Deepak Bhardwaj murder and the dangerous business of marriage

“What a pity”, Armand-Emmanuel du Plessis, the estimable Duc de Richelieu, is rumoured to have said on hearing of the death of his best friend’s extremely old and extremely rich widow. “She would have been a fine catch the day before”. For the past several days, New Delhi residents have been transfixed by the unfolding investigation into the murder of property tycoon Deepak Bharadwaj—the richest candidate to contest the 2009 Lok Sabha elections, with an admitted worth of Rs 600 crore. It is a riveting, filmy tale that so far involves a mystery godman , professional hit-men and just a hint of political intrigue. It is the fact that Bharadwaj’s estranged wife has been questioned , though, that is getting the most attention—and has nervous husbands wondering if their loved ones secretly share Richelieu’s sentiments. It is more than possible, given the Delhi Police’s less-than-luminous record, that some or all of the suspects have nothing to do with the case—and, even if they do, will be set free after trial for want of evidence. The prospect that Bharadwaj’s wife might have been involved in his murder, though, has underlined something all crime reporters know—that marriage, wonderful and fulfilling as it might be, is also a dangerous business. Lunatics, political extremists and terrorists put together kill a lot less, crime statistics show, than people in love - whether with each other or with money. [caption id=“attachment_684728” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] Deepak Bhardwaj while campaigning for the 2009 Lok Sabha polls: IBN-Live[/caption] For the most part, women seem to kill because they’re pushed to the edge. There is the famous case of Kiranjit Ahluwalia , a resident of Punjab’s Chakkalal village who was married off to Londoner Deepak Ahluwalia at the age of 23.  She suffered physical violence and marital rape, but found no support from her family. In the spring of 1989, after suffering an attack which involved a hot iron rod, she finally cracked.  Later that night, Ahluwalia set fire to his bed with petrol from her garage, and ran into the garden with her three year old son. She was convicted of murder, but a court later reduced the sentence to manslaughter. There have been similar cases in India, too.  In December, 2010, Coimbatore resident Selvi Ramesh was alleged to have strangled her husband , an alcoholic who frequently beat her and the children. In India, stories like these are rare: women often get mad, but rarely get even. In 1991—more years ago than I care to remember, and so long ago there’s barely a reference to it online —more than 200 people died in the Delhi slum neighbourhood of Jehangirpuri, after drinking copious amounts of an ayurvedic medicine which contained generous quantities of alcohol.  I was dispatched to find a grieving widow—and drew a blank.  “I’m delighted he’s dead”, one woman happily told me of her beloved husband, “all he’d do is drink, take my money and beat me up”. The second genre of husband-killer is closer to the Delhi murder case—the Black Widow**.**  Laura Christy’s case sparked off an epidemic of newspaper reports in the 1920s on Black Widows—women who marry and murder husbands in succession for financial gain.  In 1927, Christy—a matronly figure with librarian glasses who resembled no femme fatale ever imagined by film producers—confessed she’d poisoned her seventh husband, a pottery worker named John Ebert, as well as her eighth, the missionary William Christy. The mysterious death of her earlier six husbands—and the even more mysterious question of why all these men were queuing up to marry her—is not explained in the historical record. Then there is the story of Jill Coit, who was married 11 times to nine different men —four of whom ended up dead. In 1993, after Coit’s suspicious husband Gerald Boggs hired a private investigator to spy on her, he was found beaten and shot to death. Coit was sent to jail, but that didn’t end her serial marrying habit. In 1998, prison authorities found she had posed advertisements online, seeking an immigrant husband willing to marry her in order to obtain US citizenship. “I just don’t seem able to make a marriage work”, she admitted to an interviewer . “But before this, you could ask any of my husbands, and they would tell you that I was an excellent wife”. Black Widow cases have very occasionally clawed their way on to Indian newspaper pages—among them, the story Bindu Gupta, who was accused of murdering her husband for his property in 2007.  The courts, in her, took a dim view of the evidence and acquitted Gupta . In India, the term Black Widow is used to describe a faction of the Dima Halim Daogah terrorist group in Assam, evidence that the practice hasn’t caught on here. Yet. Husband-murder also has a third genre—the outright bizarre. In 2011, German lawyer Tim Schmidt told a court his girlfriend had tried to smother him to death during a sex game, using her 38DD-size breasts. Donna Lange, a Washington resident, is alleged to have actually succeeded in using her breasts as a murder weapon in the course of drunken bust-up with her boyfriend. Number one in the bizarre stakes, though, has to be the infamous vagina murder plot —where a still-unidentified man told authorities his wife coated her private parts with cyanide, and then invited him to give her oral sex. I’m tempted to give at least some credence to these improbable stories, simply because I find it hard to believe anyone would fabricate a story as improbable as this just to get even with their significant others. But then guys, like girls, lie all the time—so who knows? The Unknown History of Misandry blog has a fabulous collection of stories, not all admittedly reliable, on women serial killers and psychopaths. Indian women don’t seem to do bizarre—or much crime at all, the figures suggest. Though men made up the overwhelming majority of murder victims—25,244 of 34,305—their killers were mostly other men.  The National Crime Records Bureau’s  prison population statistics show that, at the end of 2011, just 12 of 477 convicts on death row are women.  There are only 2,736 women serving life terms, against 68,935 men. Indeed, Indian women seem remarkably law-abiding. The NCRB’s prison population report for 2011 says women account for just 4,959 of 123,633 convicts in the country, and 10,934 of 241,200 under-trail prisoners. So here it is: the Bad Indian Girl barely exists. Like everywhere else in the world, lust and loot are the two overwhelming drivers of murders. In 2011, property disputes were the largest single identified cause of murders—2,637 out of a total of 34,305, with over 20,000 so far unknown.  “Love affairs and sexual causes”, as the NCRB describes it, came in a close second, at 2,668. Personal gain—which I assume refers to money—claimed 1,718 lives, and dowry 1,323. The figures for terrorism were 419, politics 149, communalism 35, and casteism 21. For some mysterious reason, legally-sane people spent a lot of time killing purported witches; 239 were butchered. Lunatics, however, only killed 29 people. “Women commit murder”, wrote the mystery writer Bellow Lowndes , in the Billings Gazette of April 2, 1933, “because they love, because they hate, because they fear, because they want money”. The same reasons, in other words, as men.