Case Study Assignment 1

Due Date: 23rdth October 2017 by midnight

Please review below the format for the submission of your “Case Study Assignment 1”.
i. Submitted File should be in this format: First Name_Last Name_Case Study
Assign 1
ii. Mention your first name and last name in the submitted paper as well in the header of
the paper.
iii. You will write a minimum of 4 page analysis (Your 4 page analysis should not
include copy pasting the story)
iv. Use font size 12, Font type: Times New Roman, Single spaced lines.
v. Write in your own words. This is an application based assignment
Please remember you will write in your own words and you will not copy paste the lines of the
story to fill spaces. If you do so, you will lose marks on this paper. Please do not copy paste the
theory. You need to critically analyse the story in the context of the theory mentioned in Part A
and Part B.

Instructions
1. Use attachment theory of development to analyze to the case of Sajal Barui. You have to
explain Sajal’s story using the concepts of the attachment theory.
2. Use another theory (which you think is suitable from the ones covered in the class). You
will explain Sajal’s story and experiences using the concepts of the theory chosen.
3. Describe two causes of juvenile delinquency in the case of Sajal Barui. Support your
answer with sufficient examples from the case.
4. Use two concepts taught in the class (from the following: attitudes, attribution,
aggression, prosocial behaviour, prejudice, stereotypes & discrimination, positive and
negative mental health, Counterfactual thinking, hindsight bias, just world hypothesis,
self-victimization, & victim blaming) that you think best suits the case of Sajal Barui.
The concepts selected should help explain Sajal Barui’s experiences and development in
the below mentioned story. (Do not repeat concepts covered in your answers to questions:
Q1, Q2, and Q 3)

The Sajal Barui Case

https://web.archive.org/web/20070928202713/http:/bitscape.info/bitscape/research/the-trend-of-
violence-on-the-indian-screen-its-influence-on-children/40/

Possibly the worst case of such influence, however, was that of 17-year-old Sajal Barui who with
the help of five of his friends killed his father, step-mother, and half-brother in a particularly
gruesome manner. On the night of 22nd November 1993, Sajal let in his friends at about eight in
the evening to his house in north Calcutta. First his step-mother Neoti Barui was gagged and tied
up. When his half-brother Kajal arrived a little later, he too was overpowered and tied up
similarly and when Sajal’s father Subal Barui came home a little before midnight, the killing
began. It last for nearly three hours for neither Sajal nor his friends were adept in the art of
murder. He and one of his accomplices Ranjit took the lead in despatching the victims, first
trying to strangulate Kajal and Subal, and when they simply refused to die, hacking them to
death with choppers. Only Neoti died of strangulation.

Under Sajal’s instructions, his friends cleaned the weapons with mustard oil. Tired and hungry
by their exertions they took out some sweets from the fridge and had their fill. And, in an almost
surreal touch, arranged the weapons neatly on the dining table and placed a few coins at their
tips. The idea behind the gesture, Sajal explained to the police later, was taken from a clip in the
popular television programme The World This Week which had shown a murderer in the US
leaving behind the payment for the soft drink he had had at the victim’s expense. Sajal’s friends
similarly paid for the sweets, he said. After two years of trial, Sajal and Ranjit were sentenced to
death and the rest of the gang to life imprisonment by an additional district judge.

Sajal’s family life was far from what could be called stable or conventional. His father Subal
Barui had abandoned his first wife Neoti and their son Kajal and taken up with another woman
named Minati. Sajal was born out of that relationship - an illegitimate child - for Subal had never
divorced his first wife. After a few years, however, Sajal’s parents separated. His mother left him
with his father. Subal now started living with his first wife and elder son again and Sajal
remained with them.

Sajal never saw his own mother after the age of eight. Nor did he display any particular desire to
see her. Quite to the contrary, all along the trial and even after the death verdict, he refused to see
his mother, saying, “Who is my mother? I have no mother.”

One does not know when the sense of alienation started taking root in young Sajal. Whether it
was as early as the time when he realized that he was abandoned by his own mother, that his
status in the family was frighteningly ambiguous. Perhaps his family had made it clear to him
that he was there on sufferance. Perhaps the horrifying tales of torture that he told his friends and
the police - that he used to be burnt with a hot iron or cigarette butts, that his step-mother used to
jam his head inside the refrigerator and inflict countless other physical and psychological
indignities -were all true. Perhaps he hated and despised his father’s continuous dalliances with
women, and equally hated his brother for his string of affairs. Whatever his own particular hell, it
was obviously enough for the kind of person Sajal was to start contemplating putting his family
members to gruesome death.

Always gifted with an acute brain and a vivid imagination, his paintings, especially one entitled
Thunder Cats, startle by their obsession with brutish forms and their lurid colour schemes of
blacks, reds, yellows and oranges, somewhat similar to the Gothic paintings by the Trenchcoat
Mafia involved in the American school massacre. And it may not be sheer coincidence that all
the six youth used to regularly see movies together with the money that Sajal’s father gave him
in plenty. They also feasted at restaurants and occasionally had a drink or two. But how Sajal
managed to convince each of his friends of the pressing need to murder three people is a
mystery. For though one of his friends came from a fairly lower middle class background and
may have been swayed by his money, another boy came from a well-off family and was in no
particular need of Sajal’s largesse.

In the jail, the six youths surprised even hardened criminals with their show of merriment,
ecstasy and joy as well as arrogance. They appeared to have arrived on a long vacation to one of
the finest holiday resorts in the world. They spent their time singing and tapping their feet to the
latest Hindi film songs. Three of them were particularly fond of filmi music and watched
television every evening in the prison. Even when the sentences were announced, all of them
clapped and sang in unison.