Vanshika Sharma was bludgeoned to death by her husband in their Gurgaon home on Saturday evening. She was stuck in an abusive marriage since April 2017. Her father was aware of her plight, but dismissed the abuse as a “regular family dispute’’. Pankaj, a 29-year-old journalist, killed her in her sleep after having planned the murder for the past two months.
India’s most understated horror stories are here to stay - the ones where the curtains close on our furtive lot sweeping things under the carpet.
But shush, now; let’s find a way around it.
I don’t know exactly know how we’ve wired ourselves to take news of blood-curdling murders in stride and move on with the news cycle. But every once in a while, even the sluggish inner voice is startled with a sudden sense of foreboding- how many more such headlines? 31 per cent of married women have experienced physical, sexual, or emotional violence by their spouses, according to a survey released in 2018 by the Union health ministry. The most common kind? Physical violence (27%), followed by emotional violence (13%).
Of course, these are just ‘official’ numbers. There are always more instances, the ones that go unaccounted:
“We were born in a time when if something was broken, we would fix it, not throw it away.”
Sounds familiar?
Since we’re big fans of seniority masquerading as wisdom, this quote, apparently from an elderly couple, is widely shared on the internet. And it works like a charm every time. Wow, that’s a thought, we scream with frenzy. But the make-it-work ethos is clearly coming at a cost. So sc**w those “low divorce rates”.
We’re a cure-it culture stifling the prevent-it culture.
And it has got to STOP. Every third woman in India, since the age of 15, has faced domestic violence of some form.
Just put your blinkers on and find a way to “fix it”, women are asked again and again; self-efface and adjust. Like Vanshika was probably asked. She was bludgeoned to death with an iron rod. If your hair follicles aren’t flexing and the resultant goosebumps aren’t making you very, very angry- our country is stained.
Irreparably.
Back here, in the badlands of conformity, how many deaths are too many deaths, I wonder. How many emotional breakdowns are too many breakdowns? How many kids- privy to abuse- are too many kids growing up with a long-lasting impact of household violence, before we collectively take notice? According to a November 2018 report released by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, a total of 87,000 women were intentionally killed in 2017.
More than half of them (58 per cent) ̶ 50,000 ̶ were killed by intimate partners or family members, meaning that 137 women across the world are killed by a member of their own family every day. More than a third (30,000) of the women intentionally killed in 2017 were killed by their current or former intimate partner ̶ someone they would normally expect to trust.
If the data isn't alarming enough, the realisation that a woman's agency is deemed alarming enough to annihilate her bodily, makes it worse. Relegated to suffer as a punching bag for all psychological wounds, her lot is fated to suffer, history would have you believe.
Time to prove history wrong?
Wake up.
(Correction: An earlier version of this story had used the name Kirti Sharma. The same has been corrected to reflect Vanshika Sharma, in accordance with police reports.)