Two women in India enraged over their estranged husband seeking a third partner via the internet joined forces to confront and thrash their 26-year-old spouse on Tuesday.
A video of the incident has reportedly gone viral.
The beating took place in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu.
News outlets identified the husband as S. Aravind [or Arangan] alias Dinesh. On Wednesday, the Indo-Asian News Service (IANS) reported that the man married his second wife Anupriya in April of this year after concealing his first marriage to Priyadarshini in 2016.
Dinesh reportedly engaged in physical domestic abuse against his partners.
IANS reported:
S. Aravind alias Dinesh, who is a private sector employee, was first married to Priyadarshini in 2016 but soon after the wedding, he started ill-treating her.
Dinesh’s parents did not bother when Priyadarshini told them about her being ill-treated. So she lodged a police complaint against Dinesh and went to her parents’ place in [the city of] Tirupur [in Tamil Nadu].
With his first wife gone, Dinesh started looking out for a second wife on a matrimonial website.
In April 2019, concealing his first marriage, Dinesh married Anupriya, a divorcee with a two-year-old son. Couple of months later, Dinesh started to ill-treat Anupriya who, unable to bear the torture, left him and went back to her parents place in [Tamil ‘Nadu’s city of] Karur.
Dinesh began looking for a third wife on the internet after his second wife abandoned him, prompting the two women to come together to confront him.
News accounts of exactly where the women assaulted their husband varies. Some outlets report that the incident occurred outside the man’s office, while others say it took place outside a police station.
On Tuesday, the Press Trust of India (PTI) revealed:
Police said they intervened and took them inside the station where the two women lodged a formal complaint, accusing the man of cheating them after marriage and attempting to enter into wedlock with another.
Except for the country’s Muslim minority, polygamy is illegal in India.
Last month, Indian magazine Outlook noted:
Hindu men are polygamous too, except that because polygamy is legally banned in Hindu law, subsequent wives have no legal standing and no protection under the law. Under Sharia law, on the contrary, subsequent wives have rights and husbands have obligations towards them.
…
The “customs and usages”” of the Hindus of [the western Indian state] Goa are recognized, including “limited” polygamy for Hindus.
The ruling Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is pushing for a blanket ban on polygamy.