Public conversation on the Lohagad Fort murder case has gravitated towards the affair, the expense of the wedding, the deleted chats and cleaned forensic evidence. What unsettles us most about the case is the premeditation because of what it indicates. The act of violence was rehearsed. The consequence of that violence was deliberated, considered and found justified.
On 14th June, 2026, four days before he died, Ketan Agarwal was pushed by his fiancée, Siya Goyal, on the trail at Lohagad Fort and caught himself on a bush. Siya explained that she had spotted a snake and, in trying to distance him from it, Ketan had slipped. Ketan believed her. Four days later, on 18th June, 2026, Ketan fell into the same gorge and died. His fiancée had been with him, again.
Investigators allege that Siya and her “lover” Chetan Chaudhury visited the fort together beforehand to plan the act, and prepared answers in case they were questioned. This was not an act of self-defence or a moment of rage. It was careful deliberation, and criminal law not only acknowledges the difference between the two but pays it critical import. A murder committed in the heat of the moment is judged differently from one that was carefully deliberated. Premeditation aggravates guilt and punishment because it negates the reasoning that there was no time to think.
The fact that the accused rehearsed the murder at the Fort and their responses if questioned, and coordinated the deletion of their online footprint, reduced the act of murder to a procedure, a series of steps to be accomplished and precautions to be undertaken in the process. It makes us wonder what it must take for a well-functioning person, capable of reason in every other respect, to convince themselves that it is okay to take another’s life simply because they happen to be in the way of something one wants. We know vengeance and rage skew morality. There was neither here. But did the question of whether Ketan deserved this never bother the two accused?
Hannah Arendt encountered an adjacent question when she sat through Adolf Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem in 1961. Over the course of the trial, she reported on the bureaucrat who was accused of being the mastermind behind the ‘Final Solution on the Jewish Question’; a man who could not articulate his own actions in his own words, who repeated stock phrases which revealed a procedural perspective of the killing of thousands of Jews. Over the course of the trial, Arendt coined the phrase ‘the banality of evil ’, which surmised her understanding of why and how ordinary people could commit horrific acts of cruelty. She argued that Eichmann’s capacity for thought, for imagining another person’s perspective, had been hollowed out by distance and repetition. But while Eichmann’s evil was banal, bureaucratic and ideological, and the murder of Ketan Agarwal is intimate and personal, both contain a procedural element which eliminates moral questions.
This is what scares and unsettles us all about incidents like these. A skewed moral compass is unidentifiable in everyday life. It is unidentifiable until something irrevocable happens. We’d like to be able to distinguish ourselves from people who commit such terrible acts. But we cannot do so based on an easily identifiable metric. A skewed moral compass does not show itself like a screaming feature.
This incident is also not the first of its kind. A second concern is not raised by this incident alone but by the pattern of crime emerging within and around marriages. While the idea of selecting a partner for oneself has been on the rise in India, the concept of arranged marriage remains popular. In her study on the marriage attitudes of the Indian middle class: ‘Marriage is a Complete Gamble’, Megan N. Reed found evidence of an unsaid belief among the Indian middle class. Arranged marriage is the ‘safest’ option because parental support for the marriage served as a form of insurance against later marital issues, while self-selection of one’s marriage partner was viewed as coming with steep costs (like stigma). However, cases like these contradict the belief that arranged marriages are safe.
Arranged marriage has been considered daunting because it is a gamble of emotional compatibility. But the pattern of crime within and around marriages, both arranged and self-selected, has made marriage itself a daunting prospect. It is not just a gamble of emotional compatibility but a gamble of one’s life. But, unlike other gambling tables where one exercises their freedom and choice to sit at and deal, this is one where every individual, irrespective of sex (or gender), is coerced by society to sit at. (Women are coerced to leave this table, too, once they have passed a certain age.)
The horror of this case and its most disquieting aspect is our collective realisation underlying the details of this case. The very trust that forms the architecture of a marriage was exploited and taken advantage of with fatal consequences. While trust in any relationship can be exploited with fatal consequences, in the case of arranged marriage it is particularly unsettling because the alternative of not trusting one’s future spouse is out of the question.
It is easy and comfortable to dismiss an unsettling truth as a one-off, an exception. But this is not a never-before-heard story, and to prevent the recurrence of a calculated exploitation of trust within marriages, we need to re-examine the rules, underlying expectations and stigmas defining marriages. The consequences of ignoring it are not just fatal for individuals in a marriage but for the institution of marriage itself.
References:
- Pune realtor murder | Police recreate crime scene with accused Siya Goyal at Lohagad fort
- Marriage in modern India: “The middle-class ideal of an Indian marriage has not changed”
- Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil; Hannah Arendt