There is an eerie word in English called ‘paramour.’ It means lover, but when I was a kid, Indian newspapers used to invoke it only when a person and their ‘paramour’ killed the spouse. I don’t know why Indian media stopped using the word, even though murders involving paramours have not ceased. A lot of young English-speaking Indians may not know the word at all, like 20-year-old Siya Goyal who, the police say, admitted that she conspired with her paramour to kill her fiancé.
We don’t know the facts of the case yet, but when I first got news of it, my first reaction was why the deed wasn’t done after marriage, which is when these things usually happen. He seemed wealthier than she was, after all.
But then it occurred to me that my reaction was shaped by our long heritage of finding motives, and by the very idea that there is a rational motive behind a murder. In fact, motive is one of the most influential legal requirements in a murder trial.
So, we are told that Siya Goyal and Chetan Chaudhary, who is 22, were in love, whatever love is. But Siya’s parents arranged for her to marry Ketan Agarwal, a 26-year-old from a wealthy family. Siya did not want to marry him but didn’t have the heart to revolt against her parents. So, the story goes, she chose murder; she led Ketan to the edge of a cliff as Chetan was waiting; she sat down, which was a signal for Chetan to push Ketan, who fell some 400 feet to his death.
All this for love, we’re told. Love that would apparently go to pieces the moment her story of an accidental fall began to unravel. In police custody, she and Chetan allegedly started accusing each other of being the primary conspirator.
The murder has made Indians lament arranged marriage and parental dictatorship. These are real problems, but it is naive to consider them motives for murder.
Motives are generally a misleading analysis of the reason behind an extraordinary human action, like murder. If a woman does not want to marry a man, all she would have to do after their engagement is behave in an unpleasant fashion. Any wealthy man would cancel a living hell. That she would instead want to kill him makes no sense.
Motives are a useless way to understand a rare act. They are only triggers. Something else is usually going on.
Homicide is often a mental health issue. If two people think they must kill a young man to prevent a marriage, then they are not thinking straight. Their motive is not really saving a woman from an unwanted marriage, for that is easier, but murder.
When I was a kid, my melodramatic mother would exclaim, “The motive-hunting of motiveless malignity.” It is borrowed from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s analysis of Shakespeare’s Othello. Iago claimed he had many reasons to destroy Othello. These would, today, be called ‘motives.’ But Coleridge points out Iago really had no motive. Evil needs no motive, it only finds an excuse. And evil is, at its very core, a mental disease.
The reason why this is considered a dangerous view in the modern justice system is that someone whose action springs from disease has to be condoned. This leads to an absurd thing we do, which is to make a psychopath undergo tests by ‘experts’ to determine his mental soundness when the very act of slaughter is proof that he is not.
And, I do not believe just because evil is a mental disease, it should be condoned. Society concocts a false analysis of mental health just to punish dangerous people.
There is another violent form of mental illness, which is heart-breaking and the world misunderstands through convenient motives—suicide. Remember farmer suicides? Apparently they killed themselves because of debt and capitalism.You don’t hear much about them now. What happened? Did Indian farmers resolve their debts? You will hear about “farmer suicides” again when it is convenient for activists.
More recently, you may have heard that booth level officers were dying by suicide because of ‘stress.’ Are they fine now? In Delhi, the Cockroach Janata Party too has been using student suicides to make their point, claiming they were traumatized by the government’s incompetence in conducting NEET.
Activists seem to love suicides, but since ‘farmer’ and ‘student’ are vague terms that cover huge numbers in India, there is no convincing proof that suicide rates among farmers and students are higher than the national rate. Even if the rates do appear to differ, they don’t necessarily endorse the view that a single factor made a person die by suicide.
Extraordinary human actions spring from complex mental states. Imagine a society in which parents do not control marriage. Would Siya or Chetan be different?
More people are capable of murder than there are murders, but I don’t believe the difference is huge. Those who do such things always have ‘motives.’ This case is not representative of how normal people act in such a situation, but these situations do exist. I question only the significance of motives, not the underlying phenomena.
The richer the parents, the more they can control their children. The young, for all their yapping about rebellion, usually choose financial security over freedom. But there’s a deeper issue. Unhappiness on the path to marriage.
Its traumas are known, but it is preceded by less known miseries. I’ve known people who were miserable before marrying, as many might be today. They don’t have the courage to break up, or something an astrologer said bothers them. The whole world is in the pursuit of happiness, yet a large number have no talent for it.
The author is a journalist, novelist and screenwriter. His latest book is ‘Why the Poor Don’t Kill Us.