http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2008\05\17\story_17-5-2008_pg4_20
Indian village proud after double ‘honour killing’
By Simon Denyer
In Dalla, a village outside New Delhi, a couple stepped outside the
boundaries of strict local customs and traditions and met a deadly
fate
FIVE armed men burst into the small room and courtyard at dawn, just
as 21-year-old, 22-week pregnant, Sunita was drying her face on a
towel.
They punched and kicked her stomach as she called out for her sleeping
boyfriend “Jassa”, 22-year-old Jasbir Singh, witnesses said. When he
woke, both were dragged into waiting cars, driven away and strangled.
Their bodies, half-stripped, were laid out on the dirt outside
Sunita’s father’s house for all to see, a sign that the family’s
“honour” had been restored by her cold-blooded murder.
A week later, the village of Balla, just a couple of hours drive from
India’s capital New Delhi, stands united behind the act, proud,
defiant almost to a man. Among the Jat caste of the conservative
northern state of Haryana, it is taboo for a man and woman of the same
village to marry. Although the couple were not related, they were seen
in this deeply traditional society as brother and sister.
“From society’s point of view, this is a very good thing,” said
62-year-old farmer Balwan Arya, sitting smoking a hookah in the shade
of a tree in a square with other elders from the village council or
panchayat. “We have removed the blot.” Growing economic op****tunities
for young people and lower castes in Haryana have made “love
marriages” more common, experts say, and the violent repression of
them has risen in tandem as upper caste Jat men fight to hold on to
power, status and property.
Sunita’s father Om Prakash has confessed to murdering his pregnant
daughter and her boyfriend, police told Reuters. An uncle and two
cousins were among four others arrested. But in Balla many people
believe the father confessed merely to underline that he sup****ted his
daughter’s killing, to satisfy honour and protect the real culprits
among his family or village.
At their house, Sunita’s mother did not emerge to talk. Instead, a
young man on a motorbike tried to intimidate the Reuters team into
leaving. It turned out he was another of Sunita’s cousins, his father
and brother held by police. “We are not ashamed of it, absolutely not,
we have the honour of doing the village proud,” he said. “We would not
have had a face to show if we had not done this. It was the act of
‘real men’.”
The power of upper caste men: The relatively prosperous northern state
of Haryana is one of India’s most conservative when it comes to caste,
marriage and the role of women. Deeply patriarchal, caste purity is
paramount and marriages are arranged to sustain the status quo. Men
and women are still murdered across the villages of northern India for
daring to marry outside their caste, but in Haryana the practice is
widespread, and widely sup****ted.
Here, women veil their faces with scarves in public. The illegal
abortion of female foetuses is common, the ratio of women to men in
Haryana just 861 to 1,000, the lowest in the country. Anyone who
transgresses social codes, by marrying across caste boundaries or
within the same village, is liable to meet the same fate as Sunita and
Jasbir. Many such murders are never re****ted, hardly any result in
prosecution, says Professor Javeed Alam, chairman of the Indian
Council of Social Science Research. “People from the same village are
treated as siblings in Haryana,” he said. “So this is treated as
*****.” Without any law to prohibit this kind of marriage, “the only
way you can punish it is by taking the law into your own hands. People
believe people who commit ***** should be killed”.
Nor do politicians ever renounce the practice, Alam added, because if
they did, “they would not win elections”. And the legalisation of
property rights for women in 1956 made love marriages within a village
even more dangerous for this elite, as daughters living close to home
could in theory claim a part of the family land, sociologist Prem
Chowdhry says.
Childhood sweethearts: Sunita and Jasbir, sweethearts in the same
class at school, had little chance. When he left school a couple of
years before her to become an photographer’s apprentice, he would
often hang around at the school gates to collect her. She was married
off to another man, but left her husband to elope with Jasbir a
year-and-a-half ago, and while the families tried to keep them apart,
they realised it was a losing battle.
“They were madly in love even to the last day,” said Jasbir’s
16-year-old sister-in-law Lalita in the house where they lived in
Machhroli village, around 35 km by road from Balla. To make matters
worse, Jasbir was from a lower sub-caste, and she was pregnant outside
marriage. Sunita’s parents in Balla found themselves virtually
ostracised.
“Nobody would drink water in our house,” Sunita’s mother Roshni is
re****ted to have said. “My daughter’s action made us aliens in our own
land. But we have managed to redeem our honour. She paid for her
ill-gotten action.” But among Jasbir’s family, split between Machhroli
and Balla, grief is mixed with fear. “Why are you talking to the
media?” shouted a female family member at one point.
“This will only bring more trouble.” At the small police post in
Balla, a constable admitted the case was unlikely to ever reach
prosecution, with the village putting enormous pressure on the police,
and especially Jasbir’s family, to quietly drop the case. “We are
being pressurised into reaching an agreement, a compromise, without
even being given time to grieve,” said Jasbir’s 25-year-old sister
Neelam. “We have been told that if we don’t compromise, we will suffer
the same fate.”
In the narrow alleyway outside their tiny house, women wailed in
grief. A few hundred yards away, the panchayat sat in quiet
self-satisfaction. “The people who have done this should get an award
for it,” said 48-year-old Satvir Singh. “This was a murder of
morality.” reuters
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