| A spike in ‘honour’ killings in Haryana—three reported in the past month—sent me to Hisar to understand how and why parents in modern India continue to kill their adult children for the simple act of falling in love. Read on… The big story Dying for love: The shame of modern India  Meena and Tejbir at their wedding on April 22 / The Indian Express Tejbir Singh, 29, the son of a farmer, had been in love for two years with Meena, 28. She was the daughter of his maternal uncle’s brother-in-law, not a blood relation by a mile but still, out of bounds for marriage in Haryana. When the families refused to accept the relationship, Tejbir and Meena decided to elope. On April 22, they got married at the Arya Samaj temple in Ghaziabad. Meena’s family was so infuriated that they threatened to kill them both. The frightened couple moved to a police safe house in Hisar where they lived from May 1-4. According to the police complaint filed by Mahtab Singh, Tejbir’s father, attempts at reconciliation with Meena’s family failed, but Mahtab Singh accepted the marriage and the couple then moved out of the safe house and into the family home at Badala village. On June 24 at 8.15 am, the couple set off on Tejbir’s motorcycle to go to Delhi. Two hours later, Mahtab Singh got the news: His son and daughter-in-law had been shot. Their bodies were lying at the Lala Hukam Chand Jain Park. Tejbir was neatly dressed in a white shirt and dark pants. Meena still wore the traditional red bangles of a new bride. She was wearing red.  Lala Hukam Chand Jain Park, Hansi / Namita Bhandare On a hot and humid day, you would be hard-pressed to find traces of the grisly crime committed just days earlier. Apart from a few desultory malis, there is only one couple taking a slow round on the walking path. The man has a hanky on his head to protect himself from the sun. I wonder who they are and what plans are being made. Just outside a gazebo where the bodies were found, there’s a slight patch of discolouration on the grass where Tejbir fell. Meena was just a few feet away, probably killed while trying to run. The grass where she fell is smooth and green. Two arrests have been made so far: Meena’s younger brother Sachin and cousin Rahul are both 21, both class 12 pass-outs and both unemployed. Rahul has a previous rap sheet in a firing incident. Apparently it is he who got in touch with Meena on Instagram, trying to persuade her to return home. But in the park where they met, they had come with pistols, prepared to kill. No honour in this killing  Tejbir Singh / The Tribune Maqsood Ahmed, the superintendent of police, Hansi says this is the first case of ‘honour’ killing in his career. “There is no honour in killing,” he points out. What has shocked Ahmed the most, he says, is the ‘lack of remorse’ shown by the two boys who’ve been arrested. “They don’t believe they have done anything wrong,” he said. In Haryana, the intersection of patriarchy, which ties family and community ‘honour’ to a woman’s sexual choices, and caste has had disastrous consequences. In just the past month, three other cases have been reported in the state. In Sirsa, Jagdish Singh was arrested on June 17 for allegedly strangling his 27-year-old daughter to death for talking on the phone to her boyfriend. The family initially tried to pass off her death as a ‘heart-attack’ and had buried her in the family courtyard. After his arrest, the father confessed to the murder. On June 18 in Kaithal, a 17-year-old boy shot dead his newly married sister. Minutes later, he confessed on Instagram: “Anyone who takes a Gujjar daughter will meet the same fate.” Then he went and surrendered at the police station. The brother was reportedly furious because his sister had married a Dalit man four months ago. On June 9, in Narnaul district, a woman from Dholera village eloped with a man from the neighbouring village of Bigopur. Dholera residents are furious—a man from a neighbouring village is considered a ‘brother’—and have reportedly cut off access to Bigopur until the marriage is annulled by the panchayat. There are many degrees of prohibition for marriage from inter-faith to inter-caste and same-gotra to someone from the adjoining village. When I mention to a woman police officer that Tejbir and Meena were not really related, she rolls her eyes. “For people in Haryana he was,” she said. “Young people are just rushing off to get married without asking their parents and without thinking of the consequences,” she told me. The problem, says Deepender Deswal, a correspondent with The Tribune, is the lack of mindset change in rural Haryana where unemployment is high and young people have “too much time on their hands”. Rule by mob  CLPR In the villages of Haryana, all-male khap panchayats, or social clans (not to confused with gram panchayats that are tasked with village administration) continue to wield disproportionate influence over social life. In a development unrelated to the Hansi killing, khap panchayats last week met to demand a central law that would make parental consent mandatory in all love marriages. They also asked for a ban on live-in relationships and the lowering of the age of marriage for women from 18 to 16. These measures, they claim, are to bring down incidents of ‘honour’ killing. “We don’t have any issue with a love marriage or court marriage but parental permission must be sought while solemnising marriage,” a spokesman for the khap panchayats said. Honour killings are not unique to Haryana but are prevalent in western Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu. Cases have been reported in the recent past in Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Jharkhand and Kerala. National Crime Records Bureau data records 25 such killings in India in 2019 and 2020; another 33 in 2021. These figures are likely to be much higher given that families collude to supress the facts, say activists. Conviction rates are poor, says Maqsood Ahmed, as witnesses turn hostile in court and families and even communities band together to protect the accused. Attempts to bring in a separate law to deal with ‘honour’ killings have failed. In 2012, the Law Commission had drawn up a draft bill but it was not even taken up for discussion in Parliament. This week in Tamil Nadu, where a CPI (M) office was ransacked on June 13 after an inter-caste couple sought refuge there, chief minister M.K. Stalin clarified that he was not keen to bring in a separate bill on honour killings. As of now, only Rajasthan has a law to deal with honour killings Back in Hisar, the bodies of Tejbir and Meena were handed over to Mahtab Singh. The two were cremated on a single pyre. Her family did not attend. Reading list: Sagrika Kissu’s report in The Print on rural Haryana’s war with love marriage Law Commission of India: Prevention of Interference with the Freedom of Matrimonial Alliances (in the name of honour and tradition). A suggested legal framework aka the honour crimes bill Shakti Vahini v Union of India Dalit Human Rights Defenders Network, Crimes in the name of honour: A national shame (name and email required for a download link) | 
