Honour Killings: a predicament to the term

Honour killings can be defined as the killing of men and women by their kin or other members of their caste to supposedly safeguard the honour of their family, community or caste. Hundreds of men and women are murdered in India every year in the name of “honour” and it is very difficult to get a precise number on this phenomenon owing to the fact that most of these murder cases go unreported and the perpetrators unpunished. This so happens, due to the absence of witnesses and the large number of perpetrators which in most cases include an entire community justifying themselves on the grounds of “honouring the caste, community or family”. Hence, it is very difficult to reach in a conviction in cases relating to “honour killing”.

Caste, Community and family rules play a very important role in the life of a common Indian civilian. However, its role although very traditional and original to the Indian culture has made its evil manifestations of which “honour killing” is just one form. Most of the honour killings centre round issues of inter-caste marriages. Runaway marriages, relationships between people of different castes, the bride marrying a man from a lower caste and in some parts of northern India marrying within one’s own gotra are considered justifiable reasons to kill man and woman for having supposedly stained the honour of the group by doing so.

Most of the verdicts of honour killings of men and women are delivered by so-called caste panchayats or informal courts which is a self-proclaimed body comprising only of a few male members of the particular caste and deciding all issues concerning them. In these courts, the guilt of the boy and the girl are simply presumed and it is merely the quantum of punishment that is assessed. They function in oblivion to the realm of established law or the local legal court and villagers in most cases give more importance to the judgments passed by the self appointed courts. The leaders of the self-appointed court wield as much power as is necessary to keep the police away from village politics and in many cases the bodies of the victims are dumped and the police are never informed.

There is a general false notion that honour killings affect only women. However, the reality is that men are as much a victim of this phenomenon as women are and sometimes the more harassed of the victims. Hence, this is not a social issue which should be tackled from the point of view of women empowerment alone, but one that should be considered an evil against the entire humanity. There are many Indian grooms who have lost their lives in the hands of the bride’s father or brother. One such case is that of Geeta Rani of Hoshiarpur of Punjab who married Jasveer belonging to a different caste. A group of men belonging to Rani’s caste cut off Jasveer’s hands and legs and then killed him for having the audacity to marry one of their women.

Honour killings are most rampant in India in the northern states of Haryana and Punjab and in western Uttar Pradesh. Although most such crimes go unrecorded, according to a survey conducte by AIDWA, it was found that in Muzaffarnagar, the worst affected district of U.P, 13 cases of honour killings were reported in the first nine months of 2003 , up from ten in 2002. I hope that only reveals how much closer the Indian legal relief system has become closer to the masses and does not camouflage behind a proportionate increase in the actual number of honour killings. Around 35 couples were also declared missing during this period. It is quite devastating to relaise that this phenomenon most common in villages, has found its way into the economically, educationally as well as technologically progressed city life. A perfect example maybe the case of Subhash Chander, living in Chicago, who killed his daughter Monika, son-in-law Rajesh Jhambh and grandchild Vansh in their Oak Forest apartment merely because his daughter had married a man of a lower caste. In 2002, an FCI official stabbed his daughter to death at Mohali for a similar reason. According to a survey done by the Delhi-based Indian Population Statistics Survey (IPSS) in mid-2007, in India almost 655 homicidal cases have been registered as honour killings.

 There is a strong need for urgent measuresto be undertaken to kill this devil before it eats into the very existence of free human life in India. There is a need for strong legislations to be enacted against this heinous offence. It is quite ironical that there be a fatal threat posing on the choice to be young and to marry in the world’s largest democracy. At present there is no specific law in place which addresses this offense. The same sections relating to murder and homicide are applied to cases of honour killing as well. There need to be a definition of this offence in our books of law and most importantly, the effective implementation of the same. There should be a ban on the decisions of the kangaroo-courts that have taken the lives of many. In a recent case, the Karnal Court of Haryana has, by a landmark judgment awarded capital punishment to five persons and life sentence to one for murdering a couple in the dictated of a self-syled community panchayat  for marrying against societal norms. One step forward, we need to take many leaps more to wipe out this evil from the veins of Indian culture.