The message on WhatsApp was tantalising. 'I have a surprise for you. Please wait till evening,' it said. But for Anu Shanthi, it wasn't really a surprise. She knew what the message sent by Nino Mathew, her colleague at an IT firm, meant. He was going to kill her husband.
The police say Mathew, who wanted to marry Shanthi, ended up killing her daughter and mother-in-law, along with her husband, in Thiruvananthapuram on April 16 this year. 'Shanthi had given Mathew a map with details on how to enter and leave the house,' says R. Prathapan Nair, deputy superintendent of police.
The triple murder didn't stay in the news in the Kerala capital for long. Nair says it was followed by four back-to-back cases of marriages ending in murder because of illicit relationships.
Social scientists will tell you that extramarital relationships have become a fairly common part of modern Indian marriages today. What's changing is the outcome — in the last two years there has been a spate of cases where a spouse has killed his or her partner over an affair.
'There's an overall increase in aggression and violence in society today. This reflects is all aspects of urban life — from road rage to killing close family members,' says Samir Parekh, director, mental health and behavioural sciences, Fortis Healthcare, Delhi.
Three Sundays ago, residents of an upscale housing complex in Bangalore woke up to jolting news. Saurabh Rastogi, who worked as HR manager at a city-based BPO, had been found brutally murdered in his eighth floor flat. Rastogi's wife Ankisha was visiting relatives in Pune when he was stabbed to death.
Two days later, the police arrested a friend of the couple, Rasvin Chengappa, for the crime. When investigators mined Chengappa's phone call and message details, they found that he had sent a WhatsApp message to Ankisha that read, 'WD'. The police believe it was a code for 'work done'.
In 2013, Bangalore recorded 14 murders over love affairs. 'Two years ago, such a crime was a rarity,' says T.D. Pawar, deputy commissioner of police, East, Bangalore.
But today, from Bangalore to Delhi and from Thiruvananthapuram to Dehradun, there are reports of murders sparked by extramarital relationships. According to a study done by the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), 28,145 people were killed nationwide in such crimes between 2001 and 2012.
'The crime graph is shifting,' points out Prateep V. Philip, additional director-general of police, crime, Tamil Nadu. 'In urban areas, crimes of passion are inching closer to property disputes and enmity which are still the top reasons for murder,' Philip says.
Delhi, as always, leads the trend. An NCRB report of 2010 said one out of every five murders in Delhi was committed over a love affair.
In May, a 40-year-old Air Force officer was strangled to death allegedly by his wife and her 17-year-old lover. The police say the wife tried to make the murder look like a death caused by a heart attack.
In June, another marriage ended in murder. Om Prakash, a BPO executive, lodged a complaint in New Delhi's Kalyanpuri police station, saying that his wife Neetu had gone missing. He told the police he had called Neetu — who was living with her parents because of strained marital ties — for a movie and shopping date in Noida. But she never showed up.
'But CCTV footage from the Noida metro station showed Neetu getting off the train and meeting Om Prakash,' Sanjay Sehrawat, assistant commissioner of police, Kalyanpuri, says.
When the cops confronted Om Prakash, he sang. 'He said he suspected his wife was in an illicit relationship with a friend from college,' Sehrawat adds. That day, after picking Neetu from the metro station, Om Prakash allegedly strangled her in his car, stuffed the body in a suitcase he'd brought along and dumped it in an empty field near the Yamuna.
Experts cite many factors for the rise in such crimes. Lonely living, easy money and hedonism are the root of the problem, contends Ajit Bhide, head of psychiatry, St Martha's Hospital, Bangalore. 'There is financial prosperity among young, urban adults today, with little wisdom on how to enjoy it. Add to that a growing need for instant sexual and material gratification and you have a deadly concoction,' says Bhide, adding that he sees more such cases now than he did a few years ago.
On top of that, families are shrinking, and, along with them, support systems. 'Many young people live alone in big cities with no one to lend them an emotional shoulder,' Parekh points out. Living anonymous lives in metros also makes them socially unaccountable. 'They are not weighed down by what others will think if they commit a crime,' he adds.
