"Thukra ke mera pyar, mera intekam dekhegi,” a Hindi song from a Bollywood flick, meaning “you will see my revenge, after rejecting my love” has been, off-late, completely misunderstood by the people, especially, dejected lovers who found themselves in a similar situation.
YouTube, Instagram, or other social media platforms are flooded with people making reels on this particular song showing how they channelized their anger and transformed themselves into better humans after facing rejection, yet, some went off-track and rather than working on themselves, chose the revenge part by teaching one final lesson to their partner.
Just two weeks back, Delhi once again bore witness to a crime that won’t be easily forgotten by many people for years to come, at least for those who saw the purported video of the dastardly act that was caught on a CCTV camera.
But what was in the video that shook the conscience of people and once again raised the question of the safety and security of women in the national capital?
In the 87-second clip of the incident, a 20-year-old man named Mohammed Sahil Khan could be seen stabbing his 16-year-old girlfriend Sakshi to death on a street in outer north Delhi's Shahbad Dairy area.
The victim, who had just this year qualified for her matric exams, met the horrific end on May 28th night. After stabbing her, Khan bludgeoned her, leading to her painful demise.
The murder was so brutal that with the impact of constant stabbing by knife and smashing through stones, her skull was broken into four parts and her intestines popped out from her body.
The bystanders looked helpless and Sahil continued his stabbing spree. The victim was initially standing but fell down after the sixth knife stroke after which the accused Sahil, began stabbing on her head with both of his hands.
Sahil's attack was so brutal that in his last strokes, the knife with which he was jabbing the girl, got stuck in her head and Sahil was unable to pull it out. He then proceeded to kick the girl on her face as she lay unconscious. The accused did not even stop now and picked up a boulder and smashed her head at least five times, breaking her skull in at least 4 pieces. He then briefly left the scene and returned shortly after to again strike the girl with the same boulder, kicked her multiple times, and then finally departed.
The accused Sahil Khan fled the scene of the crime in a jiffy, went to a nearby park, spent his night at a metro station, and then left the city in a bus. He was nabbed the next day by the Delhi Police from Bulandshahar in Uttar Pradesh.
Enraged by the girl's desire to end the relationship?
Khan’s interrogation revealed that he and Sakshi were in a relationship since June 2021. For the last three to four months, they became close to each other and Sahil got completely involved with her, but she was not happy in the relationship.
Of late, things were not going well between them and the couple used to have frequent fights. Sakshi eventually stopped talking to him and wanted to end her relationship with him, but he kept approaching her and wanted to reunite.
It came to the fore that Sakshi, before Sahil, was having a boyfriend named Praveen whose tattoo bearing this name was also engraved on her forearm. Sahil suspected Sakshi was trying to yet again enter the life of her former boyfriend which enraged him. Sahil allegedly disclosed that he was just a day before the murder threatened by some man named Jabru who asked him to stay away from Sakshi. This was probably the point that triggered Sahil to allegedly murder the same woman with whom he wanted to spend the rest of his life.
A similar tale in an upscale setting
A month ago, a similar case was reported from Shiv Nadar University in Greater Noida where Anuj Singh, a third-year BA (sociology) student shot dead a woman named Sneha Chaurasia and later killed himself.
Interestingly, Anuj recorded a video before committing the horrific crime where he revealed deep torments of his life and the reason that forced him to take this extreme step. It was like any other sordid tale of betrayal that Anuj disclosed in his last video.
Anuj claimed that Sneha was seeing other guys and multiple times left him which forced him to end her life. In the video, Anuj even claimed that he suffered from third-stage Brain cancer and his having minimal chances of surviving. However, this claim was later denied by his father who said that he was having no knowledge of his son suffering from any disease.
Not to forget the barbaric killing of 27-year-old Mumbai suburb woman Shraddha Walker who was allegedly strangled on May 18, 2022, chopped into several pieces, and ultimately disposed off at different locations of a forest area in south Delhi and also Gurugram in Haryana for several months by her live-in partner Aaftab Amin Poonawala, who was arrested on November 12, six months after he committed the heinous crime.
Months later, when the Delhi Police filed the chargesheet, it revealed the extent of the barbarity of the crime. After strangling his live-in partner to death, the accused Aaftab allegedly bought tools to gradually chop Shraddha's body in 17 pieces and later disposed of them.
