Voices Devdutt Pattanaik Sathya Saran Shampa Dhar-Kamath Ravi Shankar Luke Coutinho Mata Amritanandamayi THE new sunday express MAGAZINE Buffet People Wellness Books Food Art & Culture Entertainment july 19 2026 SUNDAY PAGES 12 The Dark Side of Romance The many cases of trendy young urban women murdering their partners are generating media coverage and memes without addressing the reasons behind the crimes By Tanisha Saxena 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 watch. , ing 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. 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. Hyderabadbased 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 societybased morality, shaped by social and religious expectations, and individual-based morality, guided by a person’s own values.” License to Kill The Killer Who Got a Facial 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 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-sav, vy 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 CRIME WATCH: 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 created by India’s sensationalismhungry 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. Obvious Other Killers 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 , . HONEYMOON HORROR: A honeymoon in Meghalaya ended in murder, with Sonam Raghuvanshi accused of plotting the killing of her husband Raja Raghuvanshi DEADLY DECEIT: Muskan Rastogi allegedly murdered her husband with her lover, dismembered the body and hid it in a cement-filled blue drum 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 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 Turn to page 2