A woman dies, and men rush to defend themselves, question the legitimacy of her suffering, or change the subject entirely. As women grieve publicly, conversations are derailed by “not all men”, false equivalences, and competitive victimhood. And frankly, women are exhausted from mourning alone while empathy is turned into a debate.
Twisha Sharma was 33 years old. She had been married for five months.
On 12 May, she was found dead in her matrimonial home in Bhopal. Her family says she was mentally tortured, harassed for dowry, and driven to her death by her husband, a lawyer and her mother-in-law, a retired district judge. The husband went into hiding. The autopsy had "irregularities." CCTV footage was allegedly tampered with. It took the mother-in-law's audacious self-organised press conference and the nationwide outrage it triggered for authorities to finally examine the discrepancies.
Five days later, Deepika Nagar was gone. She was 24. Her family had spent nearly a crore on the wedding. It wasn't enough. Her in-laws wanted an SUV and another Rs 45-50 lakh. On the night she died, her father had been at the house just hours earlier, trying to resolve the demands. After midnight, he got a call saying she had "fallen from the roof." Her autopsy said otherwise: brain hematoma, ruptured spleen, bleeding in the liver and kidney, bruises across her face, arms, chest, abdomen.
Before both of them was Nikki Bhati, 28, who in August 2025 told her husband she wanted to reopen her beauty parlour with her sister. He said it wasn't "allowed." Two hours later, she was on fire. Doused in flammable liquid, filmed staggering down a staircase in flames while her six-year-old son watched. Her family had already given a Scorpio, a motorcycle, gold. It wasn't enough. It never is.
And then there is Anu Meena, a PWD engineer's wife, dead on 7 April, initially ruled a suicide and filed away. Then her phone was found with CCTV footage of her husband hitting her with a shoe, pushing her to the ground, spitting on her in front of their child and audio of years of abuse. Evidence that in March 2026, he had allegedly tried to kill her by leaving a gas cylinder open in the house. When the footage surfaced this week and people watched a husband spit on his wife, you know what a portion of the comments said?
What must she have done to make him that angry?
There it is. There is the country we live in.
Women Die. Men Debate.
In the days after Twisha Sharma’s death, my social media feed looked exactly the way it always does when an Indian woman dies violently inside a marriage.
Women posting stories. Women making reels. Women writing furious captions. Women discussing fear, marriage, compromise, in-laws, abuse, survival. They are doing the enormous, exhausting, thankless work of keeping these stories alive past the 48-hour news cycle. Women trying to process the unbearable familiarity of it all.
And then comes the toxic masculinity. The vanguards of patriarchy, and in a lot of cases our own brothers, fathers, husbands, relatives, and friends—good men, modern men, men who describe themselves as “feminists” at parties. Hiding behind their screens, commenting:
“Not all men.”
“What about false cases?”
“Men die by suicide too.”
“Make alimony optional.”
Under posts about a dead woman, strangers debate divorce laws. Beneath conversations about harassment, men compare alimony to dowry. Some even joked that at least Twisha could no longer "take his money" in a divorce.
It is difficult to explain the exhaustion of watching a woman die and seeing the conversation immediately shift toward protecting male discomfort.
This is not because men do not suffer abuse, loneliness, mental health crises, social pressure, and emotional neglect. Issues that genuinely deserve serious attention.
However, there is something deeply unsettling about the timing with which male suffering enters these conversations. It appears not as solidarity, but as rebuttal. Not as a legitimate cause but as sick competition. Not to elicit empathy but to dilute it and change the subject.
Every conversation about violence against women in India becomes a debate rather than a moment of collective reckoning. A refusal to overhaul the social evils and systemic failures that define our so-called democracy.
Perhaps that is what feels so devastating and defeating. Not just the violence but society's inability to sit with women's pain without immediately finding a justification.
Why Does Society Keep Blaming Women?
In the days after these incidents, public discourse inevitably spirals into gossip about moral character, promiscuity, Instagram reels, and "modern girls,” instead of staying focused on the fact that a woman has died horrifically inside her marital home.
