Look: the death of Ketan Agarwal in Pune’s Lohagad Fort in June, allegedly orchestrated by his fiancée Siya Goyal and her boyfriend Chetan Chaudhary, is tragic and horrific. Unless severe abuse was a part of the equation and Siya had no other recourse, there is no justifying this crime. The same goes for the murders of Raja Raghuvanshi while on honeymoon in Meghalaya 2025, and of Monu of Rewari in June. It is undeniable that there has been a spate of killings of men by their female partners, abetted by accomplice-boyfriends, making the headlines in India lately.
The denial is elsewhere, firmly where it has always been: the ratio of intimate partner violence (and murder) by women against men is very skewed. A rash of ghastly premeditated crimes by women does not come anywhere close to how endemic domestic violence and homicides by male partners and their accomplices — most often their families — is in India.
The recent high-profile demise of Twisha Sharma, whose mother-in-law and husband are accused of killing her, is barely the tip of the iceberg. A new study by Dr Kriti Kapila of King’s College, London, shows that there were 6,516 dowry-related deaths recorded in India in 2022, whereas only 1,841 cases were recorded in 1988. The study posits that public apathy about such crimes has also increased.
Meanwhile, as is evident from present headlines and discourse around them, men’s safety in the domestic context has become a serious concern in the collective Indian consciousness. Right now, there seems to be determined mobilisation — quite visible online — to present the Indian man as vulnerable, and the Indian woman as having become morally corrupted through over-empowerment.
According to police findings released to the press, Siya’s online search history indicated that she had studied Raghuvanshi’s case, as well as researched the treatment of women in prison. A police officer connected to the case called it “a crime of desperation”.
Mass public sentiment leans toward calling it a crime perpetrated in cold blood. Perhaps both things are true: someone who pulls off an act like this may be suffocated by social conditioning, yet also possessed of wicked intent.
What the sexists say they want and what the feminists have always wanted dovetail perfectly. By challenging the patriarchal paradigm, issues faced by heterosexual men — including but not limited to societal pressures, loneliness, personality problems arising from a lack of safe spaces for self-expression, and more — will be brought to light in useful ways, and potentially addressed for many.
While intimate partner violence exists across all kinds of equations, and is certainly not limited to heteronormative arranged marriages, that this particular relationship configuration is India’s most prevalent one bears weightage in this reckoning. We cannot account for the profoundly unsavoury parts of human nature wherein a person feels entitled to take another’s life in order to be more satisfied with their own. But we can look at the vast space between extremes, in which the majority of people live, and where around 90% of marriages are arranged. If something is going terribly wrong in Indian marriages, the first point of interrogation must be what they are founded on.
