"The people who have done this should get an award for it," said
48-year-old
Satvir Singh. "This was a murder of morality."
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080516/ts_nm/india_honourkilling_dc_2;_ylt=AoPR6JsSWQX_q0_Bgb4bUPwE1vAI
Indian village proud after double "honor killing"
By Simon Denyer 3
BALLA, India (Reuters) - 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 "honor" 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 honor 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 honor 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 fetuses 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 legalization 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 realized 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 (20 miles) 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 ostracized.
"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 honor. 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 pressurized 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."
--
Pucker your lips for the Apocalypse!
Johnny Asia, Guitarist from the Future
http://music.download.com/johnnyasia
|
