ARORA
SHORTLY after they eloped and married, Manoj and Babli Banwala, childhood sweethearts from India’s northern state of Haryana, were dragged from a bus by some of her male relatives, taken to a field near their village of Karora and murdered. Nineteen-year-old Babli was forced to drink pesticide by her brother. Manoj, 23, was garrotted by his bride’s uncle. Their crime, according to the tribal council that ordered the killing, was to have married within the same Hindu clan, or gotra, which many north Indians consider tantamount to incest.
In Haryana, Punjab, Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan, incautious lovers, especially young women, are quite often murdered by disapproving male relatives. There are estimated to be perhaps several hundred such “honour killings” every year, mostly to rub out the stain of inter-caste or intra-clan liaisons. Karora’s khap panchayat, an unelected taboo-enforcing council, ordered the killing of another same-gotra couple last year; the 27-year-old man was lynched and his body publicly displayed. What is remarkable about the Banwalas’ 2007 case, however, is that the killers have been brought to justice: last month five of Babli’s relatives, including her uncle and brother, were sentenced to death.
Appeals loom and the sentences may not be carried out. Executions rarely are in India. Yet the case has already grabbed much more attention than do most honour-killings. On April 13th 4,000 khap panchayat members gathered to protest against the verdicts. An ugly nexus between politicians, policemen and these self-appointed guardians of tradition—who tend to dominate elected local assemblies as well as unelected caste ones—keeps most honour-killings out of court. The killers of Manoj and Babli were pursued largely at the insistence of the groom’s mother, Chandrapati. The capital sentences—the first ever in an honour-killing case—possibly owe something to the trial-judge being a woman.
In her small brick house Chandrapati shows off a portrait of the newly wedded couple, garlanded with marigolds. She says their murders were witnessed by the local khap leaders, who then ordered her neighbours to ostracise her and her family, or pay a 25,000 rupee ($560) fine. The police, who had been charged to protect the couple, at first refused to register them as missing. But when their bodies turned up in a canal, Chandrapati says she spurned an offer of compensation from the khap leaders and, while fearing retribution, demanded justice. “I am poor but I can’t fix a price for my dead son,” she says.
To get tough on honour killing, the government in Delhi has mooted a new law. But it is not obvious why the police would be any likelier to enforce it. As events in Karora suggest, honour-killing persists at least partly because many villagers approve of it. Surendra Sharma, a 26-year-old tea-seller, says: “The killers did the right thing. This will teach people to respect the sanctity of the brother-sister relationship.” As rural Indians become more mobile and less caste-bound, such attitudes are likely to fade. But it may be a bloody transition.