Anwesha Dash, Pune
A 25-year-old student, identified as Nargis, was found murdered in a park, in Delhi’s Malviya Nagar, with an iron rod found near the body. The alleged assailant, Irfan, is said to have killed her by the rod despite their wedding being called off and her refusal to talk to him.
South Delhi DCP, Chandan Chowdhary, stated that the preliminary investigation revealed that the victim had been attacked on her head by an iron rod and died on the spot. The assailant, also her distant cousin, came with her to the park, attacked her, and fled from the scene. The police state that the motive behind the murder was the victim’s refusal of a marriage proposal.
Irfan had proposed a marriage between him and Nargis to her family but was refused due to a lack of employment and a steady income. He had tried reaching out to Nargis, but she refused to talk to him further. He approached her in a park near her coaching classes and coaxed her to talk to him and accept the proposal. But she persisted in her rejection. Therefore, in a rage, he attacked Nargis and left her dead. Irfan also confessed that he had planned the murder three days prior.
Such incidents of women being killed by their suitors for refusing to marry them have spiked in India recently. In these seven months of 2023 itself, numerous such cases have been reported from all over the nation.
A man in Jammu and Kashmir killed and chopped off a woman’s body and buried them in different locations because she was about to marry someone else. The woman was said to be pursuing a course in Computer Science for subsequent career options. Similarly, last month in Hyderabad, a software engineer had her throat slit by a man for refusing to marry him. Another such case of a teacher being stabbed to death for the same reason was reported in Ajmer.
Apart from the rejection of marriage, another point of commonality is the fact that all the victims mentioned earlier were educated, independent, and career-oriented women, including Nargis of Delhi. Hence, the recent string of such crimes makes the autonomy of a modern-day woman’s choice over marriage in India questionable.
Swati Maliwal, the chairperson of the Delhi Commission for Women, has put forward a similar sentiment and said, “In a posh locality like Malviya Nagar, a girl was beaten to death with a rod. Delhi is extremely unsafe. It doesn’t matter to anyone. Only in newspaper reports, girls’ names are changed, and the crimes do not stop.”