Honour killings are being reported at an unnervingly quick clip, but what escapes attention is the fast and furious increase in numbers of couples seeking protection, fearing for their lives once they decide to marry. Advocates say the Punjab & Haryana high court receives as many as 50 applications a day from couples seeking protection, a staggering ten-fold rise from about 5 to 6 a day five years ago. Such...
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Prying Open India’s Vast Bureaucracy by Akash Kapur
PONDICHERRY, India — P.M.L. Kalayansundaram calls himself a human rights worker. He runs an organization that provides a variety of services to villagers in this area — legal aid, financial assistance to help them organize Marriage and death ceremonies, and free refrigerated coffin boxes that they would otherwise have to procure at exorbitant rates from private merchants. On a recent afternoon, he told me that he had been determined from...
More »HC dismisses PIL against Marriage in same gotra
The Delhi High Court today dismissed a petition seeking amendment to the Hindu Marriage Act (HMA) in order to prohibit Marriages in the same clan (gotra). A vacation bench of Justices S N Dhingra and A K Pathak warned that a heavy cost would be imposed on the petitioner, Naresh Kadyan, for wasting the time of the court prompting him to withdraw his plea. "You don't know what gotra is....
More »There’s no honour in this by Preeti Singh
On Tuesday, readers awoke to the Capital’s night of horror. A young girl, Asha, and her lover, Yogesh, were tortured to death by her family members inside her home, even as neighbours chose to shut out the victims’ screams. Those who tried to intervene were brushed off by family members claiming it was a ‘private matter’. This gruesome crime, committed in the name of ‘family honour’, raises three important questions. First,...
More »Indian community torn apart by 'honour killings' by Geeta Pandey
Umesh Kumar and his wife Satvati Devi were woken in the middle of the night by loud cries coming from the neighbouring house. "She was crying loudly. She was pleading, 'Kill me, but please don't hurt him.' She loved him and they wanted to get married," Ms Devi tells me. Two days after teenage lovers Asha and Yogesh were brutally killed, Swaroop Nagar colony on the north-western outskirts of the...
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