India records thousands of dowry deaths every year. According to the NCRB's Crime in India 2024 report, 5,737 women died in dowry-related cases—nearly 16 every single day. Over 1.2 lakh cases of cruelty by husband or relatives were recorded that same year. Homemakers form the second-largest group in India's annual suicide data. Women inside marriages, inside homes, behind closed doors where no one can hear them.
There is no equivalent male dataset that comes close. Men face real mental health crises in India. Nobody is saying otherwise, but when a man dies by suicide, the numbers are not concentrated in the institution of marriage. We do not find, case after case, that his wife had been demanding money from his family for years, or that his autopsy showed a ruptured spleen and bleeding in four organs.
The pattern is not the same. The scale is not the same. Saying "men suffer too" under a story about Twisha Sharma or Deepika Nagar or Anu Meena is not solidarity with men. It is the suppression of a conversation and a refusal to acknowledge the gendered asymmetry in domestic violence that the data makes impossible to deny.
Two wrongs have never made a right. Saying "men face harassment too" while a woman's body is barely cold is not balance. It is cruelty.
Dowry and Alimony Are Not Moral Equivalents
The "not all men" reflex has become ritualistic. Women speak about fear, abuse, assault, or death, and men rush to clarify their personal innocence. Public grief gets interrupted by self-exoneration.
Even stranger is the growing false equivalence between dowry and alimony, as though they occupy the same moral universe.
Dowry is an illegal social practice tied to coercion, torture, and death. It is a payment extracted from a woman's family as a precondition of marriage. She is, in that transaction, the product being exchanged. The demands don't stop at the wedding. Women in this country have been beaten, burned alive, driven to suicide, and murdered over dowry for decades.
Alimony is a legal provision for a financially dependent spouse, of either gender, who stepped back from their career to serve the marriage. It is protection from destitution after divorce.
Conflating them is not confusion. It is a choice to uphold a system that kills women rather than engage honestly with why it does.
Then there are the comments I will not let go of. The ones that need to be held up and looked at directly. At least she can't file a false case now. At least she can't take his money in a divorce. A woman is dead. Her child has no mother. Her parents have no daughter. And somewhere, a man typed: at least.
We have to ask what we have become. Who is raising these men. What it says about all of us that these comments exist and get likes.
To flatten dowry and alimony, one a crime, one a legal remedy, into the same thing is a terrifying collapse of morality.
What Does a Woman’s Life Mean in This Country?
I keep coming back to this question because I don't know what other conclusion to draw.
Twisha Sharma was a person with a life she building inside a marriage that was crushing her from the start. Deepika Nagar was a person, a graduate, the youngest of three siblings. Nikki Bhati was a person with dreams and a six-year-old son. Anu Meena was a person who stored evidence of her abuse for someone to find one day.
Every time a woman dies and the national response becomes a debate about false cases, alimony, or what she might have done to deserve it, we are collectively and loudly saying “we don't care about women.” Period.
The sheer volume of this violence should foreclose all debate. These are not individual tragedies. This is systemic rot.
Silence Is Also Complicity
Prolonged internet discourse has trained people to treat women's suffering as a negotiation instead of a tragedy. Every act of empathy must first survive suspicion. Every dead woman must be evaluated—was she good, modern, traditional, too demanding, too ambitious, too outspoken?
The silence from men often feels louder than the outrage itself. Not because every man is guilty, but because too many remain detached until conversations begin implicating male behaviour structurally. Violence against women continues to be treated as a women's issue rather than a societal emergency.
Some men are showing up. Not nearly enough though. Not when a woman is killed in a dowry dispute every 80 minutes. Not when silence reads, to the men around you, as permission.
Showing up doesn't mean a grief post that comes down after 48 hours. It means calling out "not all men" when your friend posts it—out loud, with your name on it. It means not letting the alimony comparison go unchallenged in your group chat. It means understanding that "gifts" at your cousin's wedding could mean death for his future wife. It means talking to your parents, relatives, and sons about not treating women as property to be bought, traded, or discarded.
The women asking for this are not competing for suffering. They are asking for it to stop.
The women who died at the hands of our collective failure are no longer here to speak their truth. They were not symbols. They were not captions. They were people.
The least we can do is stay in the room when their names are spoken.
The least the men can do is show up.
(The author is a senior communications leader. This is an opinion piece and the views expressed are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)