Wedded Malice

Marriage, once regarded in India as a sacred covenant of duty, devotion and endurance, is fast descending into something far more sinister. If the case of the Indore is anything to go by, marriage in India has morphed into a staging ground for betrayal, manipulation and murder.

Indore-based Sonam Raghuvanshi allegedly plotted the murder of her husband Raja during their honeymoon in Meghalaya, a killing made all the more macabre by its theatrical execution and cold-blooded aftermath. Police say she and her lover Raj Kushwaha hired three contract killers to hack Raja to death just days after their wedding. Raj was later seen consoling the groom’s grieving father in an act so perverse it almost defies parody. That the grieving sister, an influencer with lakhs of followers, turned the saga into social media content only added to the surreal horror.

Recent crimes across the country offer grim proof that the institution, long upheld by tradition and sanctified by ritual, is buckling under the weight of materialistic selfishness and moral decay. Across India, from Mainpuri to Meerut, Jaipur to Mumbai, similar horrors have emerged, each more grotesque than the last in this year alone.

In Uttar Pradesh, Pragati Yadav, pressured into marriage by her family, chose not annulment but assassination. She lured her husband to his death within weeks of the wedding and showed no public remorse. Nearby, Muskan Rastogi spun a web of deceit so absurd it resembled pulp fiction. Impersonating her lover’s dead mother on social media, she persuaded him that her husband's murder was divinely ordained. They butchered him, cemented his remains into a drum, and left for a vacation as if ticking off a chore.

In Jaipur, a wife rode pillion on a motorbike with her husband’s corpse, wrapped in white cloth, en route to burning it by the roadside. Each story reveals not just a breakdown of marriages, but of basic human decency.

Why, then, do these marriages take place at all? To respond to an unhappy marriage not with separation but with savage murder reveals a deeper rot. These are not crimes of impulse but of cold calculation, often motivated by the hope of escaping domestic drudgery, inheriting property or legitimising extramarital affairs. The marriage becomes a mere transaction and the spouse, a disposable obstacle.

There is also the wider corrosion of values. In a society enthralled by material success, superficial beauty and social media validation, traditional institutions like marriage now carry the weight of performance, not principle. Middle-class weddings aspire to be no less than Bollywood spectacles, carefully curated for Instagram. But behind the filtered images, the bonds of trust and empathy are perilously thin. The idea of enduring hardship together which was once the cornerstone of Indian marital life, is now seen as an archaic nuisance, easily solved with poison, blades or contract killers.

What India urgently needs is a cultural reckoning and a recognition that the collapse of marriage as a moral institution portends broader societal decay.