Another Indian woman arrested, another tabloid feeding frenzy. The death of a bride in the home counties has, predictably, unleashed the usual chorus of moral outrage. British legal experts now scrutinise the arrest of the mother-in-law, as if due process were a mere afterthought in the face of public opinion.
One cannot help but think of the Salem witch trials, or indeed the Roman practice of damnatio memoriae. We have become a society that convicts first and asks questions later, provided the accused has the right skin colour and the victim the right gender. The press, ever eager for a narrative of domestic tyranny, have found their perfect villains: the immigrant family, the barbaric mother-in-law, the ‘dowry death’ conveniently transplanted to the green fields of England.
And what of the brides themselves? Their deaths become data points in a cultural crusade. We feign concern for their lives, yet we strip them of individual tragedy, reducing them to statistics that confirm our prejudices.
The legal experts now whisper of a rushed arrest, a police force bowing to public pressure. If true, it is a sad day for British justice. We must resist the urge to treat every family tragedy as a morality play.
Not every death is a crime, and not every mother-in-law a monster. Let the law do its work, slowly and deliberately, before the mob decides the verdict. Otherwise, we are no better than the very practices we profess to condemn.
In the Victorian era, we called it ‘orientalism’. Today, we call it justice. It is neither.
