24-year-old hacked inside church in TN

Tamil Nadu on Wednesday witnessed yet another incident of a woman being hacked to death by a stalker, echoing the brutal murder of an Infosys techie two months ago.

N Francina, a 24-year-old schoolteacher, was hacked to death by J Keegan while she was praying in a church in Thoothukudi before beginning her school day.

The 53-year-old assailant subsequently was found to have hanged himself in his house by the police, who said he had stalked Francina for six months before attacking her.

This comes just a day after a 19-year-old student, Sonali, was beaten to death by a youth, Udayakumar, who claimed to have been in a relationship with her — a claim denied by her friends and family. The similarities between the motives of the attackers in both the cases — claims of being in love with the victims and then attacking them because the women in question did not respond — is eerily similar to the motives of Ramkumar, the man who was arrested for the murder of the Infosys techie, S Swathi, in June.

Swathi’s murder garnered attention across India and put the focus on Tamil Nadu which, despite begin comparatively safer for women, has seen a spate of hackings recently. In the Infosys techie’s case, the accused killed her on a platform in one of Chennai’s main railway stations — a stone’s throw away from a police station — and in front of witnesses, none of whom tried to help her.

Why hacking is an increasingly common method of murder is unknown, though the affordability and the commonplace nature of the ‘aruval’ — the Tamil term for an agricultural tool that is a cross between a machete and a sickle — is a big factor. Equally important is the question of why so many young men are articulating their desires towards women in such a violent manner, physical and otherwise.