There is always a first time.
On June 14, 2026, 20-year-old would-be bride Siya Goyal told her fiancé Ketan Agarwal she had seen a snake near the edge of a cliff at Lohagad Fort and pushed him when he leaned down to look. He grabbed a branch, saved himself, and told his family what had happened. He said Siya saved his life. He was a successful realtor and about to marry a rich businessman’s daughter in a wedding on which the spend was expected to be `14 crore.
Four days later, she brought him back to the same spot.
This time, while Ketan stood at the Maratha-era rampart looking out at the Sahyadri hills, perhaps thinking of the Mahabaleshwar trip he had booked to celebrate Siya’s birthday the following day, two people pushed him from behind into a gorge 400 ft deep. The first was Siya. The second person was Chetan Chaudhary, 22, Siya’s lover, who had followed them to the fort in a hoodie despite the summer heat, keeping his distance until the moment it mattered. The next morning, Siya visited Ketan’s family. She sat with his father and said tearfully, “Ketan is watching over us from above. Please stay strong.”
Then she went home, and for the next five days continued her normal life. A psychopath? Pehaps. But a victim too.
Barely a year before Ketan was killed, another marriage had unravelled with chilling results. Raja Raghuvanshi, 29, married Sonam, 25, on May 11, 2025, in Indore. Nine days later, while honeymooning near Cherrapunji, the couple vanished during a trek. Raja’s body was later recovered from a gorge with fatal head injuries. Police allege Sonam conspired with Raj Kushwaha, with whom she was reportedly having an affair, and hired three contract killers to kill Raja. Sonam surrendered weeks later after initially claiming she had been drugged and abducted (she couldn’t say by whom or why). The trial has not yet begun, and her family continues to deny the allegations.
License to Kill
Those two cases are only the most visible entries in a steadily growing roll call of alleged relationship-linked murders. In Meerut, Muskan Rastogi is accused of murdering her husband with the help of her lover before cutting up his body and sealing the dismembered parts inside a blue cement drum before leaving for an intimate holiday. In Auraiya, Pragati stands accused of hiring a contract killer to murder her husband just 15 days after their wedding. In Bhiwani, police alleged YouTuber Ravina conspired with her alleged lover to strangle her husband. In Karnataka, police claimed software engineer Swathi Byadagi was strangled by her boyfriend after objecting to his decision to marry another woman. According to the National Crime Records Bureau’s (NCRB) Crime in India 2024 report, “love affairs” emerged as the third most common recorded motive for murder. Of India’s 27,049 recorded murders in 2024, about 5.4 percent were attributed to them and another 0.6 per cent to “illicit” relationships. The NCRB does not separately classify killings involving unmarried partners, suggesting the true extent of romance-related violence may be even larger.
Criminologists who study intimate-partner homicides describe a recurring psychological pattern, whatever be the accused partner’s gender. A relationship the girl cannot legitimately get out of because of family pressure, social stigma, financial entanglement or the absence of communication for ending things becomes a trap. Hyderabad-based behaviourist and psychologist Pranjal Mani Tripathi says, “People refrain from violence not only because of the law but also because of morality. However, morality itself can be conflicted. There is society-based morality, shaped by social and religious expectations, and individual-based morality, guided by a person’s own values.”
According to the National Crime Records Bureau’s Crime in India 2024 report, “love affairs” emerged as the third most common recorded motive for murder. Of India’s 27,049 recorded murders in 2024, about 5.4 percent were attributed to them and another 0.6 per cent to “illicit” relationships
The Pune murder case in which police allege fiancée Siya Goyal and her alleged lover killed businessman Ketan Agarwal by pushing him off Lohagad Fort
The Killer Who Got a Facial
A disturbing counter-narrative to the dreaminess of romance is unfolding in India’s cities. These cases get more media attention because the women who commit the murders are trendy, English-speaking, cuisine-savvy city girls with degrees, if not pedigrees. They photograph well. Siya ran a home bakery and could have been a content creator in another life. Sonam Raghuvanshi’s wedding photographs in bridal red, thus indistinguishable from any other bride, circulated on television for weeks. The precise source of the national obsession is: the killer could be the girl next door. She could be your colleague, your neighbour’s daughter, the woman you stood behind in the coffee queue. The horror is not the crime; it is the face of the crime.
