Sunday Reading

New Delhi, 23 July 2010 

Honour Killers

NOT KNIGHTS IN SHINING ARMOUR

By VS Dharmakumar

`Honour’ is a sanguine word. A lexicon that means respect, admiration, nobility et al. Today the obverse holds true. Wherein a bone-chilling murder or the horrendous slaughter of women and young girls by family members is called an ‘honour crime’. Bluntly, ‘honour’ stands for ‘sanction’ given by society to people who kill their kith and kin perceived to have brought dishonour to the family or caste. Never mind, it is a negation of the expression.

Sadly, by prefixing a glorifying word to a horrific crime, we are not only indirectly justifying the killings but also supporting the cause. Worse, such murders have become so routine; hardly a day passes without one hearing of a young couple’s killing in some part of the country.

Earlier, honour killings were the curse of Haryana. Nowadays, it has spread to other States threatening the lives of many more young people who dare to cross the caste lines to select their life partners. Be it urban India or rural Bharat.

Last week a Dalit youth and his upper caste wife were stoned to death in Andhra’s Krishnajivadi village in Nizamabad. Ditto in the country’s nerve centre, Delhi, a 19 year-old girl and her boyfriend were bludgeoned and electrocuted by her remorseless father and uncle. A journalist belonging to a highly educated Brahmin family of Jharkhand met the same fate, allegedly smothered to death for falling in love with a man of lower caste. In UP’s Greater Noida teenage lovers were lynched by the girl’s family and two schoolgirls who ran away with their boyfriends met the same fate at the hands of their cousin in December last.

The great social reformer Sree Narayana Guru, who wanted to build a classless society advocating, “One in kind, One in religion, One God for human” must be squirming in his samadhi when four persons belonging to his caste fell victims to honour killing in Mumbai in 2004.

Curiously, none dares to praise Chandrapati who exhibited exemplary boldness in fighting against the `Khap’ and getting death sentences awarded to the self-styled honour killers. Khap translates into a motley group of self- righteous, egoistic men who function as custodians of society norms and oppose marriages within the same 'gotra'. Also, they lend a hand to make the murders look respectable by calling them as 'knights in shining armour'.

Undoubtedly, women are always at the receiving end of the Khap’s justice system as they personify ‘honour' and are expected to “behave well”. Men, however, are free to do anything, including rape women. Shockingly, even compulsive rapists are exonerated by the Khap. Social laws put women at an unfair disadvantage and often at the mercy of men. Indian culture per se is used as a pretext to limit a woman’s prospects and life. A mere allegation is enough to award death to an innocent woman.

The travesty of justice in honour crimes is the harsh reality that the victim, killer, police, victim’s family and society are all inured to accept the Khap’s diktat as inevitable. The victim knows she would have to die for ‘family's honour’; police stays inactive as they share the same view as the killers. The parents think their daughter brought dishonour to the family, endangering the marriage prospects of her siblings who join in the 'killing' because they do not want to risk their own prospect in the marriage market. Mothers, mother-in-law and cousins support the attack because of their community and society views this as a good example, so that none repeat the mistake.

In this milieu of medieval morality, most cases go unreported and the perpetrators go unpunished as 'honour' killings are justified by the community and law enforcing authorities.

Interestingly, ‘honour’ killings are frequent in Islamic countries as the Shariat law permits them. In Pakistan over 10,000 honour killings take place every year. But unlike India they go a step further. A labourer not only killed his eldest daughter for marrying against his wishes but also three other daughters fearing that they too might follow in the eldest’s footsteps. In Turkey, a young girl was told to “kill herself” as her father wanted to save himself from a prison sentence. In Saudi, a woman was killed by her father for simply chatting with a man on Facebook.

A teenaged Jordanian girl was stoned to death by her brother for walking towards a house where young boys lived alone. An Egyptian killed his unmarried pregnant daughter and then cut her corpse in to pieces. A Palestinian hanged his sister. Another let his sister decide how she wanted to die, poison or slitting her throat.

In Baghdad, there is the bizarre case of a young woman who was imprisoned as a ploy to reach her criminal brother, evading the police. Raped by the prison guards and pregnant she wrote to him for help. The brother came to the prison and shot her dead. Why? To spare the family the disgrace, notwithstanding the post-mortem showed “forced entry.”

In sum, `honour killings’ are the new emerging dangers of society. Wherein parental and social pressure force a girl to commit suicide after she has written a suicide note absolving her family of all charges. Equally outrageous is of how men murder another man and then kill a woman from their own family to make the murder look like an 'honour killing'. Women get killed for no other reason than that they are just women!

The time has come to take immediate steps to curb the increasing menace of Khaps. The need of the hour is to set up fast track courts and hang the perpetrators of these heinous murders as quickly as possible. A measure which will save many lives. ---- INFA

(Copyright, India News and Feature Alliance)