Priyadarshini Mattoo was stalked, raped, struck 14 times with a helmet and strangled by her college senior Santosh Singh in 1996. Nineteen-year-old Shikha Dhanoia was stabbed 41 times by her 41-year-old lover in Patna in 2003. Her innards were beyond repair and her heart had shredded into 16 pieces. In 2009, Arushi Malhotra, a businessman’s daughter, was raped for 15 days before being set afire in her farmhouse in Chhattarpur by her driver who was madly in love with her. The latest JNU attack in which a Korean language student was attacked by her spurned classmate by an axe, has brought back the growing concern over where our society is heading. From broken romantics like Devdas to obsessive killer lovers like Akaash, love has become more twisted than ever. Deebashree Mohanty brings you the changing face of unrequited love and break-ups
I am not nervous. I am angry and frustrated. All I want is to hurt and hurt her brutally. First, I will strangle Kriti (his beloved, name changed) with a steel chain till she turns blue and breathless. Then, I will sodomise her till she bleeds profusely. But she should not die. I want her to be in a permanent vegetative state, like Aruna Shanbaug (the nurse who was brutally raped by a ward boy in a Mumbai hospital). I want her family to pay too. So, I will cut her sister into a 1,000 pieces and deliver her bodyparts to her parents personally
— Confessions of Rajesh (name changed), a spurned lover from Meerut, to his psychiatrist Amol Patra in August 13, 2006
Back then, Rajesh had no idea how to deal with rejection. His childhood friend Kriti had turned down his marriage proposal, saying she she was never in love with him. Then 32, he was heartbroken. He had waited this long only for her. His mother, suffering from uterine cancer, passed away in a few months and his sister had eloped. Rajesh’s father, too, had spurned him. He blamed Kriti for all this. Rajesh quit practising as a dentist and started stalking Kriti. When the situation got scary, his friends persuaded him to meet a shrink. During the session, Rajesh he revealed his desire to cause irreparable physical and mental harm to Kriti and her family,” Dr Patra, a former doctor with NIMHANS and now a consultant with Apollo Hospitals in Sarita Vihar, recalls.
He recalls how Rajesh had everything planned, cornered Kriti on a couple of occasions and was just five per cent short of committing the gory crime. Timely counselling saved him, and the girl of course. Today, Rajesh has moved on in life. He is happily married, has two children and manages his father’s clothesline business in Meerut.
But not many have been lucky to escape fatal torture by spurned lovers. The National Crime Records Data released this year tells you how break-ups, jilted lovers, unrequited love and extra-marital affairs trigger many more murders than the ones committed for other reasons.
Statistics reveal that as many as 45,860 murders India-wide in 2012 were due to personal vendetta — including rejection and crime of passion. Uttar Pradesh and Andra Pradesh lead the chart for maximum murders by spurned lovers — 6,186 in Uttar Pradesh and 4,515 in Andhra.
The situation is no less grim in Delhi NCR. More than 35 per cent of the total murders here are due to crime of passion, mainly extra marital affairs or a girl refusing a marriage proposal. Eighteen per cent of these are related to sex while 17 per cent happen due to sudden romantic provocation.
According to Ashok Deora, Inspector, Crime Cell, Delhi Police, the number of crime of passion cases has increased to a whopping 136 per cent as compared to the last decade. The modus operandi, Deora adds, has also changed. From acid attacks, now there are more cases of brutal strangulation, beating, rape and stabbing deaths.
“The JNU murder case reflects how intolerant our society, especially our youth, has become. How we are not prepared to take a ‘no’ for an answer. How there is no remorse after committing a heinous act. What kind of love is this that the boy didn’t think twice before continuously striking his partner with an axeIJ,” Deora asks. He says that in most cases he has come across, spurned lover attackers get away with minimum punishment as there is no separate section for passion crime.
“Once we start registering cases under a crime of passion section of the IPC, may be such gruesome murders will decrease,” Deora feels. He points out how, only after so many decades of pressure building, it is only now that stricter laws have come into place to curb acid attacks.
If the recent JNU axing case was not shocking enough, very alarmingly, seven very violent cases have been registered in Delhi since January this year which have something to do with a love affair gone awry. Brutal hacking and relentless stabbing have emerged as the latest modus operandi.
