Honour killing

The police in North Waziristan claimed over the weekend to have arrested a man and his nephew in the “honour killing” case of two young women over a viral video. The victims were reportedly cousins. The video reportedly features a man forcibly kissing three young women, two of whom are now dead, and one is apparently in hiding. The dishonourable men were the father of one girl and the brother of the other. The initial FIR, registered on Friday, only mentioned the younger man. Post-arrest reports, however, suggest that both men were directly involved in avenging the ‘dishonour’.

There is also chatter on social media that a local leader from the ruling party in the province and at the Centre actively urged people to kill the girls. If this is true then we must all call on the Prime Minister to clean house and make an example of the party members that egg on such violence. And while the police claim to be looking for the third girl and the man who shot the video, we must ask, for the umpteenth time: Why do victims of harassment wind up dead? Those calling for the ‘restoration’ of tribal honour seemed more focused on the blood of the victims than the man who apparently ‘dishonoured’ them.

While we do not approve of violence, we must remind that honour is in protecting one’s family. If the alleged killers were actually men of honour, the only person they would have tried to gun down would have been the man in the video. Some are going to great lengths to victim-blame by linking the killings to something that is an inherent part of the local culture.

One of the few genuinely good things that happened during British rule was the outlawing of sati — the ritual suicide of a Hindu widow on her husband’s funeral pyre. India did not abolish the law, which technically was an assault on Hindu culture, but only reduced the death penalty for abettors to life imprisonment, in line with the maximum punishment for most violent crimes in the country. And on this note, if a culture approves murdering victims, it is the culture that must die.

Published in The Express Tribune, May 19^th, 2020.

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