Suicide, Scapegoating And The Cost Of Looking Away In India

Hours after the Agra police discovered his body on February 24 this year, a video Manav Sharma had recorded began circulating online. In it, a visibly distraught Manav addresses the camera with a makeshift noose around his neck—a dupatta looped around the ceiling fan. He begins by speaking to the authorities, naming the police and law enforcement agencies as if they were listening. “The law needs to protect men,” he says, “or there will be no men left to blame.”

All men, he insists, share the same story. His, he says, is no different. He claims to have discovered that his wife, Nikita, would sleep with someone else, but immediately shrugs off the relevance of the supposed betrayal. What matters, he urges, is that someone finally speak about men. “They are so lonely,” he says. At moments, his speech unravels. He apologises to his parents—“Everything will be fine once I go; let me leave!”—and shows cut marks on his arm. “I have always been a quitter,” he says. He scoffs at “law and order”, before turning unexpectedly prescriptive. He urges all men to masturbate, suggesting it may be their only remaining release.

The video ends without resolution. What remains is a man performing his despair for an audience that arrives too late. We see Manav caught between grievance, incoherence and a desperate need to be seen. In 2017, the Mental Healthcare Act decriminalised suicide. In theory, this marked a shift away from punishment and blame. In practice, it has merely displaced culpability. If there is a body, there must still be a killer. That killer is not the law or the state, but an individual—often a woman—identified, tried and sentenced in the court of public opinion.

Manav’s family, television news channels and social media trolls quickly converged on Nikita, accusing her of abetting his suicide. She was soon compelled to release a video of her own. In it, she denies having cheated on him. She says she was in a relationship before her marriage. When Manav discovered this, she alleges, he would beat her while drunk. He had also attempted self-harm and suicide on multiple other occasions, she says, and she had saved him all of three times.

“It isn’t true that men are not heard,” Nikita says in the video. “Please listen to me and my story.”

Nikita’s plea seemingly fell on deaf ears. The coverage that followed Manav’s suicide barely engaged with the mental health demons that had earlier driven him to violence, towards his wife and himself. Even basic facts became slippery. The internet could not agree on whether Manav was 25 or 30. His profession, however—he was a Senior Process Associate at Tata Consultancy Services—quickly became the organising frame through which his death came to be understood.

Observers linked his case to that of Atul Subhash, a 34-year-old software engineer found hanging in his Bengaluru home on December 9, 2024. In the video he left behind, Atul accused his estranged wife, Nikita Singhania, and her family of harassment, extortion and relentless legal pressure. He claimed they had filed multiple criminal cases against him—including under the Dowry Prohibition Act—which he described as false, punitive and financially ruinous. The cumulative weight of litigation, he wrote, had pushed him to the brink, compounded by the fear of losing access to his four-year-old son. Atul hung a placard near him that read “Justice is Due”.

Online vigilantes reacted to Atul’s and Manav’s deaths with the hashtag #MenToo. Many were quick to point out that men accounted for 72.8% of the 1,71,418 suicides reported in 2023, a statistic repeatedly invoked to slot men as the primary victims of India’s mental-health crisis. Responsibility for a large share of these deaths was swiftly pinned on women, on figures like the two Nikitas, both accused by their husbands of mental torture.

What was far less visible in this outrage economy was another number the National Crime Records Bureau had published: 6,156 dowry deaths in 2023. The selective arithmetic of men’s-rights activism reveals its own myopia. In foregrounding male suffering only through the lens of accusation, it erases the inner lives of women who continue to bear the everyday, structural and often fatal violence of patriarchy.

Not all the headlines of 2025 were bleak. Four years after Sushant Singh Rajput died by suicide, the Central Bureau of Investigation filed its closure report in October this year. The agency said it had found no evidence that Sushant’s girlfriend, Rhea Chakraborty, had illegally confined or threatened him, or that she had abetted his death. This finding of no foul play should, at the very least, prompt an apology from the television news anchors and social media trolls who led a sustained witch-hunt against Rhea. But it also forces a reckoning with what was obscured by that frenzy: Sushant himself.

