Jaipur: On the day of her father’s tehravi, 10-year-old Monika Saini sits in a corner, repeating the last thing her mother Gopali Devi said to her before being arrested: “Mera bheetra bhar gaya tha tere baap se, tahi main maari usne.” I’d had enough of your father. That’s why I killed him.
Monika replays those words like a tape stuck on loop to neighbours, relatives, friends, even strangers. Each time, it ends in tears. The brutal murder of Dhannalal Saini by his wife Gopali in Jaipur shocked the country. But it wasn’t an isolated case. An apparent spate of wives killing their husbands, especially in small-town India, has become a national obsession in the last few weeks.
The headlines about women poisoning, stabbing, bludgeoning their spouses have been unceasing. In Meerut, Muskan Rastogi reportedly slit her husband’s throat and packed the body into a drum with cement and salt. In Auraiya, newlywed Pragati is accused of having her husband shot just 15 days into the marriage. In Muzaffarnagar, Pinki allegedly laced her husband’s coffee with poison, leaving him fighting for his life in a hospital.
Women, once framed solely as victims, are now being cast as killers, or as vengeful viragos driving their husbands to suicide. Violence against men has become a buzzword online, where videos, headlines, and desperate appeals go viral daily. This purported wave has set off a larger debate: is this a real shift, or just media-fed moral panic? Some argue that these cases are being weaponised to undercut decades of discourse on gender violence. But men’s rights activists say the cases expose a crisis society refuses to acknowledge.
“Violence against men has always existed, but no one has cared to document it. Police don’t take their complaints seriously unless it’s a brutal case. We have men sitting on the streets, fearing for their lives, saying their wives will kill them, yet no action is taken,” said Deepika Narayan Bhardwaj, a men’s rights activist.
Her group, the Ekam Nyay Foundation, has informally documented 306 instances from 2023 where husbands were murdered, often involving the wife’s extramarital affairs.
Shouting, slammed doors, long silences and daily fights—that’s how Gopali Devi and Dhannalal’s four children describe their parents’ marriage. Huddled together in their two-storey house in Jaipur’s Muhana, the siblings, aged 8 to 22, grow teary-eyed when they talk about their father, and angry when they speak of their mother.
“They always used to fight,” said 14-year-old Nisha. But even they never imagined it would end like this.
“Fights happen in every marriage, but things got worse in the last five years. That’s when she started working outside the home. Her behaviour changed after she took the job,” said Nati Devi, Gopali’s sister-in-law, who is now taking care of the younger children.
Mummy didn’t talk to us either. She never asked whether we had eaten or not. She used to cook vegetables, and I would make chapatis for the family. But even that arrangement fell apart
-Nisha, Gopali Devi’s 14-year-old daughter
A 2024 study by the International Institute for Population Sciences found that financially independent working women with mobile access were more likely to commit violence against their husbands, as shifting power dynamics led to more clashes.
Yet as these cases go viral, they’re often used as ‘proof’ that women, too, can be monsters. Or worse, as proof that they have become too independent for society’s comfort.
Data overwhelmingly shows women remain the primary victims of domestic abuse in India, but it’s the flipped narrative that’s gripped everyone now.
In Bollywood, murderous wives have become a black comedy genre unto themselves—from 7 Khoon Maaf, where Priyanka Chopra’s Susanna methodically eliminates one cruel husband after another, to Darlings, where Alia Bhatt’s character traps her abusive partner in a cycle of his own violence. In 7 Khoon Maaf, Susanna even says, “At some point in her life, every woman has thought to herself, how should I get rid of my husband?” Ahead of the release, Chopra described the role as “every wife’s dream.”
But off screen, the reality is more layered. While headlines scream “Patni kaise bani haiwaan” (How a wife became a beast), criminologists argue that most of these women weren’t cold-blooded killers. They were trapped in marriages they couldn’t escape, with no money or support.
“These murders are not just crimes of passion; they are often crimes of entrapment,” said Ntasha Bhardwaj, a criminologist whose research focuses on the impact of gender in crime. “Many of these women saw no way out. Divorce was not an option, leaving was impossible, and the abuse was relentless. For them, murder was not about power or control, as it often is when men kill their wives. It was about escape.”
A widely circulated CCTV clip is the last image Monika and her siblings have of their parents together. It shows their mother on a bike, holding their father’s wrapped corpse in her arms.
