Few crimes have captured the national imagination quite as compellingly as the murder of 25-year-old Neeraj Grover in May 2008. Bombay police say that the TV executive was lying naked in 27-year-old Kannada starlet Maria Susairaj’s bedroom when her fiance, Emile Jerome Matthew, walked in and stabbed Grover to death. Maria and Emile are then said to have hacked the corpse into approximately 300 pieces before putting the chopped limbs on fire. 
This outline makes the case sound like fodder for a Ram Gopal Verma potboiler.
The calmness with which Maria and Emile had conducted themselves afterwards was startling.
Naval lieutenant Jerome Mathew told investigators that the reason he had murdered media executive Neeraj Grover was because he had found him nude in his girlfriend’s Malad home. Mathew and his girlfriend, Kannada actress Maria Susairaj, have been arrested for killing Grover and disposing of the body in the jungles of Manor after stuffing the chopped body parts into three bags.
Mathew said that when he had phoned Susairaj on May 6, she told him that Grover was helping her move into her new apartment at Dheeraj Solitaire building and would leave in a few hours. But when Mathew flew into Mumbai the next morning, he was shocked when Susairaj opened the door in a skimpy outfit. Mathew walked straight into her bedroom and found Grover in the nude.
Mathew was consumed with jealousy and rage as he realised what was happening behind his back. He headed straight to the kitchen and returned with a knife. The two men had a scuffle and Mathew eventually overpowered Grover, stabbing him several times.
Maria Monica Susairaj, had told him that she had not slept with Grover willingly. The couple then had consensual sex twice in the same flat, even as the body lay in a pool of blood, refuting claims that Mathew had raped her after the murder.
Mathew had never seen nor spoken to Grover before that fatal run in.
Matthew was taught techniques of man-to-man combat and how to use a dagger as part of his naval training. He put his skills to use to overpower Grover.
Susairaj used her credit card to shop for a knife and three bags from a local mall, since she had run out of cash. Matthew then used this new knife to chop Grover’s body to pieces and stuff it into the three bags.
Grover had a stable career and a good life. There seemed a low probability of his going missing just like that,’’ Maria said. Grover’s parents, who came down from UP to look for their missing son, met Maria on May 9. Barely three days later, Susairaj herself came to meet Maria with her brother and three of Grover’s friends.
She requested the police to look into the case personally. But the police told her upfront that she was my ‘suspect number 1’. She was taken aback at that time. But after her arrest, she admitted to her role in the crime.
Maria added that Mathew had a good academic background—he had scored 90% marks in his SSC and HSC. He had also won a gold medal in swimming at the university level. He has been stripped of his medals and uniform by the navy.
Maria is described by her friends as “wilful, ambitious, sexually manipulative, and ultimately a figure of tragedy”.
The value attached to money and fame, and the sense of entitlement many of the young feel without necessarily the talent, all this together becomes a lethal combination.
Maria Susairaj still continues to make headlines. In May this year, TV audiences were shocked to hear she had undergone treatment for her acne. Maria’s continuing ability to make news is perhaps best explained by the fact that murder of Neeraj has proved an apt reflection of changing morals in fast-changing times. We are increasingly living in a let-it-all-hang-out culture…even violence is a form of exhibitionism.
In May this year, the police in Delhi came upon one of their nastier crime scenes. They found the blood-soaked body of middle-aged Kiran Kapoor. She had been viciously stabbed to death in her own bedroom. Kiran’s 26-year-old daughter, Sakshi, the key witness, told them two strangers were responsible for her mother’s gruesome death. The profile of the killers drawn up by the police based on Sakshi’s evidence was believable—they seemed to be seasoned criminals, they showed their victim no mercy, and they were perhaps from the ‘rougher’ side of society. As the investigation proceeded, however, the picture changed dramatically. Not only were the culprits young first-timers, they were resolutely middle-class, and the prime accused was none other than the prime witness, Sakshi.
Under questioning, Sakshi’s lover, 20-year-old Sunny Batra, broke down and confessed that the broken liquor bottle found at the crime scene was one he had brought to share with Sakshi. Kiran, who had come home early from her evening kirtan, caught the two in what the police described in its time-honoured way as a “compromising position”. Panic soon gave way to extreme violence. Sunny silenced Kiran with an iron-press, and Sakshi stabbed her 55-year-old mother 24 times over with kitchen knives.
Worryingly, Sakshi’s social profile resembles that of a number of other killers in the country.
In April, Abhishek Patil, 21, the son of a renowned Kolhapur doctor, killed his grandmother with a pestle. The apparent cause of Patil’s rage was his inability to access pornography on the Internet after the 67-year-old Shantabai moved into his room.
And in August, Tamil Nadu police arrested eight persons in connection with the kidnapping and murder of a 73-year-old doctor from Dindigul, Dr Bhaskar.
