In the same week, in Bengaluru, there were two murders and one attempted murder that barely got a few inches of space and as much airtime in the media. The victims were all young women: Ati Hangma was killed by her boyfriend over a suspicion of infidelity. Anjali was stabbed in the neck after she and her family rejected a man with a criminal record, and Ramya survived jumping out of a car that her partner of six years had turned into a bomb. Male violence against women has become so expected that it causes no surprise; the cultural discomfort sets in when it’s a woman who kills.
What turned into a news feeding frenzy was another young woman, Shwetha, who with the help of Kenneth, her secret boyfriend, allegedly killed her mother first, then her father and her sister. Just as in the case of Siya in Pune, who allegedly, with the help of her boyfriend Chetan, pushed her fiancé Ketan off Lohagad Fort, and the honeymoon murder eleven months earlier in Meghalaya, when Sonam allegedly hired hit men to bump off her husband Raja.
But we had seen it all before, way back in 2003. On a cold December night, a young law student asked her newly betrothed fiancé, Girish, a software engineer, if they could go for dinner and then to the newly built Ring Road to watch the planes land and take off. While he stood there, her boyfriend Arun and an accomplice, Venkatesha, attacked him with a steel rod. A third man, Arun’s cousin Dinesh, was also part of the conspiracy. After the attack, Shubha herself helped move the injured Girish to hospital — playing the grieving fiancée even as she’d helped set the murder in motion. He did not survive.
Siya, Sonam and Shubha were all forced into the betrothal/marriage. Shwetha said she felt “caged” by her parents. They wanted to be free, and in their desperate straits, they took desperate action.
This is not to condone their gruesome crimes — it would not do justice to the lives lost, or to Girish’s family who saw justice arrive twenty-two years late, and may now watch it quietly reversed. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that the parents of the women should also be charged by the police for the crimes of their daughters. But they should be taken to task for forcing their daughters into marriages they never wanted. There must be a suitable section of the law for depriving a person of their freedom of choice — who to marry, or whether to marry at all. If there’s no such clause, then it should be written now.
‘Ring Road’ Shubha who’d earned a media moniker in the tradition of true villainy and also inspired a film, her boyfriend, and their two accomplices were found guilty in 2010; but were out on bail from 2014. On 14 July 2025, twenty two years after Girish was murdered, the Supreme Court upheld their convictions — but suspended the life sentences, to allow all four to petition the Governor for pardon. Their sentences were suspended during an eight-week window, and there’s no public confirmation yet of whether the petitions were filed, or where they now stand.
What is remarkable is what the Supreme Court division bench comprising Justice M. M. Sundresh and Justice Aravind Kumar said in its judgement: “The voice of a young ambitious girl, muffled by a forced family decision, created the fiercest of turmoil in her mind. This, backed by an unholy alliance of a mental rebellion and wild romanticism, led to the tragic murder of an innocent young man, while simultaneously destroying the lives of three others…”
“Alienation in different forms is one of the major causes for a crime being committed, upon feeling a disconnect from the community, society, or social institutions. Alienated individuals often feel powerless and neglected, which can lead them to feel rejected by society and its social norms. The breakdown of social norms contributes to deviant behaviour, especially when individuals lack clear moral guidance from their communities. Since law keeps changing from time to time, what is legal may not necessarily be moral. Rapid social change, orchestrated by law, often creates conducive conditions for criminal behaviour.”
What makes this particularly engrossing is the next section of the judgment, titled Crime And Women. The judges go on to speak of “a gendered response of victimisation,” discussing the probable thoughts and actions of women in different classes of society, before opining: “An unwarranted marriage thrust upon her is the worst form of alienation that she can experience both mentally and physically.”
The judgment, which upheld the conviction, went on to talk about society’s role in reforming the criminal:
“Society, through its own systemic failures, inequalities, or neglect, often plays a role in shaping criminal behaviour, and is also responsible for the creation of such behaviour, whether through poverty, lack of education, discrimination, or broken institutions. In that scenario, the offender becomes a victim, requiring adequate measures for treatment by compassionate correction, structural support, and opportunities for genuine transformation…”
Women like Shubha, Shwetha, Sonam and Siya were seeking not so much to be with their boyfriends but to escape from suffocating parents. A courtroom in 2025 was willing to entertain this as mitigation. It named forced marriage as a structural harm. When will society face this uncomfortable truth and fix it?
*Sandhya Mendonca, author, biographer, podcaster, and publisher at Raintree Media, offers a distinct female gaze of the world in this column.
