There are striking parallels in the killings of Nikki Bhati and Radhika Yadav, in Greater Noida and Gurugram – two neighbouring areas, albeit falling under different state boundaries.
Propelled by builder enterprise and the coming of service industries, both places have seen the price of cheap agricultural land shoot up astronomically, going up to a 500-fold increase. The times have caught up with the old residents, turning some of them into crorepatis, but they are yet to catch up with the times. The patriarch smokes his hookah on a string cot, as the granddaughter drives around in a Mercedes.
A murder is usually the result of a combination of factors (Nikki’s family, for instance, has alleged dowry demands), but for our purposes let’s whittle it down to three confirmed reasons: first, private enterprise that brings financial independence – a beauty parlour in Nikki’s case, and a tennis academy in Radhika’s; second, the Instagram reels made by the women, flaunting their lives, which invited taunts from the community. Third, the perceived threat their financial independence posed to the dignity of men of the family and community. There’s also a commonality in both cases– the lack of remorse shown by the perpetrators.
“Nikki told Vipin (her husband) that she and her sister would reopen the parlour. When he refused, Nikki said that no one could stop them from reopening, which (Vipin) Bhati opposed. Vipin told her that in their family, posting reels on Instagram and running a parlour were not allowed. The issue turned ugly and he started assaulting her,” the station house officer of Kasna village in Greater Noida, Dharmendra Shukla, said.
Radhika Yadav’s father, Deepak, in his statement to the police, said: “When I went to Wazirabad to fetch milk, people in the village taunted me for living off my daughter’s earnings. This upset me. They also pointed fingers at her character. I told my daughter to shut the academy for this reason, but she refused. I was constantly tense over this. I was very perturbed. Due to this tension, I shot my daughter from behind when she was cooking in the kitchen.”
This theory was reinforced in two Instagram videos released by Radhika Yadav’s “best friend” – Himaanshika Singh Rajput. “They used to taunt him, saying things like ‘she wears make-up, short clothes, ‘you are surviving thanks to her money, ‘make her do dhanda’ (prostitution)… They shamed her for wearing shorts, for talking to boys, for living life on her own terms,” she said about Deepak’s friends.
Clash of tradition with modernity
As the two cases show, there is a clash between tradition and modernity, the rural and the urban, the village and the city.
The impunity with which both killings were carried out, also demonstrates that when there is a conflict between private morality and the morality of the state (the rule of law), the former always wins. Deepak Yadav didn’t try to run away after murdering his daughter, Radhika. In his head, he did the right thing, in line with his private morality.
At the same time, he didn’t resist arrest – the morality of the Indian State said he was a murder accused, and he accepted it.
In other parts of the world, transitional phases are marked by definitive breaks.
In India, we are unable to leave the past behind. We trick ourselves into thinking that structural dichotomies can co-exist: tradition with modernity, the village with the city. As the Indian juggles two things, they keep crashing.
Each time, Nikki Bhati had a fight with her husband, over monetary demands or his drunken misbehaviour, the matter was taken to the local panchayat. Even as she drove imported cars, shot Reels, and tried to run her own business, her personal life was subject to the morality of the panchayat.
When the community mutters under its breath about matters that shouldn’t be its concern, it’s called a ‘taunt’. While Nikki was modern enough to be driving a BMW and being an entrepreneur, she was also bound by tradition: from the arranged marriage she entered into, to the pronouncements of the panchayat.
As per ThePrint report, several panchayats had been called in Nikki Bhati’s case. Each time Vipin came home drunk and assaulted Nikki, she would run back to her parents’ house and refused to return. A panchayat would then be convened. Just two days before the killing, another such panchayat was held. Once again, Vipin’s family assured that no such incident would take place.
Had a clean break been made with tradition, Nikki would have filed for divorce and still been alive, living a new life. Ditto for Radhika Yadav, who would have been a tennis coach somewhere in this vast country, far away from the public morality of her community.
Both Nikki and Radhika were trying to realise their life plans, but in the tug of war that ensued between the family and the individual, the individual was the one who got erased.
The second point has to do with Reels. There’s nothing explicit in them, just Nikki and her sister driving a fancy car, wearing designer shades, sometimes dancing to Punjabi pop. But Reels symbolise something else to the men of the community who used them to taunt the husband (Nikki’s) and the father (Radhika’s). These are not the only Reels these moral custodians are watching, sitting on their haunches.
Across India, women make all kinds of online content; it’s an act of liberation, making some money. The men find it intimidating, in a world-has-lost-its-moral-centre way; they find their own lecherousness reflected in these videos. Unable to control either the world-gone-mad or their own fragile egos and compromised, confused minds, they try and control what’s in front of them: the women in their community.
In a Reel, the confident, fearless city girl is trying to express a private fantasy of being cool. Her marital life is anyway, a matter for community discussion via the panchayat. So why wouldn’t her Reels, by design public, invite the same scrutiny? Enter the taunt.
Also read: Why families keep killing wives, daughters—a silenced woman preserves honour
Carnival of killing
The third point is the ease with which Indians can kill their own. These are not hardened supari killers, remember, but they act like they are. I have no explanation, only a kind of perverse wonder. I’ve heard of putting a stone on one’s heart but here the heart itself becomes a hunter. And it’s the collective heart of the family. The family hunts in packs.
In Nikki’s case, her husband, the mother-in-law, the brother-in-law, and the father-in-law all participated like they were blowing out candles in a birthday party. Someone slaps someone, someone hands over the bottle of paint thinner, someone else lights the matchstick. It’s a carnival of killing.
Not one person stepped back and said: What’s going on is not right. Why are we doing this?
“Meri mumma ke upar kuch dala, fir unko chanta mara, fir lighter se aag laga di’ (They poured something on my mother, slapped her and set her ablaze with a lighter),” Nikki’s son said.
That’s the problem with tradition. Everyone behaves like they are animals in a herd. Outside the herd of family, there is the jhund of community. There is no difference between generations in terms of values, only money. It’s always the women of a new generation who try to forge ahead, only to be pulled back and killed.
Wasted talent
The only redeeming factor here is that while families remain under the spell of deadly tradition, the larger Indian society is perforce changing. It was accepting of Nikki’s (and her sister’s) and Radhika’s ambitions.
The sisters had become celebrated makeup artists in Sirsa, with over 53,000 followers on Instagram.
“For weddings and functions, women queued at their door, forcing them to introduce an appointment system,” wrote ThePrint’s Sagrika Kissu.
Radhika, too, was a state-level tennis player. She had leased a tennis court from an academy, where she would coach young players. Yadav had competed in International Tennis Federation (ITF) junior tournaments, and, after reaching adulthood, international events, travelling to Malaysia and Tunisia.
In India, one is forced to live (and die) in the guttural claustrophobia of a family living under one roof. Tension simmers inside Indian families until it implodes with the ferocity of a pressure cooker.
Radhika Yadav’s mother is supposed to have said that she thought the sound of gunshots (her husband shooting her daughter) was a pressure cooker exploding. In a way, this was true.
Palash Mehrotra (@palashmehrotra) is the author of ‘The Butterfly Generation: A Personal Journey into the Passions and Follies of India’s Technicolour Youth’, and former Contributing Editor, Rolling Stone, India. Views are personal.
(Edited by Ratan Priya)