And the face, in 2025, is young and presentable and utterly familiar, which turns the vicarious thrill of her guilt into a specific kick, of discovering that the girl next door had a secret life she never showed outside, a deadly plan she ran through for months, and a calm that could have fooled the most astute cop. This appetite was not created by India’s sensationalism-hungry urban media. Sociologists call this craze the optics of legibility: a crime travels at the speed at which its perpetrator is recognisable to the audience consuming it.
Beware of Wife
The murder memes that follow such crimes are not strictly about murder. They reflect the discomfort of a certain kind of Indian man who confronts the possibility of marrying the educated, connected, financially mobile woman his family has selected for him. He would never have guessed the girl who seemed so suitable, smiled so correctly for the photographers at the engagement ceremony, might be, beneath the surface, her own person. The fear the Muskan blue drum meme shows is not about violence, it is urban male inferiority. That she had a whole life he didn’t know about, and a whole set of decisions she made without him that challenged his sense of self: urban or small town. This is why the memes go viral. A man honeymooning on a rock surrounded by bodyguards. A nervous husband flinching when the wife picks up a kitchen knife to chop vegetables.
These are not funny. They are scary. They are the template.
On X, Instagram, and WhatsApp, men posted videos of themselves fleeing in terror from blue drums. “When you see a woman carrying a blue drum—RUN.” Content creators produced comic reels in which wives or girlfriends stood next to blue drums while husbands cowered. The meme format then spread into regional languages, as voice notes, and entered the fabric of casual humour among men who forwarded it to other men as a kind of intimate warning and also, let’s be honest, a kind of thrill. “Bharat mein neela drum bahut viral hai, bahut se pati sadme mein hain,” Dhirendra Shastri, Bageshwar Dham religious leader told reporters, adding, “Thank God I am not married. Who knows what could have happened.” He was laughing as he said it. Drum sellers in Meerut reported a collapse in sales. One merchant even appealed to customers to realise that the drum itself had committed no crime. In Meerut, the city of the blue drum, a distraught wife reportedly threatened her alcoholic husband that she would cut him into pieces and seal him in a drum. He filed a police complaint. The case was reported as a curiosity, a darkly comic echo of the bigger story. Nobody enquired what was really going on in that miserable marriage for long enough that she knew precisely which image would terrify him most. What the blue drum memes specifically did was to convert a story about trapped women into a story about dangerous women. The joke is always: “Husbands beware. Wives are lethal now.” The fear is a male fear of female agency, dressed up as comedy.
A honeymoon in Meghalaya ended in murder, with Sonam Raghuvanshi accused of plotting the killing of her husband Raja Raghuvanshi
Obvious Other Killers
And yet.
While India was memeing the blue drum and debating whether women had become too dangerous to marry, men were doing what men in bad marriages have always done. But the audience’s ghoulish appetite is selective. Men kill their wives with considerably more frequency, but without much national limelight. In October 2025, Avinash Narne, a software engineer from Telangana, strangled his wife Raajitha Sabbineni in their apartment in Bellevue, Washington, after four months into an arranged marriage. The day after he murdered Raajitha, he sent a photograph of her dead body to his girlfriend in India. The UNODC notes that 58 per cent of murder victims across the world are women. During the same 115 days in early 2025 that produced the Meerut drum and the Meghalaya gorge and the Lohagad fort, 30 women were killed by their husbands in Chhattisgarh, say the police. Those deaths were simply unglamorous; not a pretty HydraFacial MD enhanced face in a wedding photograph which a television anchor could put on loop. Relationship expert and psychologist Damini Luthra explains, “When a woman is accused of a crime, the public often use the case to portray women’s independence as inherently dangerous or one that ridicules marriage itself. When a man is accused, the violence is frequently dismissed as an expression of ‘male anger’ or treated as though jealousy was inevitable.”
