Women Die. Men Debate.
In the days after Twisha Sharma’s death, my social media feed looked exactly the way it always does when an Indian woman dies violently inside a marriage.
Women posting stories. Women making reels. Women writing furious captions. Women discussing fear, marriage, compromise, in-laws, abuse, survival. They are doing the enormous, exhausting, thankless work of keeping these stories alive past the 48-hour news cycle. Women trying to process the unbearable familiarity of it all.
And then comes the toxic masculinity. The vanguards of patriarchy, and in a lot of cases our own brothers, fathers, husbands, relatives, and friends—good men, modern men, men who describe themselves as “feminists” at parties. Hiding behind their screens, commenting:
“Not all men.”
“What about false cases?”
“Men die by suicide too.”
“Make alimony optional.”
Under posts about a dead woman, strangers debate divorce laws. Beneath conversations about harassment, men compare alimony to dowry. Some even joked that at least Twisha could no longer “take his money” in a divorce.
It is difficult to explain the exhaustion of watching a woman die and seeing the conversation immediately shift toward protecting male discomfort.
This is not because men do not suffer abuse, loneliness, mental health crises, social pressure, and emotional neglect. Issues that genuinely deserve serious attention.
Every conversation about violence against women in India becomes a debate rather than a moment of collective reckoning. A refusal to overhaul the social evils and systemic failures that define our so-called democracy.
Perhaps that is what feels so devastating and defeating. Not just the violence but society’s inability to sit with women’s pain without immediately finding a justification.
In the days after these incidents, public discourse inevitably spirals into gossip about moral character, promiscuity, Instagram reels, and “modern girls,” instead of staying focused on the fact that a woman has died horrifically inside her marital home.
India records thousands of dowry deaths every year. According to the NCRB’s Crime in India 2024 report, 5,737 women died in dowry-related cases—nearly 16 every single day. Over 1.2 lakh cases of cruelty by husband or relatives were recorded that same year. Homemakers form the second-largest group in India’s annual suicide data. Women inside marriages, inside homes, behind closed doors where no one can hear them.
There is no equivalent male dataset that comes close. Men face real mental health crises in India. Nobody is saying otherwise, but when a man dies by suicide, the numbers are not concentrated in the institution of marriage. We do not find, case after case, that his wife had been demanding money from his family for years, or that his autopsy showed a ruptured spleen and bleeding in four organs.
Two wrongs have never made a right. Saying “men face harassment too” while a woman’s body is barely cold is not balance. It is cruelty.
