When more than 900 people committed mass suicide

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An image which shows the scale of the human tragedy that occurred in Jonestown, a settlement in Guyana where an American cult leader told hundreds of his followers to consume a poisoned drink in 1978. (Photo: Getty Images)

Eleven people, all members of the same family, were found dead yesterday in a house in north Delhi, and the police suspect they killed themselves for spiritual reasons. If that's true, it wouldn't be unprecedented.

In 1978, hundreds paid for their obedience to an American cult leader, Jim Jones, with their lives. This happened in Jonestown, a settlement in Guyana -- a small, coastal nation sandwiched between Venezuela and Suriname on South America's northern coast.

Jones, the founder of the 'Peoples Temple', told his cultists to drink a poisoned beverage. The FBI, a US investigating agency, says "a few apparently objected".

But sadly, sanity didn't win the day. 900 people died, and the FBI says more than a fifth of them were children. Jim Jones himself died of a gunshot to the head.

Wilfred Jupiter, a local who remembered the commune set up in Jonestown by Jim Jones and his Peoples Temple cult in 1974, kneeling next to a gravestone in November 2011. (Photo: Reuters)

"It [the poisoned drink] was first squirted into the mouths of babies and children via syringe and then imbibed by adult members," an entry in the Britannica encyclopaedia says.

The episode gave birth to the expression, "Drink the Kool-Aid", which the Oxford dictionary defines as "demonstrate unquestioning obedience or loyalty to someone or something".

But why did all this happen?

It turns out that a US lawmaker, Leo Ryan, travelled to Jonestown to find out what was going on. The FBI says "there was talk of beatings, forced labor and imprisonments, the use of drugs to control behavior, suspicious deaths, and even rehearsals for a mass suicide.