The NCRB data for 2022 recorded 220 cases of husbands murdered by wives and over 270 cases of wives murdered by husbands. The ratio has never favoured female perpetration. The Atul Subhash case, which broke in December 2024, added another layer to this already complicated picture. Subhash was a 34-year-old AI engineer in Bengaluru who died by suicide after describing his sorry marriage in a 24-page note, as years of legal harassment by his estranged wife Nikita Singhania. She had filed eight cases against him, demanded `3 crore to withdraw the proceedings, and a family court judge, he alleged, laughed when his wife told him to go kill himself. His death triggered debates about the alleged misuse of matrimonial laws, systemic corruption, and the societal pressures faced by men in family disputes. Netizens demanded Accenture, Nikita’s employer, fire her within 24 hours. The hashtag #MenToo trended nationally. Nikita and her parents were arrested for abetment of suicide. The Atul Subhash case arrived during the same media cycle of the 2025 killings and was absorbed into the same conversation: are Indian women dangerous? Has the legal and social pendulum swung too far?
The question, posed with equivalent urgency across both sets of cases, does the work of flattening them into a single gender-war narrative; a bilateral structural failure. Men trap women in marriages they cannot leave, and sometimes kill them for trying. Women trap men in marriages they cannot leave, and sometimes kill them for trying. The institution at the centre of both—the arranged marriage enforced by family authority, protected by divorce stigma, and legally fortified against easy exit—has not been put on the dock being too fundamental to the Indian Family trope. And so the accused remain the women with blue drums and forts and GPS locations, and the men who wield their fists and extort with financial demands, while the system that produces them all continues, intact and unindicted, arranging the next match.
Muskan Rastogi allegedly murdered her husband with her lover, dismembered the body and hid it in a cement-filled blue drum
“Rational choice theory would suggest that the alleged offence was a calculated decision to achieve a desired outcome. Social control theory, meanwhile, would examine whether the social, moral and personal restraints had broken down.”Arun Kumar, a criminologist
Her Folk’s Tales
The media coverage of cases such as Siya’s and Muskan’s is significantly apathetic about their families which were responsible for, unwittingly, preparing the ground. The parents are in every one of these stories. Their role is not insignificant. When Pragati Yadav’s parents discovered her four-year relationship with Anurag, they did not sit her down and ask what she really wanted. They arranged her marriage to Dilip Yadav, her elder sister’s brother-in-law. The speed of the arrangement itself was a statement: “this is not a discussion.” When Dilip was shot in the head in a wheat field 14 days later, Pragati’s brother Alok told reporters that the marriage was by mutual consent and Pragati was now dead to the family. He urged the judiciary to ensure the harshest punishment, including for his own sister. The detail that recurs in nearly every such case with uncomfortable consistency is that the family did not see it coming.
Such families describe being blind sided by the daughter’s affair, her resentment, and by her deadly plan itself. In hindsight, there were long visible cracks: the daughter who seemed distant in the run-up to her wedding, the fiancé who kept cancelling plans, the couple who fought more than they should for people about to be married. Investigators looking back at the Siya Goyal case point to a string of warning signs in the weeks before Ketan’s death, such as a missing passport, a cancelled trip—all excuses that made sense only in retrospect. Tripathi says, “In family-oriented cultures, behaviours such as tracking a partner’s location, checking their phone or discouraging outside relationships can easily be mistaken for expressions of love because cultural ideas of care overlap with control. Families tend to assess a relationship by its public performance such as how visibly a couple appears at weddings, festivals or family gatherings.
Little do these well-meaning folks realise their daughters who are adept at compartmentalising difficult behaviour are equally skilled in presenting an outward image of stability.” Family therapists describe a structural reason for this blindness: in many families, the parental role in a child’s marriage is understood to end at the wedding mandap, not because they stop caring, but because raising doubts afterward would mean admitting the match itself might have been a mistake. This would be an admission that reflects on the family’s own judgment and standing, not just the couple’s happiness. The astonishment many families express after these murders is: “We had no idea. She never told us anything was wrong.”
Men’s rights activist Shonee Kapoor says, “In India, families devote enormous time to verifying a prospective bride’s or groom’s income, profession, caste, and social standing. They pay far less attention to mutual compatibility. Families rarely examine relationship history, patterns of coercive behaviour or emotional stability with equal seriousness.” Muskan Rastogi’s mother, after her daughter’s arrest, told reporters: “My daughter was disrespectful. Saurabh loved her deeply. I want her to be hanged.”
