By Sharanya Gopinathan

On July 20th, a 19-year-old college student in Jalandhar was raped by two men. While crimes against women shouldn’t be understood on some kind of hierarchy of violence and horror, the specifics of this case are particularly shocking.

The survivor was in a relationship with a 19-year-old man named Harpreet Singh Happy. They were in the same class at university, had been dating for some time now, and had decided to get married after being a relationship for a long time. On the 20th of July, he called her and told her he wanted to introduce her to his parents.

He picked her up on his bike, and stopped at a certain point near a grain market, telling her to wait there and that he would bring his parents there. After a while, two of Harpreet’s friends, Bindu and Ravi, arrived at the spot, saying Harpreet had asked them to pick her up and take her to his parents’ house. They then took her to a room near a tubewell in a field and raped her, and then to an “abandoned haveli”, where they raped her again.

The police say that Harpreet hatched this violent conspiracy so that he could use her rape as an excuse not to marry her. He’s already been arrested, and police say his friends Bindu and Ravi will soon be arrested too.

The mind, boggles, doesn’t it? Whether it’s men cutting off their wives’ fingers because they chose to study, or shooting them in the head because dinner wasn’t ready on time, or killing their pregnant wives because their rotis weren’t round, or employing friends to rape their girlfriends to get out of marrying them, it’s clear that men need no real reason to unleash the harshest and most unthinkable kinds of violence on their partners.