New crime epidemic: Jilted lover syndrome

NEW DELHI: Over the past fortnight, Delhi has witnessed a series of brutal killings caused by unrequited love that has surprised the cops and shocked the city. But consultant psychiatrists as well as sociologists feel that those involved in these crimes were emotionally too ill-equipped to negotiate refusal and at its core, the issue wasn’t love but control.
The crime spots of the “jilted lover syndrome” are peppered over different parts of the city.But what’s common to them is that none of them are middle-class dwellings of babus and professionals. A majority of those involved in these killings are relatively well-off. Rajveer, one of the killers, is a transporter. His brother had recently bought a piece of land worth Rs 97 lakh. Along with a friend, he went on a killing spree in Swaroop Nagar, a faceless colony in the city’s northwest fringe, because a public school teacher refused his entreaties to marry him.
Another killer Ravi first killed his ‘sister-in-law/girlfriend’ and her landlady in Bindapur in Delhi’s southwest and drove to Ghaziabad in a Santro to kill her father and sister before turning the gun on himself. A 16-year-old minor, who was attracted to a 24-year-old mother of three and his tenant’s wife, and ended up killing the woman’s four-year-old boy in spite. His father owned a three-storey house in Nabi Karim in central Delhi.
“Those involved in such crimes aren’t really looking for a relationship. For them, it is about procuring affection on your own terms and conditions. When that doesn’t happen, their world begins to crack. Anger erupts. And in such a volatile situation, availability of firearms can lead to disaster,” says consultant psychiatrist Avdesh Sharma. As another consultant psychiatrist Jitender Nagpal puts it, such killings are an outcome of a lot of “accumulated stresses.”
Even the killing of cardiologist Sanjiv Dhawan by a former army jawan in Rajinder Nagar on Wednesday is being attributed to the latter being attracted to and spurned by the maid who worked for the doctor. These killers had easy money but, sociologist Yogendra Singh says, they were probably not equipped to handle man-woman relationship in a modern sense even though they tried to participate or imitate it in convoluted forms.
Sharma talks about the rise of land and property prices on the outskirts of the city. “Suddenly some people have come into a lot of money. But money also brings a sense of power and desire to be upwardly mobile and modern. Love, as they understand it, is part of this package for these people,” he says.
Singh makes the same point in a different way. He says there’s a fault-line between new issues of gender freedom on the one hand and the persistence of old prejudices and established conservative ideologies on the other.
“In several parts of Delhi, there are families with peasant background with memories of long tradition of rebellious behaviour against authority and law. In their perception, the use of violence is not necessarily an illegitimate behaviour. Rather, it is a throwback to their past. There’s a tendency to settle a dispute on one’s own account rather than go to a court,” he says.
Singh believes that the intensity of exposure to outside culture through films, television and internet is more than ever before. “For such people this exposure of multiple contradictory sensations and experiences reflects in their understanding of gender relationship,” he says.
But it isn’t just paradoxical influences adding to the volatile mix. Easy availability of guns and ammunition is a major part of the problem. Rajveer used his contacts in the Sanjay Gandhi Transport authority and a local barber to get two 7.65mm pistols and a country-made revolver along with over 40 rounds of ammunition. Ravi also carried an automatic pistol as well as a country-made pistol. Dhavan’s killer too possessed a double barrel gun bought for Rs 32,000.
A senior officer in Delhi Crime Branch says that jilted lovers are dangerous and unpredictable because sometimes the victim does not even know that she might be targeted. “A couple of years ago, Radhika Tanwar had told her stalker not to follow her. In return, she was murdered on one of the busiest overbridges in Dhaula Kuan. In the past such people reacted within minutes of rejection but now the plots are more sinister and the murders planned over days,” said an officer who has investigated three such murders in north and south Delhi.
DCP (crime) Sanjay Jain admits that that the sudden spurt in such crimes has the police worried.
“It is not every day that a man travels 70 km between Delhi and Ghaziabad to kill five persons or two men killing six members, including one’s own family, in the name of an affair gone wrong. The aspiration levels have changed and people are losing their ability to rationalise,” he said.