The most important fact about the Kajal Chaudhary murder is not that she was a member of an elite Delhi Police SWAT team trained to fight terrorists. It is that no legislator in the political party you voted to power in 2014 and 2019 truly cares about everyday violence against women like Kajal—women who could so easily be their own daughters or sisters.
These politicians are too busy inventing ‘national’ threats like the non-existent conspiracy of ‘love jihad’ to confront the real, relentless war being waged on women inside Indian homes.
Has your MP ever mentioned dowry deaths? Answer Yes/No. Did you know that 17 women are murdered in dowry-related crimes every day?
Even as politicians drum up anger about Indian women being sold to ISIS as sex slaves or Muslim men “stealing our women” or whatever it is they want us to believe about love with a suffix of jihad, thousands of Kajals die every year in this country in the most gruesome ways you can imagine.
Most of them are not in inter-faith or inter-caste relationships, because only a minuscule percentage of us marry outside the chokeholds of caste and religion. They are being murdered by garden variety Indian men who have no Mughal blood in their gene pool. In my head, their terrifying killings are set to background chants of ‘Beti Bachao’.
Why Domestic Violence Fails to Hold Our Attention
A friend who tracks crimes against women wrote a series on domestic violence recently (you can read it here) and she was wondering why we are so unconcerned about an issue that affects one in three Indian women.
I suggested that old-fashioned, timeless crimes like domestic violence and dowry murders could no longer hold our attention in the digital era where chat bots undress women and sleazy new secrets of the world’s largest known child trafficker and his clientele of influential men (including former presidents and a former prime minister) come to light every few days in the US.
Plus, there is no shortage of violent, attention-grabbing crimes against Indian women that are seen individually for their shock value, rather than as part of an endemic problem.
A lover beheaded his HR manager partner and chopped off her legs in office for talking to another man, then carried her in a backpack. A man set his wife on fire and faked a rescue as neighbours gathered. A man killed his girlfriend and burned her in a blue iron box that he filled with wood. A man took a selfie with his murdered wife, another burnt her because of her skin colour, a third force fed her acid, a fourth administered a fatal dose of anaesthesia, a fifth stabbed her 45 times, a sixth put an explosive substance in her mouth then detonated it.
Do you even have the stomach to go down the rabbit hole that is 1,000 Ways To Murder An Indian Woman?
When Even a Trained Cop Is Not Safe
The ‘USP’ of the Chaudhary murder is that she was beaten to death despite the fact that she was a woman trained for combat and tasked with protecting Delhi’s citizens.
Chaudhary, 27, got married a year after joining the all-woman Delhi Police SWAT unit. She died after her husband Ankur struck her head with a metal dumbbell and against a door frame during a dispute about money and dowry. As he was doing this, he called her brother and told him that he was going to kill her. The call ended abruptly, then Ankur called back asking the brother to come collect her body. Kajal Chaudhary was declared brain dead in the hospital, and died days later.
But her professional credentials are just a distraction. In 2022, 38 percent of married women had to battle domestic violence, quaintly labelled “cruelty from husband or relatives”. It was the top category of crimes against women. Nearly a third of women say they have experienced physical, sexual or emotional violence from their spouses.
Thousands of murders every year are euphemistically labelled ‘dowry deaths’, almost like the women walked themselves into the ocean where the dowry wave engulfed them.
Ask yourself, how often your political party raises the issue of domestic violence and why it is not an electoral issue? How concerned are you about it? Has your MP ever mentioned dowry deaths? Answer Yes/No.
A Society That Normalises Violence Against Women
In our country, husbands think it’s okay to murder their wives because the breakfast has too much salt; because she told him that his family never got good gifts for their son’s 15th birthday; because he suspects she is having an affair; because he disapproved of her social media post; because she didn’t like that he was unemployed; because she didn’t serve him dinner. The sickness in our society runs deep and we aren’t doing anything to address it.
Why are Indian men so violent? Why do nearly half of both men and women agree that it’s okay for a man to beat his wife if needed? (National Family Health Survey 5). Why do many Indian courts suggest that women marry their rapists? Why do women still think of marriage as the ultimate goal in a country where we are not seen as equals or having any agency or individual rights. We are, in fact, just vessels for men to violate us as they please.
The Indian version of Valentine’s Day, renamed by convicted rapist Asaram Bapu as Parental Worship Day, should be rebranded again. Why should we worship the same parents who counsel us seriously to put up with intimate partner violence and for whom a dead daughter is preferable to a divorced daughter? Let’s celebrate 14 February as Survival Day, one more year of surviving the man we are with.
(The author is the founder of India Love Project and on the editorial board of Article 14. This is an opinion piece. All views expressed are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)