Shraddha Walkar was brutally murdered by Aftab Poonawala whom she met on a dating app and started a live-in relationship. Shraddha Walkar’s body was chopped into 35 pieces and kept in the refrigerator wrapped in multiple plastic bags for close to six months. For 18 nights, he wrapped those parts in black plastic bags and went out to dispose of them one by one at 2 AM in the night in the nearby jungle area.

The Shraddha Walkar case

Shraddha was working in a call centre in Mumbai and met a man named Aftab Poonawalla through a dating app. The two started a live-in relationship in Mumbai, which her family opposed. So they shifted to Delhi and started living in the Chhatarpur area.

Her estranged family continued to follow her on social media, but when she stopped posting updates, her worried father lodged a missing person complaint in May. He suspected her partner Aftab had a hand in her disappearance.

Using technical surveillance and intelligence sources, police managed to trace Aftab. During questioning, he confessed that he had murdered Shraddha as she was putting pressure on him to get married. After strangling her, he chopped her body into 35 pieces, bought a large fridge and stored her body parts in that.

Influence of Feminism & Wokeism

Shraddha Walkar, daughter of Vikas and Suman Walkar, was brought up in Palghar (a suburb of Mumbai) and graduated from a Vasai college. In 2018, she relocated to Mumbai where she started working in a call centre. Around the same time, she came in touch with Aftab through the dating app Bumble. The duo worked together in a store selling fitness products.

In 2019, Shraddha and Aftab started living together in Mumbai’s Malad. When she informed her mother about her live-in relationship, her parents opposed her relationship. After Shraddha’s argument with her parents, she left her house and cut off all ties with her family. Her parents got updates about her from Shraddha’s friends and social media.

Bumble is a self-proclaimed feminist platform and the portal markets itself as a feminist app where the power to initiate the conversation lies with women.

On the other hand, Poonawala’s social media profile is full of woke and anti-Hindu content. It is quite clear that woke and feminist ideas influenced Shradhha. With no family backing, and having cut off all family ties, Shraddha was an easy target for the likes of Aftab. Recently, CoHNA’s (Coalition of Hindus of North America) Shobha Swamy explained how wokeism is breaking families.

Her post, saying she was smoking Doob (cannabis cigarette) while enjoying the beautiful Ganga, is probably an attestation to the fact that she was deeply influenced by ‘liberal’ ideas. Feminist portals that usually bat for ‘liberal’ ideas push youth away from their culture and values.

Shraddha was in an abusive relationship with Aftab Poonawala. The two not just had frequent arguments but Poonawala used to physically abuse her as well. She even started missing work due to the physical beating by Poonawala. Shraddha was reportedly hospitalized for four days in 2020. Her friends have testified the fact that Poonawala was abusive towards Shraddha.

“Once she contacted me on WhatsApp and asked to rescue her from her residence. She said that if she stayed with him (Aaftab) that night, he would kill her”, said Shraddha’s friend Laxman Nadar. Nadar along with his friends rescued Shraddha from Chattarpur. They also warned Aftab they will complain to the police. However, they did not complain to the police keeping in mind Shraddha’s commitment towards Aaftab.

Lack of Dharmic rooting affecting Hindus

The disease of hook-up culture and live-in relations is spreading fast in metros and slowly seeping even into tier-two towns due to blind adulation of American pop culture and trashy web series and movies. Urduwood aka Bollywood films and OTT web series have accelerated the uptake of this neo-colonial ‘global culture’ and given it an Indian packaging.

Many Hindu families in cities are now mostly functioning as nuclear families, if that, and are largely cut off from close relatives and extended family ties. These parents have a cursory knowledge of Dharma, and their religious community life has broken down. Many traditional Dharmic organizations have also abandoned such Hindus and are hardly doing any outreach, not least because the secular state has weakened Hindu organizations through incessant legal attacks and demonization. 

As a result, most Hindu youths, both boys and girls, are drifting along in a sea of degeneracy without any Dharmic anchor or sanskars (good values) to help them discriminate between right and wrong. Anyone who talks about Dharma is shouted down or mocked with slurs like ‘dehati’ (rustic), ‘sanskari balak’ (the word has taken overtones of being pedantic, sheltered and diffident) etc.

Moreover, Hindu youth, fed on a diet of Urduwood ‘love conquers all’ romance movies, are completely unaware of the basics of Islam and sharia. They do not know that Islamic law explicitly forbids the marriage of a Muslim with a Hindu unless the Hindu converts to Islam. Moreover, most Muslim youth are indoctrinated since birth to regard Hindus as ‘inferior, immoral’ beings. This stereotyping makes many Muslim youths regard Hindu girls as objects for pleasure and fooling around, but not ‘pure’ or ‘worthy’ of marriage.

There is an awakening taking place among Hindus, and the anti-conversion law introduced in UP which was later copied by a few other states is a welcome step. But the onus of instilling Dharmic values in our children, and educating them about the real dangers that lurk in society, finally rests upon Hindu parents and Hindu religious-social organizations. We need to up our game and become ambassadors for Dharma in a structured and bold way, or else we will continue seeing more Shraddhas in body bags.