Kamal Kaur Bhabhi vs Culture: Why an Instagrammer’s Murderer is Being Celebrated in Punjab

Punjab is finally rid of all its problems, or so shall we believe. All it took was the murder of a woman deemed too unfit for its pious society. You can find an archive of her public life on Instagram: the handle is ‘@kamalkaurbhabhi’, run by a woman called Kanchan Kumari.It mostly had her making erotic jokes toying with the male mind fixated on sexualising the ‘bhabhi’, the brother’s wife. You could call it ‘wordy soft porn’. No one is sure if she had any lovers or a husband, but fans she did have on Instagram, nearly half a million of them and still rising, while she’s dead.A man in the robes of a Nihang Singh—the Sikh religious warrior class that’s now supposed to be largely ceremonial—has claimed to be behind the killing. This man, Amritpal Singh Mehron, took responsibility for the murder in his social media posts as “necessary to protect our culture”.Two of his fellow protectors were arrested after the woman’s body was found rotting in a car in Bathinda. Mehron left the country soon after strangling her. He is reported to be in the UAE now. Censoring 'Satluj' Doesn't Heal Punjab's Wounds, It Just Silences the PainBack home in Punjab, he’s being celebrated by scarily large sections as ‘qaum da heera’ (a community jewel). A top Sikh clergyman has said there’s nothing wrong with such a murder. Vulgarity, a term reserved exclusively for women’s bodies, needs to be dealt with, we are being told. Even news channels and YouTubers are calling it sodha, loosely translated to a killing necessitated by religious duty.The nub of the matter is believed to be Kanchan Kumari’s use of the word ‘Kaur’, Guru Gobind Singh’s assigned surname for Sikh women, in her stage name. A Kanchan Kumari’s vulgarity was perhaps someone else’s responsibility, but claiming to be a ‘Kaur’ made her furthermore eligible for murder in Mehron’s worldview.No wonder hardly anyone showed up for her funeral. She was cremated by social workers in Bathinda while her family remained in Ludhiana. Other allegedly obscene influencers have apologised, deleted their accounts, or pledged to be decent, whatever that means. Fear has muzzled conversation too. There are some occasional “bravo”, “thanks for saying it” and other such Facebook comments under rare posts that have called the murder by its name. But shock and grief are in short supply.Then come those who confuse fairness with balance. Some of them are as pained by the use of religious identities in headlines. Maybe using “self-styled” would balance it. A journalist from a global news platform called me the other day to seek suggestions on sociologists whom he could speak to about this. But he was worried he needed balance in the story, or it’d be deemed unfit for publishing.In all this, the politicians are throwing in the customary “but…” after “yes, we know murder is bad”. The state government is treating the crime as per the law book—and expects gratitude for that—but refuses to take a position beyond that.It’s silly to expect anything else from our truth-bending neo-politics that insists governance or leadership is only about some schools, barebones hospitals, sleek roads, efficient websites, and publicising all of that. Populist technocracies see society as a hindrance—no matter how delusional that sounds. Let’s make another app, I say, and make it all go away. It was an app that changed Kanchan Kumari’s life. She was once an orchestra dancer, performing at weddings. Instagram made the whole world her stage, fuelling the scale of her ambitions. No longer did she entertain just a handful of men, who attended weddings sometimes not to bless the couple or enjoy a family festivity, but to throw currency notes at the dancers and, if chance permits, grope them.On Instagram, she was no longer just one woman that a dozen men wanted to grab at a time. She could feed the fantasies of lakhs at once. For some, she was just very funny, as most taboos are. The righteous killer had a problem with her starkness and scale. He decided she was the problem, not those who watched her. And he took upon himself the social contract of eliminating her. We are living in an era of contracts and outsourcing, you see. ‘Thekedari’, as they say in Punjabi. When every aspect of government—and, by extension, our lives—can be outsourced, it makes sense to also outsource social order, law and justice. Contractors are already lining up; Amritpal Singh Mehron being one of them. If the contractors can fix the social order by