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Opinion National Interest PoV 50-Word Edit

ThePrint On Camera Videos In Pictures

Society & Culture Around Town Book Excerpts Vigyapanti The Dating Story

More Judiciary Education YourTurn Work With Us Campus Voice

Put arranged marriage on trial. It’s the common link in women killing fiancés

Ketan Agarwal's murderers must face justice. But some of these runaway brides are simply playing by the rules of the arranged marriage system.

It took less than a fortnight for a person’s beastly death to turn into meme material. Ketan Agarwal, 25, fresh off an American degree and five months away from a wedding for which his family had leased a palace in Udaipur, was allegedly murdered by his fiancee Siya Goyal, 20, and her partner, Chetan Chaudhary. The couple apparently plotted the murder for months and finally pushed him off a cliff at Pune’s Lohagad Fort.

In the days since his killing, Agarwal has been passed around like a punchline. The doting birthday montages he once filmed for his fiancée have resurfaced along with sneering captions. Goyal’s own teary tribute posts are replayed as proof of her nerve. There are Bollywood reactions to “When your fiancée asks you to go on a trek”. A creator named MK Ki Power—accompanied, inexplicably, by a young child—even attempted to summon Agarwal’s spirit, using an AI-generated photo of the victim.

But the detail that the timeline has feasted on most greedily is that Agarwal wore a hair patch. In the hands of the internet, this fact has been assigned as a possible motive for murder. It has reduced his grieving father to repeating that this was a condition they’d discussed with Goyal’s family, well before the engagement.

A young man’s death has been sanded down into the week’s discourse, a tragedy curdled into entertainment. And it is, frankly, obscene.

The jokes are working hard to make us forget what the Pune police have described as a plan assembled with patience over thousands of calls spanning months. Reports have suggested that Goyal and Chaudhary had made two attempts on Agarwal’s life before the one that worked. She apparently also stole his passport to sabotage a pre-wedding holiday that had grown inconvenient.

If the case holds, Goyal and Chaudhary should spend a very long time in prison. There is no reading of the facts in which that is in question. Nothing that follows asks for leniency.

And yet, the reels are not really about Ketan Agarwal, nor about getting him justice. What they are playing on is the rarity of the spectacle. In India, we are used to absorbing an enormous amount of information about domestic killings, via numbers that don’t trend and cases that don’t make it to the news. We are so inured to the direction in which such violence normally runs that it has lost the power to startle us. That around 16 women die every day—that’s 5,737 women a year—in dowry-related cases alone is a hoary statistic. But a young bride-to-be or wife plotting the murder of the groom is the equivalent of “man bites dog”. These cases are, by now, a genre of their own.

A little over a year ago, in May 2025, a transport businessman from Indore named Raja Raghuvanshi, 29, went to Meghalaya for his honeymoon and did not return home. His body was recovered from a gorge near the Wei Sawdong falls a few days after his bride, Sonam, 25, had vanished and then resurfaced in Uttar Pradesh, claiming to have been drugged and abducted. Sonam’s story did not hold, and investigators discovered that she had hired three men to murder her husband. As it happens, this month, the Meghalaya High Court upheld the bail granted to Sonam in April by a Shillong court.

It led Raghuvanshi’s mother to label Goyal “mini Sonam”.

In 2022, in Anakapalli, a young woman named Pushpa took her fiancé—a research scholar she had no desire to marry—up a hill on the promise of meeting her friends. She blindfolded him with her........

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