There’s no honour in ‘honour killings’ so drop the prefix

Last week, a 17-year-old hacked his pregnant sister to death in rural Aurangabad for marrying a man of her choice. He then made a display of his brutality and apparently clicked selfies. In all this, he had help from his mother.

As in most such cases, the perpetrator did not see himself as the average criminal. He killed, and calmly awaited arrest. This just had to be done — his sister had broken a cardinal rule of patriarchy: women cannot do as they please.

So numbed are we now by these ‘honour killings’ that this incident drew little comment. There was none of the furore we saw in the 2000s when some Manoj or Babli was, with alarming regularity, lynched for flouting rules on gotra exogamy.

Women have for long been asking that the ‘honour’ — and the notion of virtue and sacrifice it implies — be dropped as a prefix for what is essentially cold-blooded murder. So, what is this notion of honour? The traditional ideology is that women are the repositories of honour and men its regulators, says sociologist Prem Chowdhry in her seminal essay, ‘Redeeming honour through violence’, published in the anthology The Fear That Stalks. And whether it is the duel of the Middle Age or the violence of Partition, honour is always situated in the woman’s body. This is why her behaviour, clothes, posture and sexual choices are all causes for unending male anxieties.

In about every kind of gender violence, it is the perpetrator who gets to play the ‘victim’ because, look what he has to put on the line to teach the woman her place in the world and restore status quo. She always asks for it — by dressing thus, laughing loudly, loitering, staring back, defying convention, or making a choice.

Chowdhry, who has researched extensively in Haryana, says that families, communities and villages claim a place of valour for the men who killed women for smirching notions of izzat. After the 1994 killing of Asha and her lover Manoj in Nayangaon in Haryana, when some of the killers were let out on bail, they were treated with respect by the village. There was righteous outrage that they were punished as per the law.

Between 2014 and 2016, as many as 288 cases of honour killing were reported. In 2020, a year we spent cowering at home as the pandemic raged, there were 25 — and these are just official figures. Three years ago, the Supreme Court declared that “the act of honour killing puts the rule of law in a catastrophic crisis” and asked for steps to protect an adult Indian’s right to have a legal relationship of her choice. Rajasthan now has a law to deal with this crime, the Freedom of Matrimonial Alliances in the Name of Honour and Tradition Bill, 2019.

But honour crimes sit on the high ground of custom and as women press on for more freedoms, the crackdown gets worse. Once the horror stories came mostly from the north, now they have no specific geography. Evidence, a Madurai-based NGO, estimated that between 2012 and 2017, there were as many as 187 cases in Tamil Nadu. The two Telugu-speaking states have reported some high-profile cases where inter-caste marriage meant community death sentence.

In Kerala and Karnataka, there are more subtle ways to infantilise women and stifle their agency — through the notion of love jihad. Now in danger of being formalised, it is not really a new campaign. Historian Charu Gupta links it to the panic-creating propaganda of the 1920s when pamphlets, posters, novels and gossip campaigns spoke of the abduction and forcible conversion of gullible Hindu women.

The facts are depressing: over 38% of murders of women are committed by current or former partners. And though it has been nearly 40 years since landmark anti-dowry legislations, India still recorded 6,966 cases of dowry deaths last year.

The notion of honour simply does not allow domestic violence to be treated like other crimes; it is ghar ki baat, izzat ki baat, anything but wanton cruelty. It is a sign of how entrenched misogyny is in our society. And all the changes that are empowering women — laws on gender equity, education, jobs, better health systems — are not doing much to uproot it.

Sairat, a 2016 Marathi film, was a song-and-dance blockbuster with a menacing darkness at its heart. Its last scene spoke of the horrors of young lives lost to misplaced notions of honour. You would think it would send out a message, give masculine fury a cause for pause.

But it was, apparently, the “inspiration” for the Aurangabad killing. There could not be a more ironic pointer to how crimes against women are impervious to laws, public approbation or pleas for humaneness and decency. This is one change that just has to begin at home.