Killing for honour

One thing is common for women living across both sides of the Pak-India border: their victimization at the hands of those who are their protectors and loved ones.

Data collected from local newspapers for the year 2018 reflects that more than 55 percent crimes against women in Pakistan were committed by blood relatives. Sample data on similar crimes shows that nearly 45 percent victims in India also became victims of the same predators. The data collected doesn’t cover all the occurrences of such crimes in both countries but is good enough for an analyst to draw a picture that can point to some basic causes of the problem.

The reason I had to collect data on a personal level is to gain access to information that cannot be obtained from the data officially available. Social crimes against women are committed in both India and Pakistan. The most common are honour killing, sexual assault, domestic violence, matrimonial disputes, and violence against women. Two of these offences, honour killings and sexual assaults, are linked with one basic human instinct: attraction to the opposite sex. Ironically, in one case the act of attraction invites death, but in the other case it leads to a person disgracing another person without feeling the loss of honour and respect.

Unlike terrorism, the crime of honour killing is mostly committed without any discrimination against any religion, caste, creed, and ethnicity. As many as 209 women were killed in Pakistan during 2018 for honour; 47 of them were killed by blood relatives like fathers, brothers, and in one case a mother was also found to have committed this crime. All of these women were Muslims and so were their killers.

Social crimes are a reflection of the socio-cultural values and political policies of a country and indicators of how tolerant or intolerant a society is. Honour killings in Pakistan are largely committed not just by blood relatives but by close relatives. In 2018, 54 percent of all such killings were carried out by close relatives and only 19 percent by blood relatives. Among close relatives, the highest number of crimes was committed by husbands but the sense of honour of the family didn’t end at fathers, brothers and husbands; uncles, cousins, nephews, brothers-in-law, and fathers-in-law also took part in this honour-saving ritual. One of the reasons for the involvement of relatives in this crime is that there has been a provision of law in Pakistan under which legal heirs can pardon a guilty person.

In 2018, Pakistan suffered 1133 fatalities from terrorist and counter-terrorist incidents; only 20 women were among the victims. Honour killing alone took the lives of nearly 116 females in the country during the same period based on my personal data. Terrorist attacks, as is well known, are carried out by hard-core militants associated with organizations that carry certain ideologies. Honour killing, on the other hand, is carried out by those who carry no past history of crime, no affiliation with any organization having an agenda for such crimes, and majority of them are very close to the victims.

Women are not the only ones who became victims of this crime; a large number of men have also been targeted. Out of 222 casualties of honour killings that I recorded in 2018, 97 belonged to men – more than 40 percent of the total. This data reflects a small part of honour killing in Pakistan because there is no reliable source from where complete and reliable data can be accessed. The website of the Punjab Police alone shows 244 fatalities from honour killings in the province while the Sindh Police shows 108 fatalities for the year 2018. Balochistan and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa have no database for this crime.

Regardless of data maintenance issues, the crime of honour killing is so merciless in its nature that the numbers become irrelevant in the face of the brutality that gets unleashed in the name of it.

And, in performing this honourable ritual, perpetrators on both sides of the border behave no different from each other. A desire for inter-caste marriage quite often ends up in a fatalistic reaction in India while Hindus living in Pakistan face a tragedy that is conversely opposite to what their religious brethren experience in India. In Pakistan, the Hindu community often complains that their daughters are being kidnapped, converted to Islam by force and married off to Muslim boys by some influential people with a religious agenda. Two influential pirs in Sindh are notoriously famous for providing shelter to those Muslim men who kidnap Hindu girls and force them to enter into marriage by converting their religion.

The crimes committed in the name of honour leave behind a tragic trail of unfortunate families who succeed to keep the conceptual honour of their families alive but not their own children. According to a BBC report of December 7, 2016, Indian police had registered 251 cases of honour killings in 2015, compared with 28 cases reported in 2014. This steep rise in honour killings in India is attributed to the change in the data recording system by the Indian police that began keeping honour killing data separate from murder.

For more than 65 years after Independence these brutal crimes remained unattended by the government, a sign of the cultural influence that played its role in keeping this crime under the radar. However, women’s activists in India say the numbers recorded by the police are still vastly underestimated. One study in 2011 suggested that about 900 people were murdered in the name of honour every year in India.

Even if the unofficial figures of 900 fatalities for honour are accepted as correct, they appear to be very low in comparison with the unofficial figures of 700 victims for similar crimes in Pakistan, especially when we apply the population difference that exists between these two countries. Can this be attributed to the secular democratic system that has been practised in India? Despite being a secular country, the persistence of similar hatred as reflected in honour the killings’ incidences is proof that society couldn’t learn anything from its past experiences.

Marrying within the same religion and caste is the only norm widely acceptable in India; any deviation is bound to invite the wrath of society. Of eight incidents of honour killings in India that I recorded during 2018, only one was the result of a love affair in which a man and his two sons had chopped off a boy’s genitals upon finding him with his daughter in the city of Gorakhpur. All other incidents were triggered by inter-caste or inter-faith marriages or affairs.

While Pakistan suffers from honour killing as a result of free-will marriages or love affairs, the same crime is carried out in India by adding religious and caste related hatred in it. Among all social crimes, honour killing leaves little chance of survival for the victims. Yet the non-availability of any official data on this crime in India and in some provinces of Pakistan is a reflection of criminal negligence on the part of the relevant authorities.

Every year, hundreds of men and women living in both countries are mercilessly killed in the name of honour because both societies carry a mindset that doesn’t consider such acts as crime – a reason that lets this crime continue on irrespective of what the law of the land says or religion commands. Despite living in two different countries, practising different political systems and following different religions, the plight of the women living in Pakistan and India remain unchanged. This demands a new strategy since the trend is not declining but growing in both countries.

The writer is a freelance journalistand researcher.

Email: mohammad.nafees@yahoo.com