A gruesome crime turned viral meme — but behind the jokes lies a disturbing pattern of intimate partner violence. Let's look beyond the punchline with Manish Adhikary on First Things Fast.
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00:00In India, the blue drum is very famous, it's very viral, many husbands are in shock because of the blue drum.
00:08By the grace of God, we haven't got married yet.
00:11The blue drum, once just a household item, now a symbol of something far darker.
00:17The murder of 29-year-old Sourav Rajput in Meerut changed everything.
00:22His wife, Muskaan, and her lover, Sahil, allegedly chopped his body into 15 pieces
00:27and dumped them in a blue plastic drum filled with cement.
00:30When police found the drum, India found a new meme.
00:33Instagram, X, YouTube, full of jokes about the blue drum.
00:37Men jokingly scared of girlfriends standing next to it.
00:41But here's the thing, behind the meme is a disturbing pattern.
00:44Women in relationships killing their male partners.
00:47In Auraiya, 22-year-old Pragati Yadav had her husband shot two weeks into the marriage.
00:52Police found him bleeding in a field. He died the next day.
00:56In Jaipur, Gopali Devi and her lover smashed her husband's head with an iron pipe,
01:01strangled him, and then burned the body near a temple.
01:04In Bareilly, Aarti killed her husband-to-be with a 17-year-old.
01:07She's now serving a life sentence.
01:09In Telangana, Swati Reddy bludgeoned her husband to death,
01:12then poured acid on her lover's face so he could impersonate the dead man after plastic surgery.
01:18Yes, really.
01:19In Karnataka, Niharika allegedly killed her husband for Rs 8 crore in assets.
01:24She lured him to a remote location, strangled him, and burned his body in a coffee plantation.
01:29These are not isolated cases.
01:32In 2023 alone, 306 husbands were murdered by their wives or intimate partners in India.
01:37213 of those involved the wife and the lover working together.
01:41But don't get me wrong, it's imperative not to let the blue drum overshadow the pervasive
01:46and systemic violence that women continue to endure daily.
01:49A 2023 study revealed that 72.5% of Indian women surveyed had experienced some form of abuse,
01:57physical, sexual, or psychological, during their relationships.
02:00According to NCRB, reported crimes against women increased by 12.9%
02:05from 2018 to 2022, with a rate of 66.4 incidents per 1 lakh women in 2022.
02:12So while the blue drum meme gets likes and LOLs,
02:15maybe it's also time we looked at what it really represents.
02:18Meme born from murder, a punchline hiding a pattern.
02:22But don't let it cloud your view on the much deeper crisis of women's safety in India.
02:26I'm Anish Adhikari, thank you for watching First Things First.