http://www.gulfnews.com/world/India/10213745.html
Smug about the 'death penalty'
Reuters
Published: May 16, 2008, 23:39
Balla: Five armed men burst into the small room and courtyard at
dawn, just as 21-year-old Sunita, 22 weeks pregnant, was drying her
face on a towel.
They punched and kicked her stomach as she called out for her
sleeping boyfriend "Jassa", 22-year-old Jasbir Singh, witnesses said.
When he woke, both were dragged into waiting cars, driven away and
strangled.
Their bodies, half-stripped, were laid out on the dirt outside
Sunita's father's house for all to see, a sign that the
family's "honour" had been restored by her cold-blooded murder.
A week later, the village of Balla, just a couple of hours drive from
New Delhi, stands united behind the act, proud, defiant almost to a
man.
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Among the Jat caste of the conservative northern state of Haryana, it
is taboo for a man and woman of the same village to marry. Although
the couple were not related, they were seen in this deeply
traditional society as brother and sister.
"From society's point of view, this is a very good thing," said 62-
year-old farmer Balwan Arya, sitting smoking a hookah in the shade of
a tree in a square with other elders from the village council or
panchayat. "We have removed the blot."
Growing economic opportunities for young people and lower castes in
Haryana have made "love marriages" more common, experts say, and the
violent repression of them has risen in tandem as upper caste Jat men
fight to hold on to power, status and property.
Father's confession
Sunita's father Om Prakash has confessed to murdering his pregnant
daughter and her boyfriend, police said. An uncle and two cousins
were among four others arrested.
But in Balla many people believe the father confessed merely to
underline that he supported his daughter's killing, to satisfy honour
and protect the real culprits among his family or village.
At their house, Sunita's mother did not emerge to talk. Instead, a
young man on a motorbike tried to intimidate those who dared get
closer. It turned out he was another of Sunita's cousins, his father
and brother held by police.
"We are not ashamed of it, absolutely not, we have the honour of
doing the village proud," he said.
"We would not have had a face to show if we had not done this. It was
the act of 'real men'."
The relatively prosperous state of Haryana is one of the most
conservative when it comes to caste, marriage and the role of women.
The social system is deeply patriarchal, caste purity is paramount
and marriages are arranged to sustain the status quo.
Men and women are still victimised in rural areas 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 foetuses is common and the sex ratio stands at
just 861, 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."
Nor do politicians ever renounce the practice, Alam added, because if
they did, "they would not win elections".
And the legalisation 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.
Sunita and Jasbir, sweethearts in the same class at school, had
little chance. When he left school a couple of years before her to
become a photographer's apprentice, he would often hang around at the
school gates to collect her. She was married off to another man, but
left her husband to elope with Jasbir a year-and-a-half ago, and
while the families tried to keep them apart, they realised it was a
losing battle.
"They were madly in love even to the last day," said Jasbir's 16-year-
old sister-in-law Lalita, standing in the house where they lived in
Machhroli village, around 35km by road from Balla.
To make matters worse, Jasbir was from a lower sub-caste, and Sunita
was pregnant outside marriage. Sunita's parents in Balla found
themselves virtually ostracised.
"Nobody would drink water in our house," Sunita's mother Roshni is
reported to have said.
"My daughter's action made us aliens in our own land. But we have
managed to redeem our honour. She paid for her ill-gotten action."
Grief mixed with fear
But among Jasbir's family, split between Machhroli and Balla, grief
is mixed with fear.
"Why are you talking to the media," shouted a female family member at
one point. "This will only bring more trouble."
At the small police post in Balla, a constable admitted the case was
unlikely to ever reach prosecution, with the village putting enormous
pressure on the police, and especially Jasbir's family, to quietly
drop the case.
"We are being pressurised into reaching an agreement, a compromise,
without even being given time to grieve," said Jasbir's 25-year-old
sister Neelam. "We have been told that if we don't compromise, we
will suffer the same fate."
In the narrow alleyway outside their tiny house, women wailed in
grief. A few hundred yards away, the panchayat sat in quiet self-
satisfaction.
"The people who have done this should get an award for it," said 48-
year-old Satvir Singh. "This was a murder of morality."
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