Backstory: Framing a Monstrous Crime of Passion Through the Lens of ‘Love Jihad’

The murder and dismemberment of 26-year-old Shraddha Walker is yet another monstrous crime perpetrated against women that Delhi has had to witness in recent times. Much like the gang rape and eventual death of Jyoti Singh (‘Nirbhaya’) a decade ago, it has – since the latest story broke on November 12 – quickly assumed the proportions of a media spectacle.

A livestreaming, if you will, of every little shard drawn from police sources, friends and family members, as well as reporters on the ground. On television, the case is eternally unspooling, cycle by repetitious cycle.

This continuous reiteration of known information (sometimes with edits: 35 pieces, no, 16), does in no way dissuade the binge watchers who are lured into the narrative through successive “breaking news” invitations that use adjective-heavy kickers – “More gory details emerge”; “Blood-curdling revelations”; “Spine-chilling details” – to keep the story going.

The Nirbhaya coverage saw a new level of graphic detail being made public in terms of the mutilation done to the female body. We had, at that juncture, shuddered to read and hear those details of entrails and rod which would earlier have been edited out, keeping human sensitivities in mind. But, as I had observed in a book that I written on the mediatisation of India, “competition between peers fuelled a tidal wave of information that washed away such compliances.

The explicit reportage on the condition of the woman’s body based on eye-witness accounts also contributed towards the creation of an atavistic desire for retribution that marked the crowd response”. Today, that dam has long since broken. In the Shraddha Walker murder, every detail, including the minutiae of the ways in which the killer disposed of the body, is offered up without a thought.

There are crucial reasons why editorial reticence on publishing violent or graphic material is advised. It leads to a coarsening of the public discourse; an undermining of people’s capacity to be empathetic; a normalisation of criminal pathologies. The potential impact on the impressionable minds of children is also enormous.

Resulting anxieties and traumas are rarely registered, even though they have a long afterlife with potentially severely damaging consequences for society, including the encouragement of psychopathic behaviour and copycat attacks. (I am happy to report that the editors of The Wire had weighed in on the subject long before the present case and have tried to set a norm for themselves.

For instance, when it comes to publishing violent or graphic images of death, The Wire’s standard is to refrain from publishing them. If a red-flagged image is imperative to a story, then the editors discuss the best way to handle it – through trigger warnings, and the like.) The most ominous aspect of the Shraddha Walker news story was the manner it was framed as a ‘love jihad’, right from the point when the story broke on Saturday,

November 12, and the name of the killer was revealed as ‘Aftab Poonawala’. This fed into the familiar, pre-fabricated template, assiduously created and replicated by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and the Hindutva right wing; of Muslim men as sexual predators intent upon capturing Hindu women for purposes of conversion. Initially, doubts were raised on whether the man was indeed a Muslim since ‘Poonawala’ is a common Parsi name as well.

But soon, Hindutva trolls and media outfits were quoting Walker’s father to confirm his Muslim identity and many outlets took to adding his father’s name, ‘Amin’, to his own, as clinching evidence. Although the nature of this relationship, judging from the few details floating around which include the killer’s social media posts, does not conform to the ‘love jihad’ angle, attempts were constantly made to bring in that element.

One of the questions put to Rajat Shukla, a “friend of Shraddha”, was whether Aftab was religious. He couldn’t answer it, but was happy to go along with the ‘love jihad’ angle. Hindutva proselytisers like Kapil Mishra, with his humongous 1.3 million followers on Twitter, were among the first off the block. This is a rough translation of the tweet in Hindi he put out:

“Bollywood, media, ads that promote false constructs like brotherhood, politics that is soaked in the blood of daughters, rich and upper middle classes drinking the poison of fake secularism, the sold police and the jihadi education model. Don’t blame daughters for murders like Shraddha.

” This egged Tapan Das to immediately tweet (rough translation): “The biggest weakness is that we have not been able to keep our siste