Year Ender 2025: 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........