Sonam Raghuvanshi’s secret lover, Raj Singh Kushwaha, worked at her own brother Govind’s firm in Madhya Pradesh: Govind, who initially sought legal help for her, has publicly distanced himself. Siya Goyal’s family decided booking a fancy Udaipur wedding was the glitter on the wedding cake. The parents in all these cases are not villains. They are just people acting inside a system they did not design and largely do not question. They make decisions they believe are in their daughter’s best interest, by the definition of ‘best interest’ the world uses. But, in a structural sense, they are unwitting co-authors of murder—not because they intended the murder to happen but because their daughters could not break free from their expectations.
From Avinash Narne’s killing of wife Raajitha Sabbineni just four months into their arranged marriage to AI engineer Atul Subhash’s suicide after alleging prolonged legal harassment by estranged wife Nikita Singhania, both cases reignited debate over marital conflict and its devastating consequences
“Planned violence develops gradually. People override their moral restraints by justifying the act, blaming the victim or convincing themselves they have no alternative. Rumination can harden into intent.”Pranjal Mani Tripathi, behaviourist and psychologist
The Great Indian Arranged Marriage Gamble
“Many young Indians today are living between two psychological worlds,” says Luthra. “They may have independence in choosing education, employment, friendships and daily life, but marriage can suddenly become a collective family decision even in so-called broad-minded and modern families.” According to Luthra, the subsequent filial tension is often misunderstood not as a clash between “modern” children and “traditional” parents. “The girl’s inner conflict is often between her own desires and her need for belonging,” she says. “A person may want to choose their own partner while also fearing that doing so will hurt, disappoint or alienate their family.”
That fear, she explains, rarely resolves itself neatly. It often surfaces as guilt, resentment, secrecy, indecision and what she describes as emotional paralysis: the psychological gridlock in which a person can neither move forward nor let go. Anamika Srivastava, 28, who lives in Mumbai knows that pressure intimately. When a relative brought a marriage proposal to her family, its focus quickly turned to matching horoscopes, financial backgrounds, and professional credentials. “Everyone was busy checking whether our horoscopes matched, whether our families were compatible financially and whether our careers aligned,” she recalls. “But no one stopped to ask whether we were actually compatible.” After meeting her prospective groom twice, Srivastava says, “I knew this wasn’t the kind of life partner I was looking for. When I tried to raise concerns about compatibility, my mother dismissed it as ‘fluff’ and ‘bullshit’.” Rather than calling off the engagement, the couple have started attending counselling sessions. “So now my fiancé and I are going for counselling to understand whether we can become compatible and learn how to adjust,” she rues. “I don’t know how other women find a way out when they feel this way. The feeling of being trapped can be dangerous.”
None of this excuses murder. Nothing can. But it does broaden the conversation. The question is no longer only “why did this individual commit an unthinkable act?” It is also “Why does society leave so few dignified, accessible ways for people to say, ‘I no longer want this marriage’?” For many women, leaving an unwanted marriage is putting family relationships, social standing, and financial security at risk. In some cases, Luthra adds, the emotional burden of confronting one’s family is redirected elsewhere. “Sometimes people direct their anger toward their partner instead.” The central point in her argument is that independence is not a single, transferable skill. “Greater autonomy in one part of life does not automatically create the emotional capacity to withstand disapproval in another,” she says. She finds that distinction essential to understanding why capable, accomplished young women—people who negotiate salaries, live independently and manage demanding careers—can still struggle to have honest conversations with their parents about the person they love.
