Dis-honour killings

In yet another shocking incident (we have become numb to shock), two women were kidnapped, paraded naked and then gang-raped in a village near Naukot town of district Mirpurkhas, Sindh earlier this month.

The two women were abducted by more than 20 people belonging to the Tangri community at Nafees Nagar from the house of Mohammad Hanif Rajput. The incident took place after a girl of the Tangri community left her home and married a boy of the Rajput community. After the incident, the people of the Tangri exacted their “revenge”.

Local media reported that the women were later rescued after almost a day when MPA Mir Tariq Talpur reached the area and, with the help of contingents of police, got both abducted women released. The women told the media that they were both stripped naked, forced to parade and then were raped by many men for many hours.

The relatives of the victims who staged demonstrations in Naukot said that they believed the attackers were from the Tangri community. Since then, a First Information Report (FIR), under relevant sections of the Pakistan Penal Code, has been registered against the accused. Parents of the victims alleged that if police officials had acted in time, the women would have been saved.

Given the twisted notions of honour in our country, it is feared that this incident will not be the last of its kind. People seem to have accepted this. There is no outrage in our society over such incidents. One also has to look at the role of the state. The two young women, aged 14 and 19, when rescued, stated that their kidnappers had active help from the area’s police. According to them, after being kidnapped they were first taken to the house of an ASI, before being shifted to the home of the prime accused.

Sindh seems to have seen a rise in so-called honour killings, A survey of such cases conducted by a local NGO, Sindh Suhai Sath, has revealed that as many as 176 people — 48 men and 128 women — were killed across Sindh by their immediate families last year. Not only that but a drastic increase was also witnessed in such cases in four districts of upper Sindh.

A combination of loopholes in the law, police incompetence and poor prosecution has led to only 2% of the people involved in honour killing being punished. In most of the cases, the police push for a compromise between the two parties. The matter never reaches a court of law.

Three years back, I wrote about three women and a man who lost their lives in three separate cases of alleged honour killing in Sukkur and Matiari districts in a space of a few days. I used these examples to show how prevalent this practice had become. In that short period of time, one woman was shot dead in Khuram village near Sukkur by her husband, who suspected her of having illicit relations with a man in their village.

In another incident, a mother of three was gunned down by her brother in Matiari. She was killed because her brother “suspected her character”. After committing the murder, the accused surrendered to the police and confessed his crime. In the third such case, a mother of three was shot dead by two cousins in Bahram. The accused, Mohammad Lashari and Nazal Khan Lashari, killed their cousin because they suspected her of having illicit relations with her brother-in-law.

I took these three examples to illustrate how similar they were in the manner the crime was committed. Unfortunately, the similarity doesn’t end there. Like hundreds of other such cases, the perpetrators of these crimes will almost never be brought to justice. On an average, as many as 500 women and girls are murdered in honour killing incidents each year, making Pakistan one of the most dangerous countries for women. These victims are not just statistics: they are mothers, daughters and sisters and their deaths destroy families.

According to the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan data, 1,957 incidents of honour killings had been recorded over the past four years. The average rate of honour killing in women between 15-64 years was found to be 15 per million women per year. This may be yet another dubious world distinction we have achieved.

 

Published in The Express Tribune, February 14^th, 2022.

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