New Reply

Post a Reply

Thread: What do you think of "Honour Killing"?

Title: (100 characters at most)

Content: ( 3,000 characters at most, please )

You can add emoticons below to your post by clicking them.

[quote=SHESGOTTOBE,288703]THE POWER OF UPPER CASTE MEN

The relatively prosperous northern state of Haryana is one of India's most conservative when it comes to caste, marriage and the role of women. Deeply patriarchal, caste purity is paramount and marriages are arranged to sustain the status quo.

Men and women are still murdered across the villages of northern India for daring to marry outside their caste, but in Haryana the practice is widespread, and widely supported.

Here, women veil their faces with scarves in public. The illegal abortion of female fetuses is common, the ratio of women to men in Haryana just 861 to 1,000, the lowest in the country.

Anyone who transgresses social codes, by marrying across caste boundaries or within the same village, is liable to meet the same fate as Sunita and Jasbir.

Many such murders are never reported, hardly any result in prosecution, says Professor Javeed Alam, chairman of the Indian Council of Social Science Research.

"People from the same village are treated as siblings in Haryana," he said. "So this is treated as incest."

Without any law to prohibit this kind of marriage, "the only way you can punish it is by taking the law into your own hands. People believe people who commit incest should be killed."

Nor do politicians ever renounce the practice, Alam added, because if they did, "they would not win elections."

And the legalization of property rights for women in 1956 made love marriages within a village even more dangerous for this elite, as daughters living close to home could in theory claim a part of the family land, sociologist Prem Chowdhry says.

[/quote]

characters left

Name:

Get a new code