Also Read: Girl kills father, lover turns murderer. Are rural romances growing deadlier?
‘Dharm ka bhai’
Artificial roses, framed religious artwork, and a ‘Welcome’ mural decorate Gopali Devi and Dhannalal’s four-room home. Green-painted vines trail across the doorway. But for most of their 25-year marriage, the couple were at odds. Their children, family members, and neighbours had all witnessed the shouting matches. In the early years, Dhannalal, a vegetable vendor, had even hit her.
But over time, the tables started turning.
“Their fights had never been a secret,” said Nati Devi, Gopali’s sister-in-law. “It wasn’t that Dhannalal used to beat her regularly. In the early years of their marriage, he had slapped her a couple of times, but in recent years, she had started dominating him. She refused to cook, insulted him frequently, and the verbal abuse had become routine.”
Things started changing five years ago, when Gopali, now 42, took a stitching job at a clothes factory about three kilometres from home. A slender woman who’d always cover head in public, she’d leave for work at 10 am sharp, and return after 7 in the evening. But it wasn’t all work. She was getting closer and closer to Deendayal Kushwaha, a man in his late twenties who worked at a shop near the factory.
In 2023, during preparations for their eldest daughter’s wedding, the situation at home began to unravel further. Gopali insisted on including Deendayal in the wedding shopping. She introduced him to the family as her dharm ka bhai (spiritual brother). But when he gifted her three sarees during one of the outings, Dhannalal grew suspicious. When they returned, a major fight broke out. Dhannalal said he didn’t want Deendayal at the wedding.
After that, the house became even more divided. The couple started sleeping in separate rooms. Gopali also stopped cooking for the family.
The children describe her as a withdrawn, irritable woman who rarely spoke to anyone. She avoided social gatherings, festivals, and even conversations within the family. In the few photos there are of her, she’s rarely smiling.
“Mummy didn’t talk to us either. She never asked whether we had eaten or not. She used to cook vegetables, and I would make chapatis for the family. But even that arrangement fell apart after the last big fight,” recalled Nisha, the eldest daughter, standing beside her siblings.
By then, Dhannalal had started eating at relatives’ homes, but that too came to an end.
“She found out and abused us publicly,” said one relative who didn’t want to be named. “So, we stopped giving him food.”
By all accounts, Dhannalal had lost what little authority he had left in the household. Then on 15 March, he decided to follow Gopali to find out where she really went during the day. Instead of heading to the factory, she went to Deendayal’s shop. Witnesses say he caught them together and flew into a rage, shouting at Gopali and demanding answers.
A lot of women I’ve interviewed weren’t even in love with these men. Many of them saw the relationship as a way out. When the husband finds out, the fear of losing that one good thing in their life pushes them to take drastic steps
Ntsasha Bhardwaj, criminologist
What happened next was cold and calculated, according to family members—and a crime of passion, per the police.
Under the pretext of having a private conversation, Gopali Devi and Deendayal took Saini to a room above the clothes shop. First, they him on the head with an iron rod and then strangled him to make sure the job was done.
“The victim had objected to their affair, after which his wife and co-accused Deendayal hit him on his head with an iron rod in rage. This led to him losing consciousness. He possibly died on the spot,” said Jaipur Deputy Commissioner of Police (South) Digant Anand.
To get rid of the body, they wrapped it in a bedsheet, tied it to the back of a bike, and rode through the city until they reached a wooded patch on the outskirts. There, they set the body on fire.
The police were alerted on 16 March, when a local man called the emergency helpline after stumbling upon a half-burnt corpse in the jungle. Officers began scanning CCTV footage and quickly found visuals showing Gopali and Deendayal transporting the body and arrested them on 18 March.
A widely circulated clip from that footage is the last image Monika and her siblings have of their parents together. It shows their mother on a bike, holding their father’s wrapped corpse in her arms.
“It was horrible, I can’t even look at it for more than two seconds,” Monika said, her voice barely a whisper.
Wives on a rampage?
Gopali’s arrest came the same day the Meerut drum case broke. The lurid details were everywhere—how 26-year-old Muskan fed sedative-laced kathal kofta to her husband Saurabh, slit his throat, then dismembered him and stuffed the body into a cement drum with her lover Sahil’s help. That she’d had a ‘love marriage’ with Saurabh only made it all seem more darkly poetic somehow.
Now Jaipur had its own sensational story of adultery and murder, and reporters went to town.
