South India Is Struggling to Overcome Its Forced Euthanasia Problem

For years, people in certain villages in South India have been participating in a tradition that amounts to forced euthanasia: Young people have been finding ways to gently kill the elderly, with the tacit blessing of their communities.

According to the sociologist S. Gurusamy, a professor at the Gandhigram Rural Institute in Dindigul, this is called thalaikoothal, a Tamil term for "shower" or "oil bath." The method he's familiar with, called "milk therapy," involves pinching the victim's nose shut (which is presumably possibile because they're too old and enfeebled to fight back) and forcing them to drink fresh cow's milk until they suffer breathing problems and, eventually, die.

Gurusamy told me that often practitioners of thalaikoothal are "disposing of old people who are undergoing unbearable pain and suffering." According to him, these rural areas in South India are "marked by economic backwardness," and the elderly in these regions are a liability due to the high medical bills and the inaccessibility of health care.

Whatever the reasons for thalaikoothal, which is illegal in India, the details sound horrific. There's been a lot of media attention surrounding the practice since 2010, when the popular English language newspaper the Deccan Chronicleran the harrowing story of an 80-year-old man who narrowly escaped death at the hands of his own children. He told the Chronicle they'd been "discussing how they were going to share my lands." After a little while, he decided to return to his village with bodyguards.

The author of the story, Pramila Krishnan, followed up with an undercover investigation in the Virudhunagar District, where she pretended to be a woman who wanted her annoying grandfather out of the way. She quickly found a "quack" named Fathima who was willing to perform a version of thalaikoothal, one of many people who advertised themselves as medical professionals and would provide a Kevorkian-style lethal injection service. Krishnan recorded Fathima saying, "I killed a 76-year-old man only four days ago with an injection. I can do it for your old man too."

The stories she wrote were picked up by the mass media, and soon Krishnan found herself talking about thalaikoothal on a blockbuster TV special hosted by Bollywood megastar Aamir Khan.

Then, two weeks ago, Krishnan posted a small follow-up to the thalaikoothal coverage on her blog, writing that "with the help of voluntary organizations, elders in Virudhunagar district have now formed self-help groups to guard themselves from errant children and fight for their rights." (Krishnan wasn't available for comment for this piece.)

I reached out to Azaan Javaida, a reporter who covers poverty in India, to find out if things are truly improving. There weren't numbers to back up a decline in illegal mercy killing, he said, and his optimism was very cautious. He told me that people in the middle of nowhere who want to kill their relatives can probably get away with it. "Thus impunity prevails," he said.

Javaida did say that the police "sprang into action" after the flurry of media coverage. He explained that the police aren't exactly beloved in India, but the show of force was nice to see. "No such case has been reported ever since."

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