Technology — in the shape of smartphones and tablets — has enabled people to nurture private relationships which no one gets to know about. The experts point out that heavy interaction on social networking sites can also lead to illicit relationships. According to a new study published in the US journal Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, spending too much time on Twitter may damage a person's romantic relationship, even leading to negative outcomes such as cheating, break-up or divorce.
With the rise in such crimes, the police plan to run awareness programmes on the legal options available to people stuck in unfaithful marriages. 'If a partner cheats, his or her spouse can sue for adultery and put them behind bars. That's the way to channel anger,' says Vivek Sharma, joint commissioner of police (crime), Gurgaon.
This could have helped save the life of Shweta Bindra. Bindra ran a playschool in Gurgaon, while her husband, Rajnish Kumar Singh, an alumnus of IIM, Ahmedabad, worked as vice-president at a Gurgaon-based consultancy firm. The couple had a love marriage nine years ago and three children.
But the bubble burst in March this year when neighbours heard Bindra screaming for help. She was dead before anyone could reach her.
Singh stabbed Bindra 18 times with a kitchen knife — and then surrendered to the police. 'During interrogation he said he killed his wife in a fit of rage when he learnt she was in an illicit relationship with someone in the neighbourhood,' Sharma says.
Not all crimes are committed because of sudden impulses — some are meticulously planned. The police claim that Bangalore-based software professional Sowjanya Rao's decision to kill her husband was carefully plotted with colleague and boyfriend Jaideep Deshi.
In September last year, an injured Rao stumbled into Hyderabad's Hayathnagar police station. She had visited a temple on the city's outskirts with her husband. On the way back, she said they were attacked by robbers who killed her husband and took away her gold jewellery.
'The story wasn't convincing,' recalls Inspector Venkateswarlu, who investigated the crime. 'Robbers do not usually kill for a few ornaments.'
When the police checked Rao's call records they found she was in touch with Deshi till minutes before the murder. She reportedly confessed her crime. 'Her parents had forced her to marry. When her husband asked her to quit her Bangalore job and move to Hyderabad, where he lived, she hatched a plan to eliminate him,' the police official adds.
The question many raise is how a love affair can seemingly so easily lead to murder. 'Rationale takes a backseat at such times, as people look for a quick-fix way out,' explains C.J. John, chief psychiatrist, Medical Trust Hospital, Kochi.
He counselled a 35-year-old man who killed his wife to be with another woman. 'He said he did it because it was the easiest and quickest option. A divorce would be long and messy.'
Psychiatrist Sanjay Chugh puts the blame on 'reduced tolerance levels' among people. 'We are increasingly getting programmed to get things instantly and discard that which seems remotely unwanted. In the past, people used to spend time and energy in trying to make relationships work. If that didn't help, they would reluctantly head for a divorce, if at all. But now the threshold of tolerance seems to have come down to such an extent that we commonly see such incidents taking place,' Chugh says.
But divorce for Dehradun-based Rajesh Gulati was apparently not an option. When police officer Arvind Singh Rawat walked into Gulati's house with a search warrant in December 2010, he was horrified. The police found 72 pieces of his wife Anupama's body stored in a deep freezer.
During interrogation, the IIT graduate — who had worked in the US till 2008 — apparently confessed that he was in a relationship with a Calcutta-based woman, which led to domestic discord. 'During one such scrap, Gulati banged Anupama's head against the wall and strangled her to death,' Rawat says.
Gulati then went shopping for a deep freezer and an electric saw. He kept the body in the freezer for two months — chopping a few pieces every week and throwing them in a lake near his house.
The police agree that most criminals do not think they will get caught, so consequences are of no significance. 'Every law violator feels he or she can get away with the crime,' former Delhi police commissioner B.K. Gupta says.
But the law does tend to catch up in the end. And that, the police will say, is WD — work done.