Instead of accusing Rhea of sorcery and incarcerating her on tenuous drug-related charges, we might have asked harder, more uncomfortable questions about how the actor’s bipolar disorder shaped his final days, about how it left him isolated, frightened and haunted by inner ghosts that no amount of public adulation could banish. In choosing spectacle over understanding, we failed Sushant. And in doing so, we also failed the thousands of Indians who live with mental illnesses that render them vulnerable to their own minds, and also to a society that would rather hunt for villains than sit with complexity or pain.

The vilification of women in each of these deaths by suicide underscores a broader, more dangerous pattern: the ease with which majorities learn to oppress, suffocate and scapegoat minorities. In an India charged with majoritarian hate, Dalits and religious minorities are routinely attacked, harassed, blamed and displaced. This animus does not remain confined to the margins; it surfaces just as readily in elite, ostensibly liberal spaces.

One such instance played out at an October 2024 Annual General Body Meeting of the Khar Gymkhana in Mumbai. The club’s management cancelled an honorary three-year membership granted to cricketer Jemimah Rodrigues, reportedly after some members objected to her father, Ivan Rodrigues, using the gymkhana premises for “religious activities”.

He was accused of organising events aimed at “converting” the “vulnerable”. After the controversy erupted online, Ivan Rodrigues issued a clarification on Instagram. “The prayer meetings were open to all,” he wrote, “and were in no way ‘conversion meetings’ as is wrongly labelled in articles in the media.” He added, pointedly, “We are honest, law-abiding people who are grateful that we can practise our faith without it being a cause of inconvenience to anyone else.”

The cancellation of Jemimah’s membership resurfaced in public conversation after the 25-year-old scored an unbeaten 127 off 134 balls in the semi-final of the ICC Women’s ODI World Cup at DY Patil Stadium on October 30.

Jemimah broke down during the post-match presentation as she spoke about her struggles with anxiety. “When you are going through anxiety, you just feel numb. You don’t know what to do.” She spoke of breaking down repeatedly on calls with her parents, overwhelmed by pressure and expectation. What steadied her, she said, was not resilience mythologised as stoicism, but support. “I am so blessed to have friends I can call family. I didn’t have to go through it alone. It is okay to ask for help.”

Then, struggling to hold back tears, she decided to choose vulnerability over strength. “I will be very vulnerable here,” she said, “because I know if someone is watching, they might be going through the very same thing. Nobody likes to talk about their weakness.”

There is no panacea like success. Jemimah Rodrigues was rightly hailed as a hero after her Herculean knock, but what made the triumph especially resonant was that it wasn’t only her own mind that had placed her back against the wall; we had pushed her there, too.

In the aftermath of the Khar Gymkhana controversy, Jemimah was subjected to a barrage of derogatory slurs online. Speaking after India’s World Cup win, she described the shock of that onslaught. “Suddenly, I started seeing news, messages and people saying terrible things about me, and worse, about my family and my church. I didn’t know what to do.” She spoke of crying bitterly to her brother.

Eventually, she said, she and her family made a conscious decision to forgive those who had hurt them, “because that’s what Jesus taught us, to forgive even those who wrong us.”

Not everyone placed in Jemimah’s position would find that fortitude, or summon the same generosity of spirit. And they shouldn’t be expected to. If 2025 has taught us anything, it is that while individual resilience is often celebrated, collective responsibility is more easily evaded. We, as a society, have far more to reckon with—and, as this year makes clear, much to atone for.

If you or someone you know needs help, mail icall@tiss.ac.in or dial 9152897821 (Monday–Saturday, 8 am to 10 pm) to reach iCall, a psychosocial helpline set up by the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS).

Trigger Warning: This article contains detailed references to suicide, self-harm, domestic violence, mental illness, online harassment, and religious and gender-based targeting. Readers who may find such material triggering or overwhelming are advised to proceed with care.

The author is an independent journalist based in Kolkata.