A "peaceful" Rakhil only said he is not there for any sort of relationship. Three weeks after standing silently before the police, Rakhil died by suicide. Unable to break up with Manasa, he tried to solve the problems between them.
All three sentences (minus the double quotes I couldn't help adding) are media headlines of the same story, of a murder that happened in broad daylight in Kerala. The man described here as peaceful, heartbroken and silent before the police, is the murderer. Manasa is the one he killed. On July 30, 32 year-old Rakhil, an interior designer by profession, barged into the house of 24-year-old Manasa Madhavan, who was doing her house surgency in Kothamangalam. He shot her dead and then killed himself.
Many reports somehow however made the murderer sound like the victim, as if roles were almost exchanged. He is the one who killed. He is the one who stalked the young woman for days, rented a room near her, travelled to god knows where to get a gun, all to end the life of a woman he claimed to love. Ah yes, love. That's the keyword that got all the voyeuristic attention in the end. Not that a young woman's life and promising career as a doctor was ended at the age of 24. Not that this man, eight years older than her, decided one Friday afternoon she had lived enough and went into the house she shared with other women, took her aside and shot her with a gun. But yes, many reports did not forget to mention the love that gushed out of him.
If these reports could be a movie, they would have sentimental music when Rakhil appeared on screen, just after killing Manasa. It was almost like he was still alive and in the court, and journalists were playing his advocates to buy him the minimum sentence.
Sadly, this is not the first time it has happened. There have been countless reports calling a man who pours acid on a woman’s face and makes her go through a lifetime of pain and suffering, “a jilted lover”. Men barging into houses of young women and hacking them to death in their bedrooms get described as heartbroken by rejection.
If we have to go back to our ABCs, so be it. Killing is the crime here, not rejecting a proposal, not breaking up. As hard as some media houses may find it to believe, women are completely equipped to break up a relationship they no longer want to be in. If you want to add that detail in your report, by all means do. But the moment you use the story to even subtly justify the crime, that's when it becomes a problem.
Let's take it a notch up. Suppose a person (of any gender) cheats on a lover - that still does not give the lover the right to kill the person. It doesn’t make it alright for media reports to say, "Poor lover kills person for cheating".
People have pasts. People have bad relationships. People make good or bad decisions that can hurt or upset another. None of it is an invitation for their murder, as certain media reports tend to insinuate. You just don’t dig into the victim’s past relationships to whitewash the killer. The question you need to ask yourself when you hear these real or unreal “romantic tales” is, “so what?”
While you can bring in relevant facts about a murder victim's past into your reports, it is absolutely in bad taste to weave a melodramatic version of it, reducing the crime of murder to a mere side-effect. Just pause to take this in: a life has been cruelly ended.