On January 26, 2013, Delhi University student Megha Dutt was bludgeoned to death by her boyfriend whom she had spurned. Dutt was a brilliant student. Her boyfriend Mahesh lal, also a student, felt so angry about being “belittled by a woman” that he he smashed her face and skull beyond recognition by a stone. lal is in jail and his case in court.
Then there is this case of Aparna Sukha (17), a Class XII student from Mangolpuri East. She was raped and tortured by her auto-rickshaw driver Anmol for two days before being set afire by him and succumbing to 98 per cent burns.
Anmol is in jail and claims to have been in love with Sukha. He says he gave her many free rides and gifts but got annoyed when she found her love interest in her classmate. When Anmol was arrested on February 6, 2013, he was sitting next to Sukha’s charred body and making her painting.
The alarming thing here is that these are no longer stray cases of twisted minds. Even though crimes of passion have existed ever since man met woman, the brutality with which rejection is being avenged leads to many unanswered questions.
Psychiatrist Sameer Malhotra from Max Hospital in New Delhi believes that all this is the result of the very concept of love becoming twisted. “The concept of true love is now infested with possessiveness and the desire to have complete control over their lover’s life. This is not love, but the new generation has presumed it is and hence, when they feel they are losing control over their lover, they take extreme steps to get it back,” Malhotra argues.
He points out that gone are the days when a Devdas would agonisingly bury his sorrow in alcohol or squander away his life for unrequited love. Today’s lovers want to get a square deal. Riding high on chauvinism, men today take rejection too personally. And their trophy is causing maximum hurt to whoever has hurt them.
“Blame yourself for this change. Haven’t we given that leeway to menIJ Has our society not ingrained in a man’s mind that he cannot weep come what mayIJ Have our social institutions not taught these men to not take things lying downIJ A man has been taught to retaliate and show he is macho. That is reflecting in such violence,” clinical psychologist Sameer Parekh explains. He points out that along with geographical and sociological perspectives, even the psyche of man per se has undergone a massive change.
But has that not been the case for all these decadesIJ “It is not true that men have suddenly become very egoistic. It is also a fact that it is a patriarchal society So what has changedIJ For one, it is the easy access and availability of weapons. Two, there is complete lack of fear of punishment. Somewhere, the man feels he can get away by committing a brutal crime. Three, there is extreme societal and peer pressure of bearing the mockery. He feels if he lets the woman go, he will become the butt of jokes forever,” Parekh says. He argues that most crimes of passion are an impulsive and provocative reaction, something he commits in a fit of rage and repents at leisure. But for those few murderous seconds, he has no control over his emotions.
“Earlier, the instinctive reaction was to take one’s own life but nowadays the jilted lover is not happy doing just that. He now wants his partner to pay and feel the hurt too,” Parekh says, adding that this is true for most men who have been rejected. In case of women, however, they mostly feel that it is better to take their own life rather than cause harm to their men.
Take the recent case of Jiah Khan who committed suicide in her Borivilli flat in Mumbai because her beau of seven years, Sooraj Pancholi, had decided to part ways with her. Although Pancholi was later dragged to jail on charges of abetting of suicide, Jiah’s friends says she would have never wanted to see him in this sort of pain.
On another plain, social monitors say that every kind of violence boils down to two basic things — our altered DNA due to growing aggression and lax laws which make punishment fear almost non-existent. Add to that the easy accessibility to weapons and you have urban crime going beyond control.
“There is no doubt that the arms market is thriving in India and the law is ill-equipped to curb it. You can easily buy illegal arms from factories thriving in places line Munger in Bihar and the underbelly of west UP. Quite alarmingly, the number of sophisticated weapon owners is much less to those owning desi kattas or tamanchas,” Major General (retd) Dipankar Banerjee of the Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies, tells you.
As per a sting operation carried out by Delhi Police in 2012, Gaffar Market is the hub of AK-47s and its younger sibling AK-74 which can be bought for anything between Rs 60,000 and Rs 5 lakh, depending on the originality of the weapon.
Although the gun culture is something that needs to be looked at seriously, cops tell you that provocative and impulsive revenge killings are generally carried out by a knife, metal chains, poison, acid or other blunt objects, like a stone or an axe.