Monday 06 / July / 2026
Bengaluru: The details of the Lohagad Fort murder case read like a crime thriller. A young woman. A fiancé she did not want. A lover. A scouted location. A rehearsed signal and a murder, bringing a young man’s life to a tragic end. Siya Goyal was twenty years old. Ketan Agarwal, the man she is accused of killing, was twenty-five.
When I discussed this topic with an old colleague from my reporting days, he was unimpressed by its novelty. “This is not new,” he said. “It is just that the excuses are becoming flimsier nowadays.” He vaguely mentioned a case in Bengaluru in the early 2000s, but couldn’t remember details. This sent me on a hunt.
In 2003-era Bengaluru, when the city was yet to become the traffic-jinxed nightmare it is today, a law student named Shubha Shankaranarayan got engaged to BV Girish, a software engineer. Their families had been neighbours for fifteen years. Four days after the engagement, Shubha asked Girish to take her to a viewpoint near the HAL Airport inside the city to watch the planes take off. While he stood watching, a man attacked him from behind on her instruction and fled. Girish died of his injuries. Shubha, it emerged, had been seeing a college junior and had conspired with him to remove Girish from the picture rather than simply telling her family the truth.
Twenty-two years separate Shubha and Siya. Different decades, different technology, same architecture: a young woman who could not find a way to say “I don’t want this” to the people who needed to hear it, and who found, in that silence, room for something far worse to grow.
In July last year, the Indian Court upheld Shubha’s life sentence. But before it did, the bench made an observation worth far more attention than it received. It noted that the tragedy might never have occurred had her family been more sympathetic to her state of mind - and, more broadly, that social stigma does not merely limit a person’s choices, it distorts their very perception of freedom, making resistance feel impossible, even immoral. Shubha, the court found, was an adult who was nonetheless unable to make an independent decision for herself, caught between what she wanted and what her family was prepared to hear. The court did not excuse what she did. The sentence stands. But it named, plainly, what helped create the conditions for it.
That is not just a story about one troubled young woman or man. It is a story about what happens, repeatedly, generation after generation, when a society refuses to accept that choosing a partner or choosing not to marry at all are legitimate exercises of individual will, rather than decisions to be made on someone’s behalf by caste, class, religion, and horoscope. Both Shubha and Siya were not fleeing relationships they had chosen. They were unable to refuse relationships they hadn’t.
India has the lowest divorce rate in the world at just 1%. This number is frequently cited with quiet pride, as evidence of the sanctity with which this country treats marriage. It is worth asking what it actually measures. The same society that produces that statistic also produces, in large numbers, couples living as strangers under one roof, engagements nobody felt able to break, and periodically, a fiancé pushed off a cliff or bludgeoned near an airport because saying no out loud was never made to feel possible.
Across South Asia, numbers tell a similar story: Sri Lanka’s divorce rate sits at a barely visible 0.15 per cent, Pakistan and Bangladesh are not far behind. The stigma travels too: South Asians in the diaspora, settled in countries with far more permissive social norms, still divorce at significantly lower rates than other ethnic groups around them. In Pakistan, researchers have documented marriages held together by the fear of stigma alone, even where one partner had a severe, untreated mental illness. The architecture is regional, not exceptional to any one country or family.
There is a reason the 1% figure looks the way it does, and it isn’t marital bliss. India also has one of the highest marriage rates in the world: the vast majority of women are married by the time they reach 25, and singlehood past a certain age remains, for most families, not a lifestyle but a failure to be managed. Almost everyone enters marriage. Almost no one leaves it. That combination only makes sense if either Indian marriages are uncommonly well-matched at a population scale, which no other data suggests, or if both the entry and the exit are far less voluntary than the culture likes to claim. A society that cannot yet accept a young woman’s right to stay single, by choice, is not well positioned to ask why she didn’t simply say no to a fiancé instead of scripting a murder.
Here is the part that should worry the institution’s defenders more than any murder case: the generation watching all this is slowly and without drama, choosing to opt out.
I interact regularly with a group of twenty-somethings in my gym, the kind of conversations that start off as small talk and turn serious without warning. They told me they had been ambivalent about marriage. Now, watching cases like these, watching friends and cousins trapped in unhappy unions that they are not allowed to exit cleanly, several of them said they were simply against it. Not against love, not against commitment, but against the institution as currently practised in their own families, where a wedding is viewed as a trade with no returns possible.
That is the real casualty here, and it is one that nobody enforcing the stigma seems to notice. Families that punish honesty in the name of protecting marriage are not protecting it. They are teaching their children that marriage is a trap, and their children, watching closely, are declining the invitation.
Girish, Ketan Agarwal, and the hundreds of women murdered in similar circumstances across the country, all deserved better, and all deserve justice, which the courts must continue to deliver in full. But accountability without understanding is just punishment without prevention. If we want fewer such cases, we need families that can hear “I don’t want this,” whether it is a fiancé, a wedding, or marriage itself, long before it becomes something unspeakable; and an institution that earns the next generation’s trust by allowing an honest exit, and an honest refusal, rather than demanding impossible endurance.
The 1% divorce rate is not something to be proud of. Read alongside a marriage rate that leaves almost no room for choice, it isn’t evidence of sanctity at all. It is a warning, written in the smallest number a society can produce. We would do well to finally read it.