Content creators produced comic reels in which wives or girlfriends stood next to blue drums while husbands cowered. The meme format then spread into regional languages, as voice notes, and entered the fabric of casual humour among men
A Pattern, Not an Aberration
According to India’s Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation, the Gross Enrolment Ratio in higher education for Indian females reached 30.2 in 2022-23, outpacing males at 28.9. Female Labour Force Participation rose from 49.8 per cent in 2017-18 to 60.1 per cent in 2023-24. The number of startups recognised by the government’s DPIIT, with at least one woman director, grew from 1,943 in 2017 to 17,405 in 2024—a rise of over 800 per cent. Managerial roles of women grew by 102 per cent between 2017 and 2025, outpacing men. India is, by every metric, producing a generation of women more educated, more economically active, and more digitally connected than any that came before. An earlier 2011-12 survey, however, found that 95 per cent of Indian women reported their families were involved in selecting their husbands. Even among college-educated women, only nine per cent chose their husbands entirely on their own. The mean age of marriage for women has crept up to 24.3 but the mechanism has not changed. It is the family that decides in the end. A decision, then ratified by the community. She consents. If she does not, she is told that her consent was never the point. This is the central contradiction of gender in modern India. The same parents who paid for the engineering degree, who bought the smartphone, who sent their daughter to work in another city and took pride in her independence as a social credential, then exercised veto power over whom she could love. The women were probably aware their education was an investment to boost family status; allowed a career until it becomes inconvenient: the marriage is the correction.
Tamil Nadu criminologist Arun Kumar explains, “If the prosecution’s allegations are ultimately proven in court in this case (Siya Goyal), does that mean that the social, moral, and personal restraints that ordinarily prevent people from committing serious crimes broken down?” Somewhere between the theoretical right to refuse a marriage and the lived reality of one, a psychological barrier breaks down badly enough to make the murder look, to the person committing it, the only escape route.
“In India, families devote enormous time to verifying a prospective bride’s or groom’s income, profession, caste and social standing. Far less attention is paid to compatibility. Families rarely examine relationship history.”Shonee Kapoor, men’s rights activist
“Many young Indians today are living between two psychological worlds. They may have autonomy in education, employment, friendships and daily life, but marriage can still suddenly become a collective family decision.”Damini Luthra, psychologist and relationship expert
Every Murder Leaves a Digital Shadow
Behaviourist Anindo Bhattacharjee argues that technology has compressed the emotional timeline of jealousy. “In earlier generations, suspicion about a partner’s fidelity unfolded slowly through inconsistencies in stories, secondhand information or direct confrontation,” he says. “That slowness created a cooling-off period, allowing emotions to settle first. Today, a suspicious partner can get a definitive answer within minutes through a location ping, a read receipt or a message left open on a shared device. The result is that people often act on raw, unprocessed emotional information rather than information they have had time to sit with.” Bhattacharjee notes romantic deception has become more sophisticated. “Encrypted messaging, disappearing messages, secondary devices and app-cloning tools make it easier to hide a parallel life,” he says. “Paradoxically, the more effort someone invests in concealing deception, the higher the psychological stakes become if it is exposed.”
You open the maps app sometimes and watch the blue dot that is you, moving through the city. The phone pinging towers. The CCTV on the roof. The hotel register in Kasol that recorded two names for one room. The GPS log on a Meghalaya trekking trail that showed a location shared at 1.43 pm—and then nothing. The browsing history on two phones belonging to a woman who researched how not to get caught and did not know, as she searched, that the search itself was the catch.
Think about Muskan’s videos from Kasol, the drum that lay sealed in Meerut. Think about Siya sitting with Ketan’s father, consoling him. Think about Pragati attending her muh dikhai, holding out her hands for the blessing money, knowing already what it was going to pay for. Think about all these women: educated, connected, employed, employable, possessed of desires that their generation was the first to fully articulate while navigating a system built for a woman who was none of those things.
Indeed, this sisterhood of blood made unforgivable choices. The men they killed were blameless; just ordinary men living inside the same system, crushed by its resolution of a problem they did not create. Dilip Yadav, shot in a wheat field. Ketan Agarwal, looking at the hills. Raja Raghuvanshi, identified in a gorge by his smartwatch and his tattoo. But the system that handed women a generation of freedom and later seized it back at the mandap is not on trial.
The memes will continue. The blue drum will disappear online after the next case replaces it. Parents will break down at press conferences and say they never suspected anything was wrong. The television anchors will find a new woman’s photograph to show on loop. A woman in one city or the other is sitting with her phone in a house in a life she did not choose, running a map of murder again and again, all the while looking for the door.