Dainik Bhaskar headlined the case: “Patni ne premi ke saath milkar ki pati ki hatya, laash ko jalane ka prayaas” (Wife kills husband with lover, attempts to burn body). Rajasthan Patrika highlighted the motive: “Pati ke virodh par patni ne premi ke saath milkar ki hatya, CCTV mein aaye saboot” (Wife kills husband with lover after he opposed affair, evidence captured on CCTV). And Navbharat Times immediately drew a link with the drum case: “Meerut ke baad Jaipur mein khaufnaak kaand! Pati ki laash ko bore mein bharkar lagaya thikaane, CCTV se pardaafaash” (After Meerut, a horrifying case in Jaipur! Wife stuffed husband’s body in a sack and dumped it—CCTV showed everything).
And it didn’t end there. Over the past month alone, more than twenty such cases have been reported in Hindi language media, mostly from small-town India.
One Bulandshahr woman allegedly enlisted the help of not one but two lovers. The Amar Ujala headline said: “Kisi ki na ho aisi biwi: Do premiyon sang mil pati ko marwa dala” (No one should have such a wife: She got her husband killed along with her two lovers).
In Sitapur, another woman and her lover were accused of killing her husband and dumping his body in a canal. Aajtak Digital reported, “Patni ne premi sang milkar di ek lakh rupaye ki supari, pati ki hatya ke baad shav ko nahar mein phenka” (Wife gave lover Rs 1 lakh supari. After killing, threw husband’s body in canal).
In most of these cases, the murders were planned with a lover. Experts say the fear of losing that relationship becomes the trigger.
“A lot of women I’ve interviewed weren’t even in love with these men,” said criminologist Bhardwaj. “Many of them saw the relationship as a way out. When the husband finds out, the fear of losing that one good thing in their life pushes them to take drastic steps.”
The deeper question, the why, is rarely asked.
“It’s easy to say ‘extramarital affair’ and dismiss it, but the reality is more complex. Why are these women so desperate for an escape in the first place? What does that tell us about marriage and relationships in our society?” Bhardwaj added.
In my novels, I depicted ruthless women who kill for wealth, power, or revenge. But now, these stories are making headlines. The fact that these cases are gaining such massive public attention tells us something unsettling…
-Amit Khan, crime novelist
For the public, though, it’s as if the pulpy crime fiction peddled in railway stations is now unfolding in gruesome headline after headline.
“I have written over 100 murder mystery novels, stories where cunning women kill for wealth or lust. But these plots were meant to remain within fiction,” said Amit Khan, a popular Hindi crime thriller writer, whose bestselling potboilers about adulterous women killers include Night Club and Madam Natasha ka Premi.
He noted it’s “truly disturbing” how headlines about wives orchestrating their husband’s murders echo his novels.
“Crime fiction should entertain, not mirror the darkest turns in society,” Khan said. “In my novels, I depicted ruthless women who kill for wealth, power, or revenge. But now, these stories are making headlines. Fiction creates a safe distance; real life does not. The fact that these cases are gaining such massive public attention, even inspiring songs, tells us something unsettling about our society’s growing obsession with crime, betrayal, and danger.”
A Bhojpuri ditty about the Meerut drum case, titled Muskan-Sahil Song, goes: “Naari pe ke kari bharosa, badi jhamela ho gayil. Cement ke khela sakhi, badi albela ho gayil” (Who can trust a woman? It turned into a big mess. This cement game, my friend, turned really strange).
Another song is called Drum Mein Raja.
Many say the exaggerated outrage over such cases hide the fact that the data is weak. There is still much more overwhelming empirical evidence about violence against women in India.
The Meerut effect
A woman in a flowing pastel outfit storms out of a house in Gonda and begins thrashing her husband with a wiper, shows the CCTV footage. Then she points at a pile of cement. That’s where things got scary, according to his police complaint. She allegedly said: “If you say too much, I’ll get you chopped and packed in a drum like the Meerut case.”
This CCTV clip, like many others, has joined a growing pool of WhatsApp forwards and social media videos showing women physically abusing their husbands, men recording video suicide notes blaming their wives, and reels featuring “remorseless” wives.
