A woman is murdered by her partner. The killer is Muslim, the victim Hindu – now the media is pouring out every detail.
“We don’t marry between religions and castes,” the father of the murdered woman (middle) is said to have told the police. The picture shows him shortly after a press conference on December 9, 2022.
A horrible murder has occupied India for weeks: Aaftab P. allegedly killed his partner Shraddha W. He is said to have confessed to this, according to the police. The case came to light in November and has been the subject of newspapers, private Whatsapp groups and television ever since.
On the one hand, this has to do with the horror of the crime. Aaftab P., 28, strangled his 27-year-old partner in May. He then chopped up her body into more than thirty pieces and scattered them in the forests around the capital, Delhi, for months. The crime therefore only came to light in November, after Shraddha’s father filed a missing persons report. Since then, more and more body parts have been found.
The media pours out every detail of this murder. Camera crews from the major news channels scour the forest where the killer dumped the body parts.
religious component
Shraddha P. and Aaftab P. met through a dating app. Both actually come from the metropolis of Mumbai. Apparently they had argued a lot, Shraddha’s father was against the relationship. Media quoted from the police report, according to which the father said: «Our daughter told my wife in 2019 that she wanted to be in a relationship with Aaftab P. (. . .) My wife and I forbade it because I am Hindu, and this boy is muslim. We don’t marry between religions and castes.”
The killer is a Muslim, the victim a Hindu, giving the murder political significance in polarized India.
Inter-caste or inter-religious marriages are still rare in India. Such marriages are often only possible against the will of the families. If the couple prevails against the resistance, they often break away from their relatives. Sometimes the woman adopts the man’s religion.
For years, this has led to the conspiracy theory of “love jihad” among Hindu nationalists. It states that Muslim men would purposely seduce Hindu women in order for them to change religion. In this way, the Hindu population would be deliberately decimated. In India, 80 percent of the people are Hindu, about 15 percent are Muslim. Volunteers made it their mission to prevent the “love jihad,” which often meant beating Muslim bridegrooms half to death.
The murder now fires the imagination of those Hindus who suspect a Muslim conspiracy. Not only do Muslims want to convert Hindu women, they also want to murder them – according to the theories that are now partially circulating via Whatsapp.
The murder has already arrived in politics. The chief minister of the state of Assam said at a campaign event that if the population wanted to prevent such murders in the future, they would have to re-elect strong leaders like Prime Minister Modi. 2024 are national elections in India. The BJP, Prime Minister Modi’s Hindu nationalist party, is seen as the favorite in the election campaign. Other politicians use the murder for their conservative agenda. A member of the national parliament said women should marry, living together without marriage encourages such crimes.
Domestic violence is common
Activists stress that India rather should have a debate on violence against women. According to the news channel NDTV, Shraddha P. had already filed a complaint against her partner with the police in 2020. He beat her and threatened to kill her. Shortly thereafter, she reported to the police again, the conflict had been resolved and she had spoken to her partner’s parents.
One Domestic Violence Study came to the conclusion that the cases between 2006 and 2019 tended to increase. More married women said they had been victims of violence before. Some states recorded a high increase, in southern Indian Karnataka 45 percent of women said they had experienced such violence. In other states, the numbers remain at a high level.
In 2021, reports of domestic violence across the country trended downward after increasing in previous years. This could have to do with the Covid pandemic and the lack of opportunities to report such cases. According to experts, the reports have increased in recent years, also because the police in some states are increasingly taking on the issue. For example, in the capital, Delhi, there are pink police posts – they are police posts for women only. Only policewomen work there, so a trusting environment should be created in which women can report domestic violence or abuse.