14th February would have been a romantic day for Ankit Saxena and his girlfriend, like any regular couple. Instead, his 20-year-old girlfriend has to deal with the grief of Saxena’s death. “Honour” has claimed yet another life.
The 23-year-old photographer, who was killed by his girlfriend’s relatives because the couple belonged to different religions, is one of several who will die this year for hurting the ‘honour’ of a family.
When it comes to love, India loves to kill. Apart from ‘honour killings’, numbers argue, more than a thousand people will be murdered over a love affair or an “illicit” relationship this year. In fact, murders – where the motive is ‘honour killing’, ‘love affair’, or ‘illicit relationship’ – will constitute over six percent of all murders in the country in 2018.
How can we say this with certainty? Because ever since the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) started collecting data on motives of murder in 1971 (see ‘How Love Has Ended In Murder’ below), this has been the case. Since 1989, the number of people murdered annually over love has risen to more than 2000. Dig deeper and you find that when patriarchal notions meet love, the result has been getting bloodier.
Researchers say “jealousy, unrequited, denied, intimate partner violence and stymied affections” – all of which point to the patriarchal idea of possessing the person one loves – are commonly associated with murders that have been counted under the head ‘love affairs/sexual causes’ since 1988. What is alarming is the fact that love is the fourth largest reason for murder in India, right behind murders committed due to “personal vendetta or enmity” and those due to “property dispute”.
However, this may not be the picture one would get from the police. The police is likely to tell you that when it comes to murders committed where motive is “love affairs/sexual causes”, the rate has consistently dropped since 1994. The rate first dropped to 25 to 30 such murders per crore population in the latter half of the 1990s, and then dropped even further to less than 25 murders per crore population after 2002.
But this is not the complete picture. It appears that this reduction in the crime rate of love-murders has ridden on the back of the reduction in the crime rate of total murders – which by 2016 reduced to half of what it was in 1991.
But if are looking to reduce violence related to love-affairs, another question we must also ask is that among all the different kinds of murders we see, has the percent of love-murders reduced? And, there’s the rub.
The percent of love murders among all murders has been steadily – although unevenly – rising since the 1980s, after a decreasing trend in the 1970s. The share of such murders remained between 6 to 7 percent 1981 and 1988. In 6 out of 12 years starting 1989, it remained above 7 percent. And from 2002 onward, this share has always been above 7 percent.
Another argument that law enforcement agencies and ministers use when shown disconcerting crime figures is that the increase in numbers of a particular crime is a reflection of people’s confidence in reporting those crimes. This is not a reason we can reject outright. There are crimes that can go unreported unless somebody reports it. But if there is perhaps one crime that is least likely to remain hidden, get over or under-reported, it is murder. Moreover, data on motives of murder is reported after investigation by the police itself, and the heads under which this data was collected also didn’t change between 1988 to 2014 – anything that would suggest this increasing trend.
The direction in which these numbers point then is not so incomprehensible. We have reduced the rate of murders in the country, but what we understand by analysing the data closely, is that as a country, we are killing ever more than ever before in the name of love. It’s definitely a worrying trend for a young country like India.