killing an “obscene” woman, they’ll be happy to graduate to dictating a chunni on the head, or worse. A woman must be a pious goddess, or nothing at all.It’ll be disingenuous to just name the Taliban here, or cite the recent killing of a TikTok star in Pakistan, or mention Qandeel Baloch as a cautionary tale. Ludhiana and Bathinda are Ground Zero right now, with posters are calling him “the protector of our dignity”. Politics everywhere is capable of growing cauliflowers over corpses, so this issue will eventually be subsumed too. Kanchan Kumari’s corpse, if it’s ever dug up in conversations, will turn into a broad-brushed reference to the hurt sentiments of pure and pious people. But what about the sentiments of her followers? They, too, are pure and pious once she’s washed away. She was the stain, right? All we now need is a clean-up of social media. Of course, after removing the words ‘women’ and ‘murder’ from it, and making it a ‘save the children’ campaign. We must keep a check on those serving vulgarity to our kids. Parents must outsource parenting to the government, and the government can hire contractors who cut the stains and worse. Social media algorithms trump the debilitating anxiety of young Punjabis, the extreme vulnerability of a generation that mistakes gig work as employment, and the real-estate bubble that the government continues to fill up, indifferent to what happens when it bursts. All of that can always be managed by hoardings declaring wars on everything that needs fixing or re-fixing — ‘yuddh nasheyan viruddh’ (war on drugs) and such. But now that society itself needs fixing, we must go to war against social media. Fault lines be damned, we must protect our men from cleavage first. There will be those who will intellectualise this murder to a degree that there’s no empathy left. As the German-American political scientist Norman Finkelstein puts it (and I am paraphrasing here): a logical debate does not lose sight of what it is talking about at its core, whereas intellectualism can turn something viscerally real into apathetically abstract. In this case, there is a possible intellectualisation of the context of this murder. We can talk about how conservatism is seeing a rise across the world — from our Leader Dearest to a Giorgia Meloni in Italy, to the Trump-Musk situation in the US. So, well, it’s understandable for Punjab to also be like that. We can argue that when a large part of the rest of India flaunts its Hindutva conservatism, it’s only natural for elements like that to emerge across society. In reality, there is no contestation here, only a consensus. That’s why the “fringe” Hindutva types have also been praising Mehron for the murder. And even from the other Punjab, the one in Pakistan, there are voices supporting his clean-up of “our shared culture”.It’s pointless to ask who gave these men the right to police society anyway. They give each other the right. The shadow-boxing is only over who gets to exercise that right when and where. In the Name of 'Yeshu': Punjab's Viral Pastor & the Rise of PR-driven 'Godmen' Honestly, though, what is vulgar? Is it vulgar to drive a massive car, flex your biceps, and decide who can keep their moustaches twirled upwards, or who can ride a horse in his baraat? Is it vulgar for women to go to school, or dance there?Who is vulgar, when Instagram now has AI-generated ‘bhabhi’ characters talking dirty and flaunting superlative levels of cleavage? Is it vulgar to eat a softy, or for a woman to hold up a banana in her hand? Who knows when a man’s gaze and imagination team up to declare anything vulgar.Yet, small men or big tools have hardly ever succeeded in stopping culture from flowing as it does. It carries within it many streams, be it the birth of new music, the hybridisation of languages, rise of new religions, and so forth — including the dynamic definitions of morality and obscenity.You, my friends, must be careful though. Check your Instagram feed right now. (The writer is an assistant professor of journalism at Bennett University, reachable on mail at aarishc@gmail.com and tweets at Twitter: @aarishc. This is an opinion piece and the views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses, nor is responsible for them.)

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Kamal Kaur Bhabhi Was Killed in Punjab. And Her Murderer Has Fans

A woman must be a pious goddess, or nothing at all, writes Aarish Chhabra.

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Topics: Punjab Instagram Social Media Influencers