| Hello and welcome to Mind the Gap, a newsletter that adds perspective to the gender developments of the week—and what a grim week it's been with the US Supreme Court set to overturn abortion rights and 'dishonour' killings continuing unchecked in modern India. Clearly, a long, hard haul ahead. THE BIG STORY: Dying for love They studied in the same school and had known each other for 11 years. She is Muslim, he a Dalit from the Mala community. When they declared their intention to marry, her family said a flat-out no. On January 30, she left home and a day later married the love of her life at an Arya Samaj temple. Her family filed a missing person's report at the police station. B. Nagaraju, 25 and his wife, Ashrin Sultana, 25, told the superintendent of police, Vikarabad district that they feared for their lives. The police told her parents to stay away from them. But the couple was taking no chances and moved to Vishakapatnam, Andhra Pradesh. Then roughly a week ago, they returned to Hyderabad, some 100 km from their village, where Nagaraju had got a job as a salesman with a car showroom. Still worried about his wife's safety, he would drop her off at her sister's when he went to work. On May 4, at 8.45 pm, the couple was returning home on their motorcycle when they stopped at a crossing. Assailants on two motorcycles attacked Nagaraju with iron rods, stabbing him to death after he fell to the ground while his horrified wife screamed for help. Police have arrested two men, including Ashrin's elder brother Mubin Syed and cousin Mohammad Masood Ahmed. On May 6, Ashrin visited her husband's parental home for the first time since her marriage, clutching in her hands a portrait of Nagaraju. Modern India's shame Between 2014 and 2015, the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) recorded a 792% spike in dishonour killings from 28 to 251 with Uttar Pradesh accounting for 68% of these killings. In August 2021, minister of state for home, Ajay Kumar Mishra told Parliament there had been 145 dishonour killings between 2017 and 2019. Vincent Kathir of Evidence, a Tamil Nadu-based NGO, says the figure is much higher with 70% of the victims women. A 2012 Law Commission report defines these killings as "incidents of violence and harassment caused to [a] young couple intending to marry or having married against the wishes of the community or family members." These murders are carried out most often by the couple's own family and sometimes at the behest of khap panchayats that have no legal recognition. The report recommended a separate law to try these crimes and even proposed a bill called the Prevention of Interference with the Freedom of Matrimonial Alliances (in the name of honour and tradition). The bill was introduced in Parliament in 2015 but lapsed without ever being brought up. Supreme Court ruling In 2018, then chief justice Dipak Misra in a scathing 54-page ruling said, the "human rights of a daughter, brother, sister or son are not mortgaged to the so-called or so-understood honour of the family or clan or the collective." He made a slew of recommendations including moving the trial of such killings to fast-track courts. The judgment asked police to either prevent khap panchayat meetings from taking place or being present at such meetings in order to counsel families and record proceedings. It asked the government to sensitise law enforcement to prevent such violence. It recommended the setting up of safe houses for couples at every district. It recommended the creation of special cells and a 24-hour helpline. Freedom to love At the heart of every dishonour killing lies the question of agency. Children, particularly girls, are brought up to be obedient and filial duty remains a cherished family ideal. In December 2021, a 17-year-old boy decapitated his pregnant 19-year-old sister with a sickle. Then he posed for a selfie with her head. Even though she had married a man of the same caste, her family was reportedly upset because it was a love marriage. In a country, where 93% of all people still have marriages arranged by their parents in keeping with faith, caste and socio-economic lines, the idea that young people might fall in love outside these boundaries remains exceptional and, sometimes, deadly. Notwithstanding the Supreme Court's 2018 ruling, the judiciary's own stand has been ambiguous. In 2017, the Kerala High Court annulled the marriage of a 24-year-old woman who had converted to Islam and then married a Muslim man on the grounds that she was 'weak and vulnerable, capable of being exploited in many ways'. It took the Supreme Court to reverse that ruling for Hadiya to return to the husband she had chosen. Under the name of preventing religious conversion by fraud, already illegal in this country, 'love jihad' laws too subscribe to the idea that adult women are liable to be misled by wily men. No evidence of this so-called love jihad has ever been presented and the National Investigating Agency told the Supreme Court in 2018 that it had no evidence of it in Kerala while investigating the Hadiya case. Yet, with stringent punishments in place, in 10 states it is now virtually impossible for inter-faith couples to marry both by law and by right-wing lynch mobs that act with impunity. | 
