New Delhi, July 06: Police in India arrested a man suspected of killing his 20-year-old daughter in an apparent “honour killing” after she walked out on an arranged marriage with a man 25 years her senior.
The young woman named Mukesh had apparently fled her husband’s home in the north Indian state of Haryana and refused to return to him, Nirpijit Singh, deputy superintendent of police in Kaithal district, said. A post-mortem on the victim’s body showed signs of strangulation, he said, adding that the father and an uncle were taken into police custody afterwards. “Mukesh was married off two months ago as part of an exchange deal between her and her husband’s family,” he explained.
“Her uncle Inder was meant to marry a girl from her husband’s family, but when she ran away from her husband’s home, all that fell apart, so they killed her,” he said. Marriage deals involving the exchange of women are commonplace among the conservative Jat community, a caste of farmers from north India to which Mukesh belonged, Singh added. So-called “honour killings” are common in India and normally involve young people who break strict social and caste conventions governing marriage and are then murdered by relatives to restore a family’s pride. Supreme Court said in May that the death penalty should be given to those found guilty of so-called honour killings, calling the crime a barbaric “slur” on the nation.
There are no official figures on honour killings, though an independent study last year suggested that as many as 900 were being committed every year in the northern states of Haryana, Punjab and Uttar Pradesh.
Many go unreported, with police and local politicians turning a blind eye to what some see as an acceptable form of traditional justice.
-Agencies