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In December 2024, an 81-minute video recording and a 24-page note titled “This ATM has been closed permanently” suddenly surfaced on Indian social media feeds. Left behind by Atul Subhash, a 34-year-old Bengaluru-based software engineer who tragically died by suicide amid a bitter matrimonial dispute, the material quickly transformed from a private tragedy into an absolute algorithmic wildfire. Fast forward to June 2026, and a similarly intense digital frenzy has erupted around the murder of a Pune-based businessman, Ketan Agarwal, who was pushed into a 350-foot gorge at Lohagad Fort by his fiancée, Siya Goyal, and her associate.

To the casual scroller, the explosive digital reaction to these cases looks like a collective, organic human cry for justice. On closer inspection, however, the digital ecosystem reveals a deeply coordinated ideological backlash. In a country where gender-based violence remains structurally and overwhelmingly tilted against women, these specific, anomalous cases where women are the perpetrators are being heavily weaponised by a growing online “manosphere.”

This digital phenomenon does not simply seek justice for individual victims like Atul or Ketan. Instead, it relies on a deliberate strategy: using shocking anomalies to engineer a narrative of “male victimhood,” push back against feminist legal safeguards, and subtly re-legitimise traditional patriarchal control among India’s tech-savvy Gen Z and millennial youth.

The ‘man bites dog’ anomaly

To understand why these cases go so incredibly viral, one must look at the baseline of criminal violence in India. National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) data has consistently demonstrated a massive, deeply structural gender gap in spousal violence. In the most recent report of the year 2024, India recorded 4,41,534 cases of crimes against women. Of these, the absolute majority were cases of ‘Cruelty by Husband or Relatives’, accounting for 1,20,227 cases. Thousands of women are subjected to domestic abuse, dowry deaths, and marital homicides every single year. Still, the digital ecosystem often absorbs this reality as a grim, almost normalised statistic, a quiet headline buried under the weight of systemic repetition.

Social media algorithms do not feed on the systemic, they feed on the........

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