On the late evening of June 16, 2021, C K Balachandran, a resident of Perinthalmanna in Kerala, received a disturbing phone call. He was informed that his wholesale toy shop in the town had been set on fire. He hurried to the location and discovered that more than half of the shop was engulfed in flames. The fire department worked for several hours to extinguish the fire.

Still reeling from the shock, Balachandran received another phone call the next morning, this time from his home. He learned that his elder daughter, Drishya, had been brutally stabbed. His younger daughter, who was only 13 years old, was also injured while trying to protect her sister. Neighbours rushed both girls to the hospital. Balachandran immediately made his way to the hospital, only to receive the devastating news that Drishya had succumbed to her injuries.

Twenty-one-year-old Vineesh Vinod, an old schoolmate of Drishya, was arrested for both the cold-blooded crimes that sent shock waves across the village. According to the police, he murdered Drishya for breaking up with him and rejecting his proposal. Drishya was pursuing a degree in law at the Nehru College, Ottappalam, in Palakkad district.

According to Balachandran, Vineesh had been stalking Drishya for six months prior to the brutal murder. “A few months ago, he came to my shop and told me that he wanted to marry my daughter. When I asked Drishya about it, she told me that she had broken up with him and was not interested in marriage,” says Balachandran.

However, Vineesh did not stop there. The local truck drivers noticed Vineesh moving around Drishya’s house in the wee hours three days prior to the murder. They caught him and informed Balachandran. “We went to the police station and filed a complaint against him for stalking. My daughter herself prepared the complaint, but she insisted on not pressing charges. Later, I realised that she might have been scared of him,” says Balachandran.

Drishya changed her SIM card, but Balachandran and his wife had no clue why she changed her SIM card before her death. According to the police, she was scared of his constant stalking and harassment.

The police filed the chargesheet on the 57th day of the murder. The trial is yet to begin. Vineesh attempted a jailbreak and also tried to commit suicide, twice. He was admitted to the mental health centre for a few months. According to the police, he is fit for trial though he has shown signs of mental health problems.

Seventeen-year-old Devika, a 12th grade student in Ernakulam, Kerala, was burned to death in the wee hours on October 9, 2019, at her home. Twenty-four-year-old Midhun allegedlyknocked on the door and barged into their house, poured petrol over Devika and set her on fire. Shalan, Devika’s father, also suffered serious burns while trying to save his daughter. Devika succumbed to her injuries. Midhun also was engulfed by the fire and succumbed to burns. Devika’s mother, Molly, and the younger sister ran away and survived.

The motive behind the tragedies of both Drishya and Devika is the same: rejection of love.

A few days prior to his daughter’s death, Shalan had filed a complaint against Midhun for stalking and harassing her. He alleged that the police did not take action on his complaint. “Three days before she died, he followed her on his bike. She was scared and ran into a shop nearby. It was only then that I came to know about him and their relationship. She told me that she had broken up with him a few months ago, and he had been harassing her ever since. I quickly took her to the police station and filed a complaint. The cops called him and just warned him, but did nothing else,” says Shalan. With a sense of bitterness he says he would not have lost his daughter if the cops had acted on his complaint.

Drishya and Devika belong to a long list of victims who have succumbed to toxic masculinity in the name of ‘love’. India has recently witnessed a spike in the number of crimes in which girls/women have been subjected to brutal violence by men who claim to be lovers. Recently, a 16-year-old girl was stabbed to death in Delhi in full view of the people on the street. The 21-year-old assailant, who claimed to have had a ‘relationship’ with the girl, according to media reports, killed her because he was angry that ‘she talked to other men’. Both of them reportedly had heated arguments a few days prior to the murder.

On November 7, 2022, 21-year-old Shilpa Jharia was murdered at a resort in Jabalpur allegedly by her ‘boyfriend’ who later posted a video on the social media displaying her blood-smeared body. The man who appeared in the video with a fake name, Abhijit Patidar—his actual name is Hemant Bhadaude—warned her ‘not to cheat’. He showed her body and said that it was the result of being unfaithful.

