Eighteen-year-old Maimun, filled with dreams of
romantic love, made the mistake of eloping with
Idris, who was already married with two children.

It was mostly love that blinded her to the
consequences of her action, but also the
desperate desire to escape marriage to an uncle
she loathed. She was dragged back home, and
hastily and forcibly married to a local lout. On
their way to his home after the wedding, he raped
her brutally, calling her a whore, invited his
friends to do the same, then slit her with a
knife from neck to navel and left her for dead.
That’s what she deserved for besmirching the
honour of her family.

In another part of the country, village goons
tied Pribha to an electric pole, beat her black
and blue and shaved her head because she had
chosen to spend the night with a relative.
Nearby, the village of Johri in eastern Uttar
Pradesh forbade the marriage of Yashpal’s
daughter to a man of her choice because it
violated caste norms.

Killing women to redeem honour has no Muslim
pedigree in India. These dishonourable killings
leap across caste and creed: Hindu, Sikh and
Muslim, touchable and ’untouchable’ are united in
their agreement that avenging male honour entails
killing one’s own women. Such killings may be
carried out in public with the active connivance
of village elders and caste panchayats (village
councils), or in private by family members alone.

They may take place because women have chosen to
love within the faith but not within permissible
norms - like Maimun; or because women choose to
transgress community and religious boundaries
altogether by marrying across caste, community or
ethnicity; or if they are audacious enough to
commit adultery. Whatever the provocation, what
they prove is that there is a patriarchal
consensus around the violent ’resolution’, so to
speak, of the troublesome question of women’s
sexuality.

Their sexual status - chaste, polluted or impure - is a matter of extreme and stringent control,
and any attempt by women to resist it may be
punished with death.

Some feminists and women’s groups in India who
have been active in bringing all such cases to
public and judicial attention, seriously question
the use of the term ’honour killings’ or ’honour
crimes’ to characterise this deadly form of
violence against women - and, occasionally, men.

They argue that it obscures the true nature of
the crimes by ’othering’ them, seeing them as
characteristic of non-modern societies, aberrant
and irrational. They ask, instead, that we see
such killings for what they are: violent acts of
sexual control and subjugation of women in order
to maintain either social and economic disparity,
or the legitimate (caste, religious or ethnic)
community.

 Boundaries

All these stratifications are contingent upon the
rigidity of boundaries; maintaining them, in
turn, is contingent on endogamy, hence the strict
supervision of women’s sexuality.

Relationships of choice disrupt this continuity
and threaten the political economy of
communities. When a high-caste woman marries a
Dalit man, for example, and then has the temerity
to claim her inheritance, she rocks the boat of
inequality and destroys the status quo in every
respect.

Purna Sen of Amnesty International has identified
six key features of what I shall now call
dishonourable killings: patriarchal gender
relations that are predicated on controlling and
regulating women’s sexuality; the role of women
in policing and monitoring women’s behaviour;
collective decisions regarding punishment for
transgressing boundaries; the potential for
women’s participation in such killings; the
ability to reclaim honour through enforced
compliance or killings; and state and social
sanction for such killings that recognise and
acknowledge ’honour’ as acceptable motivation,
mitigation and justification.

In Maimun’s case, the marriage arranged by her
parents to her uncle had the attraction of
monetary gain, as well as conformity to family
and social expectations.

When Maimun repudiated both, her mother was the
first to react. ’You infidel!’ she shrieked, ’you
have actually married a man from your own
village, from another sub-caste - I will kill
you! If they don’t slice you up, I will!’ And
when a team of officials from the National
Commission for Women went to the village to
enquire into the violence, they were surrounded
by villagers who shouted, ’These are our customs,
no one can interfere. Neither man nor god.’

In the other two cases above, the decision of the
caste panchayat was taken on behalf of the whole
village, collectively upholding its ’honour’.
Unlike elected panchayats, which are
constitutionally empowered to function as
institutions of self-governance, caste panchayats
are illegal and unconstitutional.

They act as moral policemen to the communities
they ’govern’ through power that is often
hereditary. ’Office-bearers’ can be corrupt, and
caste considerations weigh heavily when ’justice’
is being dispensed. More important, however, they
make for a curious legal conundrum. Supreme Court
lawyer Indira Jaising says that caste panchayats
displace the justice-dispensing function of the
state and elevate informal or non-state systems
of justice into ’customary’ practice, recognised
by law.

Such systems rarely recognise the principle of
gender or social equality, and almost inevitably
reinforce patriarchal gender relations. Their
assumption of adjudicatory power, moreover, is in
effect sanctioned by institutions of the state
through inaction.

 Documentation

The experience of several activists and women’s
groups who have reported dishonourable killings
bears this out. The All India Democratic Women’s
Association (Aidwa), which has documented
killings in the north Indian state of Haryana,
says that the police are reluctant to record them
because the state machinery and caste panchayats
are in cahoots.

Policemen have not set foot in the village of
Johri for more than five years; and in Bijnore,
when Pribha was being beaten, the beat constable
was a mute witness. When AIDWA activists have
exposed the killings, the villagers themselves
and the panchayats try to cover them up.
Post-mortems, which are crucial in establishing
that women have been murdered, are never
conducted. And in a recent menacing twist, AIDWA
activists have been told that they should pay
protection money to the local panchayat because
their safety is at risk from charged-up villagers
and avenging families.

In the rare instance that a case comes up to the
National Commission for Women or the National
Commission for Human Rights, justice dispensed by
the court in favour of the women may easily be
reversed by murderous vigilantism.

Maimun, who was left for dead, was discovered by
an elderly couple on the road where she had been
abandoned. They nursed her back to health and
restored her to Idris. The Commission took up her
case and successfully fought it in the Supreme
Court. Four years later, Maimun was killed by her
younger brother who declared that only a dead
sister could restore his family’s honour.

Contrary to the image they conjure up of barbaric
communities living in the dark ages, these
dishonourable killings take place in modern
societies, in broad daylight, with the full
knowledge of those in charge of upholding the
law. They are crimes against the state as much as
they are vendettas against particular groups,
clans or families.

Yet the state, through acts of omission and
commission, and through its tacit endorsement of
patriarchal privilege-including the right to kill
transgressors-aligns itself with the
perpetrators. It would seem that for the state,
too, a woman’s body is a man’s property, to
dispose of as he will.