Most recently, Pushpam Sinha, a PhD scholar in Delhi, was accused of killing and burning the body of 17-year-old Manipuri teenager after she refused to respond to his persistent sexual overtures. Goodbye Yuppies, Hello Yukkies: young, urban Indians ready to kill, kidnap, rape, sodomise and steal.
Of all persons arrested on charges of murder in Delhi from January to August this year, 61 per cent were below the age of 25; all the 33 individuals accused of kidnapping for ransom were first-timers, and most belonged to the 20-25 age group. The last time the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) updated its record in 2007, it found that two out of five individuals (41.3 per cent) arrested in India belonged to the 18-30 age group.
Bombay’s joint commissioner of police (crime), says, “Old theories which said that criminals are uneducated and unemployed—they just don’t hold anymore. Earlier on, youngsters could rely on the guidance and the watchfulness of elders. Now, they are left to fend for themselves and believe that any means can justify the end.”
In fact, elimination of the guiding hand of elders has become a bit of a norm with today’s Yukkies.
In March this year, police in Porbandar (Gujarat) arrested a 16-year-old schoolgirl for killing her parents and sibling for opposing her affair with a married man. Six months later, a 19-year-old college girl in Rohtak (Haryana) killed seven members of her family who came in the way of her amorous affair. Similar cases abound across Indian cities.
In her confession, Delhi’s Sakshi said her mother was a strict disciplinarian who constantly chastised her for relationships with men. It was this insistence on dictatorial discipline that was responsible for Sakshi’s violent outburst. The girl stabbed her mother 24 times. It is clear that this was not just a heat-of-the-moment crime of passion; there was a more innate hostility and hatred at play. This is what you get when you replace understanding with thoughtless strictness.
Parents’ anxiety, which often translates into nagging and interference, amounts to provocation. This finally results in displays of violent aggression. But even when the blame shifts from decaying moral values to bad parenting, the bonds that tie India’s youth and heinous crime don’t become any eas Sexual frustration, more cases show, continues to be a prime motivating factor.
In April, for instance, Mumbai police arrested six twenty something college students after having found evidence implicating them in the gang-rape of an American student of the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS).
Then in August, a 17-year-old student from a popular central Delhi school was apprehended for sodomising an 11-year-old boy. The abuse, police said, lasted two long years.
The Indian youngster’s relatively new casualness towards crime worries Delhi’s joint commissioner (crime). Youngsters committing crime—that currently ranks as our biggest concern,” he says. What makes the matter worse, according to him, is that many of these crimes are impossible to prevent. If someone without any criminal record is sitting in a room, hatching a plan to murder or kidnap, it is a little unfair to expect the city’s police to have enough intelligence with which they can intervene in time,” he says.
Psychologist Mitra, who has been counselling Delhi’s young offenders for over 15 years, believes that a “loosening of familial bonds” has much to do with the growing instances of violence on the part of young Indians of a certain profile. Of late, he says, the “fantasies of the young are becoming far more violent.” Rather than being able to negotiate their inability to fulfil their desires, they often give in to what Mitra calls “a real or perceived perception of injustice and humiliation”. This invented feeling of persecution “then leads to brutally violent acts such as homicide; they express their rage forcibly without any understanding of what might be the end result.” The will to hurt, says Mitra, gets further compounded by the fact that rather than being absolute, morality is now relative. “If it seems all right, it is all right to do, even if the ‘it’ in question is murder.”
Into the widening pool of Yukkies, schoolgoing teenagers are being sucked in as well.
Concerned about the unbridled aggression she sees in the language and acts of many students, principal of Delhi Public School, Gurgaon, says, “I feel as if I am sitting on a time bomb, unable to ensure security in a school environment.”
Two Class XII students in Bombay serve as examples to fuel her fears. They are said to have kidnapped and killed their 17-year-old Rizvi College classmate in February.
When police authorities discovered Mukim Khan’s battered body in a Santa Cruz gutter, they found that the teen’s head had been bludgeoned beyond recognition. One of the accused, 17-year-old Amir Sheikh, later confessed that the killing wasn’t impulsive; it had been planned all along. And it was only after the brutal killing that he and his friend called Mukim’s wealthy father, a landlord in Bandra, demanding Rs 3 crore in ransom.
Delhi’s Vikas Sethi, who demanded ransom from the parents of 7-year-old Akshita in August, told investigators the film Apaharan was his inspiration. Sundari Nanda, additional commissioner of police (licensing), says that, besides films and TV, advertising myths such as “the girl goes with the rich man in a big car” add to already existing peer pressure and that could push youngsters to crime.
Apart from need and greed, the problem here is the non-sustainability of a life of truth. A hypocritical society is forcing the nation’s urban young to conform to an “unusual existence”, making them afraid to be different. Their ambition is now consumed by airtime. If some act can get you on a talk show, then that act must be justified.
Accusations and blame notwithstanding, the one question that still needs further exploration is this—when did the nation’s youth begin to think that killing people was a novel way of killing time?
