Hyde
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No honour in murder
Youngsters in certain parts of India today cannot choose their partners. If they still do and the choice violates arbitrary, extra-legal norms set down by caste panchayats, the consequence can be death. Isn't it time we built a popular movement against the medieval practice of honour killings.
by AMMU JOSEPH
A newly-wed bride and her mother-in-law were killed and the groom seriously injured by the girl's relatives in the Tarn Taran district of Punjab on May 11. According to the police, 19-year-old Gurleen Kaur's naked body had deep cuts in the neck area, and her shoulder and fingers had been mutilated. Her father, brothers and uncles obviously thought this was fit punishment for her crime: marrying 25-year-old Amarpreet Singh against their wishes.
Around the same time, an 18-year-old girl, Rajni Sahu, was murdered by her family in Allahabad (Uttar Pradesh) after they discovered she was pregnant. Although her death was initially sought to be passed off as a suicide, her elder brother subsequently confessed that she was killed because she was determined to marry a neighbourhood boy despite her family's disapproval. He told the media that he killed her to safeguard the honour of our family.
These are among the latest in the series of gruesome murders in the name of honour that have been reported from various parts of the country in recent months.
Will such so-called honour killings stop if the Hindu Marriage Act, 1955 is amended to prohibit marriages within the same gotra? Unlikely. That may be the most publicised of the demands and threats issued by the Khap Mahapanchayat a congregation of caste Panchayats from Jat strongholds in Haryana, Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan in Kurukshetra on April 13, and subsequently elsewhere. But it was not the only one. They have also reportedly called for a ban on marriages within the same village and contiguous villages, as well as de-recognition of temple weddings uniting runaway couples.
Landmark judgment
The mythical gotra factor may have come to the fore because the Kurukshetra gathering was clearly triggered by the recent landmark judgment delivered by District and Sessions Judge Vani Gopal Sharma in Karnal (Haryana) in the case of Manoj and Babli Banwala, a young couple belonging to the same caste and gotra, who were murdered in 2007 because they dared to marry each other.
But, as scholar and activist Jagmati Sangwan has pointed out, not all honour killings even within Haryana involve same-gotra couples. According to her, the majority of the marriages condemned by Khap Panchayats are of couples who do not share a gotra.
Besides, even in a small state like Haryana, there are apparently areas and castes that permit intra-village and intra-gotra marriages, and do not have caste or Khap Panchayats. So the self-styled Khap Mahapanchayat cannot legitimately claim to represent all Hindu communities in Haryana, let alone the rest of India.
Most victims of honour killings reported from various parts of the country are young people who choose to love or marry outside their caste, sub-caste or religion. Not surprisingly, the socially and economically dominant castes are usually responsible for acts of reprisal against inter-caste relationships.
The bottom line is that, even today, many young lovers are punished often with death for having the temerity to fall in love across boundaries of caste or religion. Many caste groups, communities and families in several parts of the country still seem violently opposed to the right of young adults to choose a life partner (even though courts have upheld citizens' right to select their significant other, including a same-sex partner). In the name of preserving social order and saving the honour of the community, caste or family, all kinds of justifications are pressed into service. If the same village or gotra obstacle does not apply, there is always something else: a man was killed in Haryana last year for violating the customary proscription of marriage between residents of neighbouring villages.
Against individual choice
Opposition to matrimonial autonomy is so endemic in certain areas that in June 2008 Justice K.S. Ahluwalia of the High Court of Punjab and Haryana called for State intervention. While simultaneously hearing several cases relating to couples in the 18-21 age group he observed that the court was flooded with petitions seeking judicial confirmation of the right of life and liberty of married couples, while the State remained a mute spectator. When shall the State awake from its slumber [and] for how long can Courts provide solace and balm by disposing of such cases? he asked.
The recent spate of deaths attributed to honour killing and the aggressive, unrepentant posturing of Khap leaders seem to have pushed at least some in the government into taking a more decisive stand on the issue than was common in the past (under any political dispensation). However, it is no secret that these caste-based, extra-legal bodies enjoy at least tacit support from a number of political leaders, civil servants, police officers, lawyers and even judges. Already two politicians from Haryana one supposedly enlightened, the other definitely old school have publicly sought to make peace with the increasingly combative Khaps, albeit with riders (which ring rather hollow).
Sangwan's statement that A legislature with little political will and a pliant executive will have to be made responsive under pressure of a mass movement brings to mind a recent book by the woman who was largely responsible for catalysing a popular movement against honour killings in Jordan, one of the many countries where a life especially a woman's life appears to be worth less than honour.
Award-winning Jordanian journalist Rana Husseini's Murder in the Name of Honour is a passionate, powerful, provocative but remarkably positive and eminently readable book about the struggle against honour killings in her West Asian nation and the prevalence of the crime in several other countries, including the U.S., the U.K. and Europe. Drawing on her personal and professional experience, it vividly tells the fascinating story of her engagement with the subject from the day she followed up on a four-line report about a 16-year-old girl killed by her brother in one of Amman's poorer areas. Like the kitchen accident briefs in the Indian press in the 1970s that turned out to be about dowry-related murders, such reports were common in the Arabic press. As a cub crime reporter with The Jordan Times, Husseini felt the need to further investigate such deaths.