Daughters are not for killing

How is it that daughters are allowed an education, freedom to travel to the city, pursue careers of their choice and live alone - but cannot choose the men they would like to marry? All inroads made by the brave new world are stonewalled the moment women's sexual freedom comes in for scrutiny
Ratna Raman Delhi

I met a young woman a few years ago. She had come to New Delhi and found a job as an assistant in a small shop. She was also in love and her conservative family had come around to accepting her adult choice of a life partner. They were coming to Delhi the following month to formalise her wedding. She was looking forward to it, since single lodgings in the city tended to be shabby, solitary and dreary. "Please do come for my engagement ceremony," she entreated, as her eyes lit up with excitement.  

I assured her of my participation and left my phone number with her so that she could inform me about the date and the location. A couple of months went by but there was no phone call from her.  Not seeing her on a subsequent visit to the shop I enquired about her.  Her employer told me guardedly that she no longer worked there. On my insistent questioning, the harrowing details were divulged. 

A week before her supposed engagement, her family had marched into the city. Her mother and maternal uncles had forcibly dragged her back to the village with them. She had made a frantic phone call to her employer who offered her support. The phone call was cut short. When the employer tried to contact her again, she was told that the girl was returning to her village and would not come in to work anymore. The phone connection was also abruptly terminated. Meanwhile, her beau visited the employer. He confided that he had been knocked off his bike on a couple of occasions and had subsequently received phone calls telling him these were warnings. His family was also threatened. There was no news of the ebullient girl who had wanted to chart her own destiny.

Here was a situation where newspaper statistics had leapt off the page to reveal a grim three dimensional reality. There was no way of contacting the girl and I raged helplessly against a lawless country in which young women could be abducted by their own kinsfolk and treated so shabbily. This was by no means a solitary incident. Something is rotten in the fabric of our country. Something continues to dog and intimidate and brutalise young women. It injures men too in the attempt to settle scores relentlessly and lethally, notching points on behalf of insularity and barbarism and gratuitous gender cruelty. 

In 2000, newspapers carried reports that Bibi Jagir Kaur, a Shiromani Akali Dal councillor in Punjab and chief of the powerful Shiromani Gurudwara Prabhandak Committee, had allegedly abducted her daughter Harpreet, subjected her to an abortion, given her an overdose of pills and consigned her to the flames. This was because the young woman in question had married in secret while studying at a medical college. To date no one has been punished and witnesses in the face of muscle and money power have now turned hostile.  

What exactly was the crime these two young women had committed? What was the basis of their family's behaviour?  How could one even hope to understand this vicious and vitiating practice?