It costs under Rs 5,000 to replace a car’s broken side view mirror. But Manoj Kumar, a 32-year-old Kalaripayattu martial arts trainer, decided that that wasn’t enough. The mirror was worth the life of the man who had damaged it.
On the night of 25 October, delivery executive Darshan N, 24, accidentally brushed his scooter against Kumar’s car. According to reports, Darshan apologised and sped away with the pillion-rider G Varun to complete their delivery. In response, Kumar took a U-turn, chased the men over two kilometres through Bengaluru traffic, and eventually rammed their scooter from behind. The impact threw both the riders into the air: While Darshan died on the spot from severe head injuries, Varun was admitted to the hospital.
Forty minutes after the incident, Kumar and his wife Aarati Sharma returned to the scene of crime wearing masks and collected the broken mirror fragments and car parts that might connect them to the killing. They understood exactly what they had done. Some news reports have floated the notion that the mirror damage was the result of a “prank gone wrong”, as if that mitigates what the couple did.
When Kumar made that U-turn he knew that on Indian roads it is permissible for you to execute someone for supposedly disrespecting you. This is especially true if you kill a pedestrian or someone in a vehicle smaller than yours. And if you’re careful about the evidence, you might just get away with it.
This isn’t merely a case of road rage gone too far. Road rage suggests a certain loss of control, but Kumar and his wife were in complete command. What sets this incident apart is the level of calculation, aggression, and disregard that went into killing over a perceived insult—and it’s part of a pattern that has made Indian roads a slaughterhouse.
Days after Kumar was charged with murder and arrested, another Bengaluru incident surfaced. A 23-year-old software engineer, Sukruth Keshav Gowda, allegedly rammed his car into a family of three on a two-wheeler because the rider had honked at him at a traffic signal. Gowda had earlier attempted to muddy the narrative and suggested that he’d lost control over the car’s power steering. But CCTV footage contradicted his claim and showed his car hitting the scooter from behind, launching the family into the divider. The accused later said that he was “irritated” by the honking.
This deadly instinct has travelled further out from cities. In Madhya Pradesh’s Ganeshpura village, a BJP leader’s nephew allegedly ran over farmer Ram Swaroop Dhakad with a Thar SUV. According to the victim’s family, the BJP leader, Mahendra Nagar, was threatening small farmers in the area to sell their land, but Dhakad had refused. The accused assaulted the farmer’s daughters, and when his wife tried to intervene, they crushed him. Dhakad died due to his injuries.
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Thar’s reputation
We see the Thar wielded as an instrument of violence, reappearing in video after distressing video. In Jammu, a 20-year-old student named Mannan Anand ran over a senior citizen on a scooter twice. After reversing into and knocking over the older man, Anand calmly stepped out of his vehicle, abused the unconscious man, and drove away. There is no panic or terror in the accused’s demeanour—only the cool composure of a man who knows he will not have to pay for his crimes.
In Haldwani, after a speeding Thar ran over and killed a 55-year-old man, the passengers took their own sweet time to get out of the car. In the CCTV footage of the incident, you see them in no rush to check on the victim’s condition or call for help. Instead, they first inspect and fuss over the damage to the bumper of their vehicle.
Minimal provocation. Maximum force. All aided by a certainty that the vehicle grants its owner the right to extract instant retribution through lethal punishment.
Beyond the killings, the Thar’s connection with a perception of lawlessness, is impossible to ignore. A spate of incidents—including thieves using a Thar to tow away a stolen Scorpio in Gurugram and a property dealer being mowed down by an ACP’s son in Faridabad—led Haryana’s DGP, OP Singh, to issue a controversial statement. The SUV has become so synonymous with aggression, that Singh said that the “Thar is not a car, it’s a statement”. He associated the vehicle explicitly with “dadagiri” and suggested that those who drove it were crazy.
You might not agree with Singh’s expression. But you know him to be instinctively right, especially when you’re being tailgated by a Thar with black windows on a Gurugram highway in the middle of the night.
Prateek Singh, a 28-year-old road safety awareness YouTuber based in Lucknow, told me that “Thar owners think that they own the road.” They tend to be younger men, and very few buy it for its off-roading capabilities.
