Rejecting a man's advances a risky act for women in India

Spate of killings by those jilted a reminder that men’s dominance still entrenched in country

- Rohini Mohan

BENGALURU - Spurning a lover is a dangerous proposition for women in India, given a spate of recent killings in the world's most populous country.

While there is no official tally of such killings, lawyers, social workers and the police said the number of killings of women by jilted suitors is growing.

The city pages of Indian newspapers record many such killings, which are often gruesome. In the last four months, there have been eight reports of a lovelorn man killing a woman or former girlfriend in Karnataka state alone.

This spate of violence against women is reigniting anxieties that young men are deploying entitled patriarchal norms in new ways in a society that has already been traumatised by high-profile rape cases involving local and foreign women.

Law and policing in India have come a long way in addressing sexual harassment and violence. However, these outlandish killings of young women are a stark reminder that men's dominance is still very much entrenched at home, at work and in public in the country.

In one of the latest cases in tech capital Bengaluru, 25-year-old Abhishek Ghosi allegedly killed Ms Kriti Kumari, 24. In closed-circuit television (CCTV) footage, he is seen slitting her throat in her hostel in July.

The police said he held Ms Kumari responsible for his break-up with her roommate, who was his girlfriend.

In April, 23-year-old Fayaz Khondunaik allegedly stabbed his former classmate, Ms Neha Hiremath, 23, to death in a university campus in Hubbali, a small town in Karnataka.

While some college students have claimed that they were in a relationship that had ended, Ms Hiremath's family insisted that they were just friends and that she rejected his romantic overtures.