Love in the Time of Murder

Raja Raghuvanshi was 28 years old when his wife allegedly had him murdered. They had been married for just 10 days and were on their honeymoon in Meghalaya—India’s northeastern Eden. Raghuvanshi, a corporate professional from Indore, had, according to his family, married “happily,” with no trace of discord. And yet, as per the chargesheet filed by police in early June, his new wife Sonam allegedly plotted the killing with her lover Raj Kushwaha, hired three local men to strangle him and dump his body in a gorge, and returned to Delhi with a carefully constructed alibi.

The case would not have been solved but for the matter of her mobile phone location, a very talkative associate, and Raghuvanshi’s last Instagram selfie, uploaded not long before he stopped responding to his family’s texts. The murder, understandably, rocked the country: a young bride, a secret lover, a vacation-turned-crime-scene—an irresistible noir cocktail.

Sonam’s story, lurid as it may be, is not exceptional. Over the past two months alone, India has seen at least half a dozen murders involving romantic betrayal make national headlines. In South Bengaluru, a 25-year-old techie named Yashas stabbed his former lover Harini 13 times after she tried to end their relationship, then reportedly sat beside the body until police arrived. In Delhi, a husband killed his wife after discovering her affair with his brother. In Meerut, a college-going couple killed the girl’s husband and buried the body near a canal. Each crime featured what used to be called “crimes of passion”—except the passion had calcified into something colder, more choreographed, something methodical and eerie.

To say these murders are multiplying would be speculative. In 2020, the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) listed over 3,287 murders in India attributed to “love affairs” or “illicit relationships”—about 11% of the total homicides. That figure has held steady for years. What has changed isn’t necessarily the frequency, but the form: the public nature of the killings, the demographic convergence of urban middle-class participants, and the sheer strangeness of the stories. Love, in its failed avatar, as a vector of death. It raises a terrifying question: is India undergoing a quiet epidemic of relational collapse, expressed through lethal means?

Increasingly, these murders involve salaried professionals, educated women, tech workers, first-generation college-goers—people who, for all practical purposes, represent the aspirational arc of modern India. What connects them isn’t poverty or psychosis or even patriarchal cruelty, though some cases certainly reek of that. What connects them is a kind of ruptured grammar—a breakdown in the narrative structure that once held romantic and marital relations in place. In simpler terms: these people did not know how to leave relationships anymore. Or rather, they did not know how to leave without devastation.

Sociologists have long understood marriage in India not as a private bond, but as a publicly sanctioned contract. Your marriage isn’t just to a person—it’s to a family, a village, an entire ecosystem of expectations. What changes when you insert romantic agency—desire, regret, the availability of other options—is that you inject volatility into a system that wasn’t designed to accommodate doubt. In the older script, the shame was born by the woman: if you strayed, you were beaten, burned, hanged in a mango orchard. Now, the shame cuts both ways. And sometimes, it kills.

Consider the emotional economics of this: a 25-year-old man, raised in a modest upwardly mobile household, grows up watching Shah Rukh Khan movies, studies engineering, lands a decent IT job, gets engaged, or maybe entangled, and somewhere along the way develops a version of love that is at once transactional and transcendental. He is told, by apps, films, and friends, that relationships are about chemistry and consent. But he is also told, by elders and social cues, that love is endurance—that once you are in, you don’t leave. The cognitive dissonance is profound. And when the person across the bed violates this fragile fantasy—by loving someone else, or wanting out, or simply refusing to behave—violence often becomes the only option left.

This isn’t to excuse murder but to name the emotional circuitry in which it burns. What makes these killings disturbing isn’t just the blood—it’s the composition, premeditated and narratively airtight. They involve burner phones, train bookings, alibis timed to the minute. They suggest planning, but also fantasy—a belief that murder is not only doable, but poetically just.

One could argue these are just crimes of opportunity, amplified by media voyeurism. But that, too, misses the point. The fact that so many of these murders involve romantic betrayal—and that they keep reappearing in different cities, among people with similar class markers—suggests something structural. Like honour killings, they emerge from the collision of traditional pride and modern intimacy. But unlike honour killings, which are collective and patriarchal, these are often solitary, desperate, deeply personal. They are murders of disappointment.

What’s needed, then, is not just more arrests but better cultural diagnostics. Why, for instance, do so many of these killings happen during relationship transitions—honeymoons, breakups, new jobs, newly arranged marriages? Why do so many perpetrators have no prior record of violence? And perhaps most crucially: what tools, emotional, psychological, or civic, do we offer people to exit relationships that no longer serve them? Is there a language for disengagement that doesn’t produce shame? Is there a vocabulary for heartbreak that doesn’t end in ruin?

Because while police cases can record intent and motive, they cannot trace the long corrosion of intimacy, the thousand paper cuts of humiliation, the culture of permanence that makes leaving feel like treason.

There is also, to be clear, a regional demographic dimension. Most of the recent high-profile cases involve middle-class Hindu couples, predominantly from Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Delhi, and Karnataka. In 2020, UP alone recorded 496 murders attributed to “illicit relationships.” Why? Partly due to the sociocultural intensity of these regions, where romance is permitted but not forgiven. Where love marriages have risen, but relationship literacy has not kept pace. The smartphone, here, has arrived faster than therapy. The result: freedom without frameworks, desire without instruction. And somewhere in that gap, people die.

Some of these murders are still brutal acts of patriarchy. Some involve mental illness. But the pattern transcends pathology: too many lovers are killing each other. Too many families express shock that their children are capable of this. And too many of these deaths could have been avoided—with better guardrails, not just in law, but in life.

What might those guardrails look like? Relationship education and counselling in schools, for a start. In a significant gesture, Delhi University has announced an undergraduate course titled Negotiating Intimate Relationships for the 2025–26 academic year. Developed by the Department of Psychology, the course doesn’t promise answers so much as a way of naming the emotions and confusions that so often attend young adulthood. It covers the psychology of friendship and romantic attachment, the mechanics of jealousy and consent, and the silent labour of maintaining or exiting a relationship. There are modules on digital surveillance, on how to recognise early warning signs of coercion or control, and on what it means to end a relationship with dignity. Students will be asked to read case studies, reflect on their own experiences, and even revisit popular films like Kabir Singh or Titanic as problematic scripts that demand unpacking.

India also desperately needs helplines, not just for battered spouses, but for conflicted ones. Legal recourse that allows mediated separation, not just retributive divorce. A media ecosystem that treats these murders as symptoms of a frayed cultural fabric, not clickbait. And perhaps hardest of all: an honest reckoning that India is in the middle of an intimacy convulsion. Marriage is no longer the anchor it once was. Love is no longer the safe rebellion it used to be. We are, as a society, in the chrysalis. And metamorphosis is messy. Wings, after all, come at the cost of limbs.

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