In Gonda district,
Water Corporation's Junior Engineer Dharmendra Kushwaha was beaten with a wiper by his wife. Dharmendra alleges that his wife, pointing to the blue drums and cement bags kept nearby, threatened to treat him like Saurabh from Meerut along with her boyfriend.🥺 pic.twitter.com/Y6VVXS8bYA
— Alok (@alokdubey1408) March 31, 2025
One of the most circulated shows Muskan purportedly celebrating Holi with her lover Sahil just 10 days after killing her husband.
The cases have become meme material and hot topics on the streets, in WhatsApp groups, and at social gatherings. Almost every other day, there’s a new case, keeping the fear alive.
In Delhi’s Uttam Nagar, 28-year-old Rohit Kumar says he’s been hearing about the Meerut drum case from family members and neighbours non-stop. The reason: he had a love marriage. Sarcastic remarks such as “Zyada bolega to drum milega” (If you speak too much, you’ll end up in a drum) have become common.
When such incidents occur, existing biases against women amplify them disproportionately. Extramarital affairs aren’t exclusive to women; when happiness and contentment are lacking at home, individuals often seek them elsewhere
-Jagmati Sangwan, social activist
Every evening, his retired father’s friends gather to discuss social issues, and their latest favourite topic is “killer wives”, which often devolves into snide remarks about modern, independent women.
“They don’t mean harm, but this is very new and alarming for them,” said Kumar, an engineer. “Whenever I raise my voice at my wife, they warn me I’ll end up in a drum. Now they’ve picked up this new Auraiya case too.”
On 19 March, a young man named Dilip Yadav was found bleeding from a gunshot wound in a wheat field in UP’s Auraiya. He died three days later. Even more tragic, his wedding had taken place just two weeks earlier. His bride, now a widow, reportedly wept bitterly as relatives tried to console her.
But within days, the police uncovered what they said was a planned hit. The grieving widow, Pragati Yadav, was allegedly the mastermind. Her motive: being denied the man she loved. Not long after the pheras, the plot to get rid of Dilip was set in motion.
“The investigation uncovered a conspiracy involving Dilip’s wife, Pragati Yadav, and her lover, Anurag Yadav, who had been in a relationship for the past four years. They hired a contract killer for Rs 2 lakh to carry out the murder,” said Auraiya Superintendent of Police (SP) Abhijeet R Shankar.
The killer they hired was a man called Ramji Nagar. Half the supari was paid in advance from Pragati’s wedding shagun.
CCTV footage led the police to Pragati, Anurag, and Ramji and all were arrested.
“The world is heading toward a dangerous place where morality is selective,” wrote one X user. “When will this madness end?” asked another.
Many say the exaggerated outrage over such cases hide the fact that the data is weak. There is still much more overwhelming empirical evidence about violence against women in India.
“The media’s disproportionate focus on such cases is unwarranted. Cases of dowry harassment and domestic violence are far more prevalent, with women still being the primary victims,” said Jagmati Sangwan, a social activist.
She pointed to a broader trend of rising violence in general.
“As murder cases increase overall, it’s natural that women, who make up half the population, are also implicated. When such incidents occur, existing biases against women amplify them disproportionately. Extramarital affairs aren’t exclusive to women; when happiness and contentment are lacking at home, individuals often seek them elsewhere.”
At times, some men have taken an unconventional path to avoid conflict. They married off their wives to their lovers. In Bihar, for instance, one husband claimed he wanted to help his wife reunite with her childhood sweetheart.
But the latest such case—in which Bablu from UP’s Sant Kabir Nagar got his wife married to her lover at a local temple—was more about self-preservation than magnanimity.
“In recent days, we have seen that husbands have been killed by their wives,” Bablu said. “After seeing what happened in Meerut, I decided to get my wife married to her lover so that we both can live peacefully.”
Also Read: Bengaluru is fast losing ‘safe for women’ tag—live-in murders, anxious parents, growing fear
‘Pain, trauma, and damage’
Some husbands have survived to tell their stories of domestic violence. In one case this year, the Delhi High Court ruled that men deserve the same legal protection as women.
At 3 am on New Year’s Day, 28-year-old Suraj Saini was asleep when his wife Jyoti allegedly crept up to him and poured boiling water mixed with chilli powder over his face and chest. She then fled into the foggy night from their home in Delhi’s Nangloi, taking his mobile phone but leaving their crying infant behind. She also locked the door from the outside.
The attack left Suraj with severe burns, and his pictures were widely circulated on social media by men’s rights activists.