In the past, he’s documented videos of Thars driving on the wrong side and blocking roads. Several of these drivers, Singh said, perform dangerous stunts for Instagram Reels. These videos, in turn, get massive views and positive comments, which reinforces their behaviour. “The biggest problem is that there are no consequences for this misbehaviour,” he said. “Drivers know they will be taken to the thana, made to sit there for a few hours, and get a challan. But no strict action will be taken against them.” Singh, who also owns a Thar, said that when people see him following traffic rules, they are often surprised.
To be clear: the Thar doesn’t create violent drivers. But it has become the vehicle of choice for men who want to be seen as untouchable. Shubhranshu Singh, former CMO at Tata Motors and Royal Enfield, has written that the Thar “must decide which idea of self it wants to represent. If it becomes the vehicle of the lout, it will soon lose the respect that made it desirable. If it reclaims its identity as the vehicle of the explorer, it can rightfully join the company of enduring icons.”
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Carelessness to rage
The Thar—and by extension, other bulky SUVs—has come to signify anarchy in India, in the same way that the BMW once signified a dangerous apathy and indifference. In 1999, Sanjeev Nanda, the grandson of a Navy Chief, drove his BMW through Delhi while drunk, and killed six people including three police officers. He fled the scene.
The defining feature of that crime was callousness and a ruthless disregard for human life. Nanda treated his victims as collateral damage—as obstacles who had the misfortune of being in his path. After years of acquittals and retrials, the Supreme Court eventually reduced his sentence to time already served, along with community service and a fine.
In the early aughts, the BMW became a symbol of how the privileged could kill and still be insulated from meaningful consequences. Nanda’s crime was that he simply didn’t care enough to slow down. Now, India is home to a whole host of supercars and with it come more entitled owners. Recently, a video went viral of a Lamborghini Aventador driving through a closed toll gate without consequence.
But the psychology of most modern drivers in the present era is different. It is premised on proactive hostility. The modern driver identifies other people on the road as prey, with targets painted on their backs. If Nanda represented the entitled carelessness of wealth, today’s drivers represent its weaponised rage.
Avik Chattopadhyay, founder of the Indian School for Design of Automobiles and former brand manager for the Gypsy, points to the deliberate construction of a muscular, formidable image. “Vehicle purchases are right-brain decisions, driven by the idea you want to project, maybe as someone not to be messed with,” he told me.
Chattopadhyay said that some people choose SUVs partly because India’s roads are full of potholes and undulations, and a high-clearance vehicle makes practical sense. “But that doesn’t explain why someone would choose a Thar or Scorpio over a Venue or Creta,” he said. “A black Thar or a Scorpio also symbolises a ‘bahubali.’” In the series Mirzapur, for instance, the gangster Kaleen Bhaiya moves around in a Scorpio while his lackeys drive Thars.
And the marketing has leaned into this. Chattopadhyay doesn’t believe that the vehicle creates this mindset, but it plays on it. He contrasts this with Honda’s iconic campaign when it launched its motorcycles in the USA in the 1960s. The iconic line, “You meet the nicest people on a Honda” was a deliberate attempt to distance the category from the violence associated with biker gangs. “Has any Indian brand played up to that persona?” he asks. “Instead, we do black editions, which is so silly in a country like India.”
A hapless response has come in from no less than the Union Transport Minister, Nitin Gadkari. Last year, he called road deaths “a dark issue for my ministry… one of our failures.” His diagnosis was that “there is a problem with society. There is neither fear, nor respect for the law.” It’s a remarkable admission of defeat from the man responsible for India’s road safety. Four hundred people die on Indian roads every day, and we account for 11 per cent of the world’s crash-related deaths, despite having only 1 per cent of its vehicles.
But then again, the dead are almost always delivery workers, farmers, two-wheeler riders, pedestrians. Some lives are simply worth less than others. An Indian road is where that hierarchy finds final proof.
Karanjeet Kaur is a journalist, former editor of Arré, and a partner at TWO Design. She tweets @Kaju_Katri. Views are personal.
(Edited by Theres Sudeep)