Consider four samples of reactions that were dropped on the internet soon after the murder of a 23-year-old woman, Vishnupriya, inside her house in Kannur last Saturday, October 22. Sample 1: Ranjith Vijayakumar says, “It is a world where husband and children are left for a lover. Every man won’t be the same, some will react.” Sample 2: Ibrahim Baqavi Idukki states that the price of cheating might be death, and those who fall in love would do well to remember that. Sample 3: Joprin Joy advocates a law to sue for breakups in relationships. And finally: Anjana Stephen is sure that “all this happened because of [the victim’s] actions. She should have learned this when she loved someone and then left him.”
These need not be their original names, just social media handles that give a false sense of “security” while spewing hatred on the internet. But these are only four samples from the many that came after Vishnupriya was hit on her head and stabbed to death inside her house in Panoor last Saturday, and news reports began to suggest that it was an act of vengeance by a former lover. Syamjith, aged 25, was arrested within hours, after a witness spoke about seeing him loitering outside the house before the murder. He had later shown the police where he buried the weapons that were used to kill Vishnupriya. According to a newspaper report, he told the police that he knew what the punishment would be, and that he would only be 39 when he came out of jail after a life sentence.
When TNM contacted the police, there was no confirmation of it being a crime of vengeance because of a breakup. But the news reports that suggested it were lapped up by eager young men on the internet, who poured out words in support of the killer, like they had a stock ready for these occasions. It was unusual to find a woman’s name among them – ‘Anjana Stephen’. Then again, the internet is also home to multitudes of fake identities. But rest assured, every time there is a crime against a woman, these users burst into action, piling up hate comment after hate comment, calling the victims names, giving them petty descriptions, and making up whatever stories they think are missing.
If they keep at it, they could graduate from the PC George school of misogyny. They could stand at par with one of the most foul-mouthed politicians in Kerala, who makes it a point to deliver an anti-woman lecture when he is not giving talks against religious minorities or ridiculing gender identities. The younger brand of moral police does its work online, unlike George who jumps out of cars with a gun and makes open threats. Social media not only allows the anonymity of a fake identity, it helps them come together and paint whole pages red with hate. In March, after a 20-year-old woman vlogger died in suspicious conditions in Dubai, an army of men pointed fingers at her for trying to be a star on the internet. It didn’t seem to touch them that Rifa Mehnu was only 20, already married and with a kid, appearing pleasant in all her videos and making obvious attempts to please her lakhs of followers when they didn’t like something she posted. That there were suspicions if she had been a victim of domestic abuse also didn’t seem to matter.
Screenshots of some comments made in response to the news of Vishnupriya's murder. Credit: Instagram/ themalluanalysts
Last year, a 24-year-old house surgency student, Manasa, was murdered in a rented apartment in Kothamangalam by a stalker who walked in with a gun. Rakhil Raghuthaman had been stalking her ever since their relationship ended earlier that year. Manasa’s father had even gone to the police to make him stop. Rakhil was given a warning but that had not stopped him, and he went on to rent a place close to her apartment, watch her every move and then shoot her down at her house. Expectedly, the news was greeted by a lot of killer-sympathisers on social media, hailing his “love” and loathing the woman who “cheated” him.
Since no one has told them the meaning of these words, perhaps we can have a few definitions. Leaving a relationship or breaking up means both of you have talked about splitting up and are going your different ways. Dumping is a less flattering term, used to describe a breakup that one of the partners initiates when the other is not ready. Cheating is when a partner is seeing someone without the other partner’s knowledge. And none of this is wrong before the law. But stalking and killing are. So is making threats online, and it could put you behind bars.
Some of these unfortunate women were smart enough to leave the men when they did, perhaps recognising a violent streak in them. It is sad that it didn’t save them in the end. The killer-sympathisers are not only advocating murder for others but also inadvertently suggesting that they themselves should be killed if they were ever found “cheating”. The more problematic of these comments come from those who argue for the mental health of the killer, adding fuel to the already messed-up understanding of mental health issues as producing violent behaviour. Popular fiction and gossip have always propagated the idea of violence being a side-effect of mental health issues, when in fact many who have mental illnesses are themselves victims.
Surprising amount of effort goes into the justification of a man who breaks into a house and kills a woman whom he had claimed to love. A love that had made him buy weapons to kill her many days in advance, plan the cruelties he would do to her and perform them with precision, and then watch as she cries in pain and dies. If this is how he loves, one can’t imagine what his hate would be. Please, people, just give a second’s thought to the person you are spending your energy defending. Please, wake up.