“She was married seven or eight times before. When I found out and filed a complaint, she threw the hot water on me,” said Suraj, who works at a steel company and lives with his parents along with their seven-month-old baby.
He still has signs of the injury on his shoulder and chest and is yet to recover from the shock.
When Jyoti applied for anticipatory bail, however, her lawyer claimed she was the real victim of domestic abuse. He said the couple had argued after she discovered Suraj talking to other women. But the court rejected her plea, noting it was wary of requests that seek “leniency solely on the basis of the accused’s gender”.
“The pain, trauma, and damage… cannot be categorised differently based on gender,” judge Swarana Kanta Sharma observed.
The case has since become a totem of domestic violence against men and social media posts about alleged police laxity in such cases regularly appeared on social media until her arrest this month.
UPDATE : SUCCESS !
AFTER 15 DAYS OF CONTINUOUS EFFORTS ON THIS CASE. FINALLY!
3 months 8 days after the crime
2 months since her AB rejection
Woman who did this to Suraj – JYOTI ALIAS KITTU has finally been ARRESTED!!!
Thankyou @dcpouter 🙏
Thanks to all of u for support 🙏 https://t.co/qUOGXogLyx
— Deepika Narayan Bhardwaj (@DeepikaBhardwaj) April 9, 2025
While police officials and criminologists acknowledge that such cases have always existed, men’s rights activists claim that there is now a rise in these incidents.
“It has been happening for the longest time, but now these cases are getting more attention,” said Saidulu Adavath, DCP North Bangalore.
But in some cases, violence appears to have been deeply embedded in the marital relationship.
In Dhannalal Saini’s murder case, police and family members described a long pattern of mutual aggression. Gopali Devi would sometimes push him forcefully during arguments.
Two months before his death, Dhannalal broke his leg and was bedridden for two months, during which time the fights escalated as he questioned her about her late shifts—a topic she strongly resented.
“One time, she raised a lathi to hit him, but her father-in-law intervened, and then she left,” said a neighbour, as several women around her covered their mouths in shock.
There is no family photo displayed in the Saini home. Monika had asked her father to get one clicked for a school assignment, but it never happened.
“Our family portrait was postponed because of my parents’ constant fighting,” said Monika, fiddling with the golden thread that was tied around her wrist at her father’s funeral. “Now that my mother is in jail and my father is gone, there’s no family left to photograph.”
(Edited by Asavari Singh)
We can only expect media dogs to come with this insensitive articles who are on the pay roll of global radical feminism cult to mock the rising murder of husbands in India.
Start a campaign to make marriage, divorce and remarriage easy – that will help both men and women survive !
People who are so obsessed with social media posts that say anything wrong about women ask why a few cases of people being murdered freak out men. Hypocrisy
“Many say”, “experts say”, “social media”. I love it when an article uses these phrases and then writes something controversial. Just escape the responsibility. But the reality is that the writer chose that specific set of people to listen to and quote. Whatever is written here is the writer’s and by extension of that, The Print’s view on the matter.
“Most of these women weren’t cold-blooded killers. They were trapped in marriages they couldn’t escape, with no money or support”.
Yup, it is a well-known fact that killing husband showers them with money. All the support for planning cold-blooded murder, but they definitely did not have the support to just leave. Amazing analysis by the criminologist.
This is just like saying honor killings happen because society boycotts those families, and honor killers are less cold-blooded than other murderers.
Please answer my one question, when you had to answer the “why”, why did you quote these specific people? Is there no “expert” out there who thinks otherwise, or do you simply don’t want to print their view?
At least the social activist admits that women are monsters just like men, and the reason men cheat is that women at home don’t provide happiness and contentment.
An excellent attempt by Ms. Nootan Sharma to portray these criminal wives as the actual victims.
That the society is so surprised by these few events when no brouhaha over BJP leader killing family and many such headlines of men killing family or the silence on 6000 women are still killed just for dowry per year and 19000 married women dying every year, is testament the extent to which femicide is normalized in Indian society where women fighting back creates ruckus of demand for extra laws to tackle these! Why the law for murder is same for everybody regardless of sex. Get out of your misogynistic lense.
Right is right and wrong is wrong. Where is the question of gender? Why to kill if one wants to escape? When one can find accompliances to commit murder, voluntarily become criminals, and destroy their own lives, surely they can find someone to support them.
The Print is becoming unreadable. You cannot quote Deepika Narayan Bharadwaj and expect to be taken seriously.