On March 17, 2023, Dharani, a 19-year-old nursing student was murdered at Villupuram in Tamil Nadu in the same way Shilpa was murdered. Her ex-boyfriend allegedly slit her throat for breaking up with him. The assailant, 23-year-old Ganesh, was arrested for the murder.

According to the police, Dharani ended her relationship as she found out that he was using drugs. On that fateful day, he contacted her and she lied to him that she had returned to Chennai where she was pursuing her studies. But when Ganesh found out that she was at home, he went to her house and stabbed her.

Neither the National Crime Records Bureau nor the state bureaus have separate data of these heinous crimes in which girls have been killed for saying “No” to boys. “We have no separate data on such crimes. It comes under the category of ‘homicide’,” says an officer with the State Crime Records Bureau of Kerala. However, there is clear evidence that there has been a spike in such crimes across the country. In Kerala, according to media reports, 20 to 25 girls have been killed by their ex-boyfriends since 2019.

Analysing the circumstances of each incident, a common pattern is evident in all cases. There is a careful process of planning and preparation prior to the execution of the murder, and none of these incidents happened due to sudden provocation. It has been found that the assailants had conducted several days of planning—buying weapons and petrol—and stalking the girls to understand their movements.

In Drishya’s murder, the assailant allegedly set the shop on fire on the previous day to distract attention and thus to get easy access to her house. In most of these cases, it has been found that the girls had raised an alarm about these men and had even informed the police. The cops often warned these men and settled the complaint without pressing charges. Another common pattern seen across these cases is that the assailants make only a feeble attempt to escape. In almost all cases in Kerala, the assailants have been caught unless they committed suicide.

Take the case of 24-year-old P V Manasa, a medical student who was shot dead on? July 30, 2021. She was killed at her rented house near the Dental College at Kothamangalam in Ernakulam district where she had been pursuing house surgency. The accused, 32-year-old Rakhil, with whom Manasa had cut off ties, purchased a pistol from Bihar several days prior to the murder. He shot himself after shooting down Manasa and succumbed to injuries.

There was meticulous planning behind the murder. He rented a room adjacent to her place where she had been staying with colleagues, a month prior to the incident. Manasa was not aware that he had been staying there and stalking her. According to the witnesses of the crime, Manasa was quite surprised and shocked to see him at her door on that fateful day.

According to the police, Rakhil had purchased the pistol saying that he wanted to kill wild boars. In this case too, the girl had filed a complaint with the local police about stalking and harassment a few weeks before the gruesome murder. The police warned him, but did not press charges on the assurance that he would not create any further trouble for Manasa.

“The media calls it love break-up, but it is a very one-sided infatuation of the boys,” says Mangesh Kulkarni, a scholar of masculinity studies, who was also associated with the Mumbai-based group ‘Men Against Violence and Abuse’. “The boys are being brought up with a sense of entitlement to the women’s body. Hence, they are unable to take a ‘NO’. It is counted as a blow on their ‘masculinity’,” says Kulkarni. He says the root of the problem lies with the social construction of masculinity.

“Stalking has been idealised and romanticised in popular culture, namely through cinema,” says Swarna Rajagopalan, a scholar of political science and the founder of Pranjya Trust. A central theme in Indian cinema has been the desperate attempt made by the protagonist to gain the love of the female character. He keeps stalking and forcing the woman to fall in love. Stalking, which is otherwise a criminal offence, has been romanticised. She says that there is also the problem of blaming the victims in such cases. The stalking and harassment by men are wrongly understood as an expression of love and romance and the girls are blamed for ‘rejecting’ the boys.

“We have accepted violence as the normal language of every kind of interaction, public or private. On a continuum, as we normalise violence in one kind of interaction, our tolerance and acceptance of it in others also eases. The result is a very violent society,” adds Rajagopalan.

Shahina K K in Thiruvananthapuram

(This appeared in the print as 'The Price Of Saying 'No''')