A woman in Haryana’s Panipat confessed to killing four children — three nieces and her own 3-year-old son. Poonam allegedly attacked the girls out of envy for their “beauty”. The case is almost too grotesque to comprehend, and the brutality stands on its own. But the alleged motive forces us to confront an uncomfortable truth: This troubled mindset did not emerge from a vacuum. It grew in a culture that trains women to measure their worth through beauty, pits them against each other, and leaves their emotional lives unacknowledged until something breaks.
India’s obsession with appearance is not just an urban curse manufactured by Instagram and skin-lightening cream ads. The reality is far older and far more widespread. From small villages to metros, beauty is social capital. A girl’s complexion is family business. Marriage prospects become a running scoreboard. Women across class and caste learn very early that their value is not inherent but conditional, assessed constantly, sometimes brutally, by relatives, friends, partners, and even strangers.
These standards are not just imposed by men. Women inherit them, enforce them, and pass them on because patriarchy rewards conformity. Mothers warn daughters to “stay out of the sun”. Aunts examine skin tone at weddings. Beauty becomes a generational project, a household duty, and in many cases the only arena where women can assert agency in lives otherwise shaped by others.
For women with little economic independence or emotional stability, beauty becomes the single remaining currency — the only domain where they can compete, win, or feel seen. And when society bases a woman’s worth almost entirely on appearance, insecurity becomes a predictable outcome. Envy, comparison, and the fear of being overshadowed are built into the architecture of gender in India.
The jealousy of children, though rare and extreme, grows from the same soil.
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Fractures and explosions
A woman whose identity rests solely on being desirable can experience another girl’s attractiveness, even a child’s, as a threat. At home, this can be sharpened by the emotional deprivation many women face after childbirth. Men who show more tenderness to their children than to their wives do not create violence, but they do create fault lines. A woman already exhausted, unsupported, or psychologically vulnerable can begin to see a child receiving affection she herself has been denied. The resentment is toxic. In rare cases, like that of Poonam in Panipat, it turns violent.
This reasoning does not justify the crime but explains the terrain that makes such warped thinking possible. We cannot discuss an act this monstrous without examining the social logic it reflects. Poonam’s insecurities did not spring from nowhere. They mirror the messages millions of Indian girls receive every day: that their worth is fragile, their desirability is a resource, and their competition is other women.
At the same time, we remain a society that romanticises mothers as selfless saints while refusing to acknowledge their mental health. Postpartum depression, loneliness, marital neglect, and emotional abuse are framed as “phases”, “hormones”, or “a woman’s duty”. Rural women have almost no access to psychological care. Urban women access care only after the crisis becomes unmanageable. The emotional turbulence of women is treated as background noise. They are called “difficult” or “ill-mannered”.
The result? Women break quietly, invisibly. Most never hurt anyone. Some hurt only themselves. A minuscule few, like Poonam, explode destructively. But the silence that precedes such explosions is familiar across India.
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‘Mirror, Mirror’ for India
Patriarchy makes beauty the measure. Family makes beauty the pressure. Society makes beauty the competition. Markets make beauty the aspiration. Then we act shocked when insecurity metastasises into pathological envy.
We created a world where women are not allowed to change as they age. Where a family invests more in a girl’s appearance than in her autonomy. Where they are “allowed” to work but also have to “manage” housework. Where she is allowed to be a mother but not allowed to need care. And of course, taught to compete with the closest women in their lives over a prize that patriarchy invented.
Until we loosen the grip of beauty as destiny, until women gain value beyond their appearance, until mental health becomes accessible and stigma-free, we will continue to be blindsided by horrors rooted in insecurities we ourselves nurture.
India is horrified by Poonam’s actions. But it should also do what it rarely does — examine the mirror it keeps holding up to its women.
Views are personal.