2 girls burnt alive for visiting boys in India

by Sanjay Jha | November 10, 2008 at 09:39 pm

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Urban India is progressing fast and aping the west in every posisble way. Love marriages, Live in relationship and extra marital relationship are not very uncommon in urban India. But in some part of the country their rural cousins are still living in stone age. Deep rooted Caste system and Honour Killing are still major social problems ailing rural India & Pakistan.

Honour killings -- where men and women are killed by their kin or members of their caste -- are widely rampant in the South Asia. Across the border, in Pakistan, "honour killings" are equally rampant. Scores of women are killed every year for allegedly bringing shame on their husband or family. Women's deaths are explained away on the flimsiest of grounds.

Hundreds, if not thousands, of women are murdered by their families each year in the name of family "honor." It's difficult to get precise numbers on the phenomenon of honor killing; the murders frequently go unreported, the perpetrators unpunished, and the concept of family honor justifies the act in the eyes of some societies.

India's apex court has called Honour killing as an act of barbarism and ordered the police across India to take stern action against those resorting to violence against major boys and girls who go for inter-caste or inter-religious marriages.

As Kaluvas, a village just three km from Bhiwani in Haryana, celebrated Diwali, the festive smiles amid the din of firecrackers and ritual exchange of sweets may just have hidden a horror no one has till now either dared or wanted to speak about.

Almost 13 days after the incident, it now transpires that Rajender Shivran, who claims he couldn’t sleep under the weight of the unspeakable crime, had on November 1 given a written complaint to the Bhiwani SP’s office saying two teenaged girls of the Dhanak community were ‘‘attacked by machetes and axes and stones as soon as they got down from a car on Diwali night (October 28).

The villagers had waited for them after getting wind of their movements. They were unconscious, but alive, when some of the men brought out jars of kerosene and set them on fire.’’

Few days ago two young girls were killed by a close relative just outside Capital New Delhi to protect the family's honour after they eloped with their boyfriends.

The killings happened in Surajpur village of Greater Noida on Thursday when the accused, identified by police as Sonu, confronted his cousins with a .315 calibre countrymade pistol. He first shot Sonam, a class X student. He then reloaded his gun as a terrified Pinky, a class XII student of Dadri Inter College, watched, and shot her.

Although Sonu tried to flee the murder scene, he was unrepentant when the cops caught him. "In ladkiyon ne parivar ki naak katwa di (these girls have sullied the family's reputation)," he told cops.

This was the second such killing within two months in Surajpur. On September 18, in the Dankor police station area, a 16-year-old girl and her 18-year-old paramour were lynched by the girl's family.