Why didn’t she just say no?

The murder of Ketan Agarwal allegedly by his fiancé raises the question of why we don’t bring up our daughters to just say no. Maybe she didn’t want to ‘shame’ her parents by running off with a man from another caste instead of the one they had picked for her—according to what police say she told them.Siya told the police she was unhappy about her impending arranged marriage with Ketan AgarwalMaybe she just lacked the courage of her convictions.Maybe her moral compass is so broken that she doesn’t see a difference between society’s disapproval and snuffing out a life.Or maybe it’s something more basic: We don’t teach our daughters to say no.From the time they are born, we teach them to adjust. To place family before self. To uphold family honour through compliance with the patriarch. To suppress individual desire in the larger interest of the family.Fear and shame: Ketan Agarwal, Siya Goyal and Chetan ChaudharySo much is not yet known about the murder of 25-year-old Ketan Agarwal, a Pune-based realtor. The plan was allegedly hatched and executed by his 20-year-old fiancé Siya Goyal and the man she is said to have been in a relationship with, 22-year-old Chetan Chaudhary. Police investigation into what was initially assumed to be an accidental fall during a trek at Lohagad Fort is still ongoing.Ketan and Siya had met through a match arranged by their parents and were set for a destination wedding in November with a reported budget of ₹17 crore, two private planes to fly in guests, and a pre-wedding shoot in Bali.Only one inconvenient fact: The bride was reluctant.The uncomfortable truth is that for millions of young women, saying “no” to an arranged marriage is not a simple personal choice. Marriage in India is less about two individuals than about an alliance between families, castes and communities.This by no means justifies murder. Every day, young Indians negotiate family expectations, caste boundaries and parental pressure without resorting to crime. If the police version is borne out in court, and Siya was indeed involved with another man, Chetan Chaudhary with whom she hatched a plot to kill Ketan, they must bear the full consequence of the law.But refusing to examine the social world in which the alleged crime occurred would leave us with a sensational murder story and no understanding of what it might reveal about marriage, autonomy and the price of saying “no.”What we don’t talk aboutThe unusually high level of interest in the death of Ketan Agarwal is partly a result of who he was—wealthy, connected, young—but largely due to the fact that the main accused is his fiancé.ViolenceIntimate partner violence is not an aberration but a routine crime in India, accounting for 27% of all crimes against women across India recorded in 2024, according to the National Crime Records Bureau.These are reported cases. Most routine domestic violence is never reported and is instead treated as part of everyday married life by the one in four women who endure it.Some violence, marital rape, for instance, is not even recognised as a crime with solicitor general Tushar Mehta, representing the government’s point of view, telling the court that its criminalisation could destabilise the institution of marriage.On Saturday as I filed this column, I could spot as many as three stories, all from Delhi, on page 5 of the Hindustan Times. The first was the murder of a 23-year-old pregnant woman allegedly by her husband, a graphic designer at a Delhi-based firm, because he suspected she was having an extra-marital affair. In the second, a 24-year-old woman was found dead at her in-laws’ house with ligature marks on her neck. Police have arrested the husband and father-in-law in what is suspected to be a dowry killing with the law presuming dowry death when a woman dies under suspicious circumstances within seven years of marriage. And in the third, a 30-year-old woman was shot dead by her husband after she accused him of infidelity.While all three killings merited some media coverage, none come close to the sort of wall-to-wall coverage of Ketan Agarwal’s death. NCRB data tells us 17 women are killed a day over dowry. How many of their families receive a personal assurance of justice from Maharashtra chief minister Devendra Fadnavis, as Ketan’s family did?Flipping the scriptSonam is accused of killing her husband Raja Raghuvanshi so that she could be with her loverNo murder can ever be justified. But when the script is flipped and a woman emerges as the accused rather than occupying her usual place as a victim, there is shock and horror and the coverage becomes disproportionate. Embedded in this breathless reporting is a cautionary tale of women “getting out of hand” as it was in the coverage of the honeymoon murder of Raja Raghuvanshi allegedly by his newly wed wife. In the context of Ketan Agarwal, one editorial asked, “What do these exceptional crimes reveal about the changing sociology of marriage in contemporary India?”But the questions to ask after the death of Ketan Agarwal is not “why didn’t she say no?” because we already know the answer is more complicated than that. The larger questions are about agency, consent and the pressure to marry the ‘right’ sort of man picked by the family. Why should the autonomy of adult daughters scare parents and society so much that over a dozen states have laws that virtually ban interfaith marriage? How do honour killings for marrying outside caste persist in a modern nation?Over 95% of all marriages continue to be arranged by families, finds the India Human Development Survey. In 40% of these marriages, the survey of 41,000 households found, women had absolutely no say. Nearly 65% of couples met for the first time on their wedding day.[I wrote earlier on Indians’ deep fear of ‘love marriages’ here.]Nothing, absolutely nothing, excuses murder. But if there is a lesson to be learned it is this: If the police’s case is ultimately proved in court what kind of society leads a young, educated woman to believe that murder is the easier option than walking away from a marriage that her parents had planned for her?Namita Bhandare writes on gender and other social issues and has 35-plus years of experience in journalism. She has edited books and features in a documentary on sexual violence. She tweets as @namitabhandareRead More