Nisha Parveen and Ketan Agarwal: How sexism and xenophobia determine whose death matters

The Ketan Agarwal murder mystery has absolutely dominated national headlines, prime-time television, and social media feeds. So much so that Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis met with Ketan's father and agreed to fast-track the case, appointing renowned advocate Ujjwal Nikam as the special public prosecutor. It had all the elements of a perfect drama- a scenic 400 ft gorge, a love triangle and a female perpetrator, to direct collective outrage.

Roughly 1300 kilometres north, in a cramped tenement in Delhi's Madanpur Khadar, Nisha Parveen, a 19-year-old pregnant woman, was found dead under suspicious and violent circumstances. Nisha left her home two years earlier to marry a Hindu man named Ankit. What followed, they say, was not a life but an ordeal: repeated beatings, isolation, violence that left marks her relatives would later describe with a particular kind of grief, the kind that comes from having warned someone and being unable to stop what happened anyway. Her family learned about her death from a friend of her brother. When the family reached her, the scene was brutal, and the description from her family seemed like a scene from a German neo noir film. They found her face severely clawed and swollen, she was bleeding from her ears and mouth, both hands were broken, and her pregnant stomach was bruised with marks of stomping. The family claimed that she was gang raped.

There was no mainstream media coverage, no social media hashtags, no Chief Minister appointing special advocates; in fact, the family claimed that the police did not register an FIR until there was a protest from the family and local residents outside the Police Station, with her dead body. The key perpetrator, Ankit, has been arrested, but others are absconding.

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Sexism, xenophobia and institutional neglect

Ketan Agarwal, a 26-year-old upper-caste Hindu male from a wealthy real estate family, died when he was allegedly pushed off a fort by his fiancée and her lover. Whereas Nisha Parveen, a 19-year-old pregnant Muslim female, died after sustained alleged abuse by her husband and his associates. Her injuries suggest prolonged violence. By any measure of severity and vulnerability of the victim, number of accused, degree of alleged violence, institutional failure, the Delhi case is the graver crime.

The systemic isolation of Nisha Parveen's murder and the meticulous speed of solving Ketan Agrwal's murder mystery is a moral indictment of how society and state machinery value human lives based on their social situation. The latter is domestic violence, which kills women in this country every day. The NCRB data suggests that at least 4,45,256 cases of crime against women are registered annually, among them over 31 per cent by family and relatives. The sheer volume should produce outrage, but it has induced numbness. The Indian audience has been increasingly desensitised to male perpetrators and grown apathetic to female victims. This moral apathy and desensitisation is nothing but sexism and internalised misogyny. The first one has an exception, a female killer, which fascinates the imagination of the Indian audience. It has an initial psychological shock value; it shatters the traditional archetype of the “ideal, passive Indian woman”, and then the public and media reaction frequently crosses into blatant sexism and misogyny, with hyper-scrutiny of morality, femme fatale tropes, and demand medieval-style punishment like “throw her off the cliff.”

Further, the religious identity of Nisha Parveen and her husband, Ankit, shuts down coverage from all directions. While official reports do not hint at it, local claims alleged that Ankit had affiliated himself with right-wing groups like the Bajrang Dal after the marriage. He had increasingly grown hostile and used to make anti muslim rant towards Muslims using derogatory language like “mullah” in his locality. The mainstream media has long peddled the narrative of Muslim men as predators and Hindu women as victims. This runs counter to the curated, majoritarian ideological script and dominant political ideoscapes. On the other hand, independent media, conditioned against the weaponisation of interfaith violence, completely avoids it. The majoritarian upper caste Hindu and their exercise of the cultural project of purity creates an anxiety of incompleteness as long as the minority exists within the border. This erases the state of urgency when law enforcement sees violence against an individual who is at the intersection of multiple marginalised identities of religion, gender and class. It does not see them as citizens but as an anomaly. The fact that Nisha's family had to literally place her dead body on the highway outside the Kalindi Kunj police station to force the authorities to file an FIR shows that a minority woman’s life has been dehumanised, it is not an aberration, rather a patten. Whether it was the night cremation of a Dalit woman without her family's consent in Hathras or garlanding the perpetrators of Bilkis Bano or the institutional silence around Nisha Parveen, the thread is consistent: when gender, caste, and religion converge in a single victim, the institutional apparatus does not just fail, it disappears them. This is xenophobia and the othering of communities, not because they came from outside, but because a dominant political movement has decided they should be made to feel that way.