The Delhi Police, in its more than 6000-page chargesheet, alleged that Shraddha Walker was murdered as she had gone to meet a friend against Aftab’s wishes, just a day before her brutal murder.
So are men not able to handle betrayal these days? Is it that men tend to believe that once a woman is in their life, they become their chattel?
To understand more about the psychology of such people and what triggers them to turn so violent, TNIE spoke to a range of experts dealing with the subject.
'Amalgamation of complex factors'
To understand the psychology of a person behind a crime it’s important to understand that it’s not a single factor but rather an amalgam of complex factors like genetics and environmental factors that play a role, experts said.
“The genetics of a person can involve certain traits that can make them prone to violence or violent behaviour but the major role is of the environmental factors. These factors involve the environment a person got during their childhood,” Dr Sneha Sharma, consultant psychiatrist at Aakash Healthcare said while speaking to TNIE
She said other factors like the gender norms in society also play a role in who is attacked and on what grounds. “In this specific context, movies and televisions often normalise and romanticize the behaviour of stalking, eve-teasing and harassment and often young people don’t know where to draw the line and respect boundaries,” said Dr Sharma.
Arti Anand, a senior psychologist at Sir Ganga Ram Hospital, feels that a patriarchal mindset with regressive thinking society has not been able to progress socially as women have progressed and become independent.
“The reason behind such incidents is an inability to accept rejection by a girl and over-possessiveness. The boy is unable to respect the female friend and females are still seen as objects to be possessed,” she said.
But is there any way to preempt such horrific crimes?
Dr. Paramjeet Singh, consultant psychiatrist at PSRI Hospital, said that to help or prevent such heinous acts we need to identify early children with high-risk traits or personality attributes as described above.
“Parental education, empathize mindfulness or trying to understand the mental state of others, nurturing and caring to parent as opposed to broken or punitive parenting, providing opportunities of emotional expression could be extremely useful,” he said.
When politicians try to give crime a communal spin
The city or even the country bears witness to umpteen brutal crimes, many driven by passion, but only when the assailant or accused belongs to a different community does it catche the media’s attention.
In the cases of both Shraddha and Sakshi, allegations of ‘love jihad’ popped up soon after the crimes were reported.
The term ‘love jihad’ evidently first came into existence in 2009 and since then is being propagated by people from a certain political party asking the majority community to protect their women from men of a minority community. In the past few years, 11 states have enacted laws to stop forcible conversions. These laws are dubbed anti-love jihad laws by the common man.
Even in the Shahbad Dairy murder case, some BJP leaders claimed it was an act of ‘love jihad’, especially after a red kalawa (sacred thread) was seen tied to the hands of accused Sahil Khan. The police have not yet directly responded to the allegations.
Michael Kingham & Harvey Gordon, while writing on morbid jealousy in the journal 'Advances in Psychiatric Treatment', explored the possible reasons behind some men resorting to murder when faced with rejection from women. What they found out:
Failure to respect that each life flourishes separately
For people with morbid jealousy, obsession is a common trait. These people have this tremendous desire to possess. Their entire idea is to dominate, possess and control. They fail to see the other person as a separate identity. Obsessed lovers are the ones who see their love as an extension of their personalities, so much that they want to control and own the person. Their brain is wired in the way it is. They fail to respect the fact that each life grows and flourishes separately and cannot be controlled by mortal beings. Jealous thoughts are experienced as intrusive and excessive, and compulsive behaviours checking may follow.
Unable to look beyond themselves
People with morbid jealousy have a tendency to put themselves above all. They think of themselves in a very high manner without any rhyme or reason. These are people who expect too much from themselves and others in return. They think they have exceptional qualities than others so they deserve love, never mind if their love interest is married or engaged to someone else. They think they are more capable of possessing that person. This obsession stems out from a weakness, where they are unable to look beyond themselves, but they see it as their strength.
A murder that shook the city's conscience
In the 87-second clip of the incident, a 20-year-old man named Mohammed Sahil Khan could be seen stabbing his 16-year-old girlfriend Sakshi to death on a street in outer north Delhi's Shahbad Dairy area.
Ujwal Jalali speaks to experts to decode the phenomenon of men brutally killing their lovers in light of two recent incidents a teenager being viciously stabbed to death, and a college student being shot dead.