By Nikita Jain:
Newspapers and news channels are filled with news of a young couple butchered to death because they belonged to the same ‘gotra’ and the village. The boy was beheaded in front of his house while the girl was stabbed to death by her own parents. This is not all. According to the reports, the father of the girl does not even have a pinch of remorse for what he did and claims he did it to save the ‘honor’ of his family and village. Both the boy and the girl were mere 22 years of age and wanted to marry each other but nobody approved of the marriage because they belonged to the same gotra. So, they ran away from their home to marry each other and break all the rules made by our mute society but unfortunately, they were caught and brutally killed.
Welcome to the reality of India where things like caste and ‘gotra’ still exists and where people who love each other are killed for some nonexistent ‘honor’. This news is just a reality check reminding us that nothing has changed. Honor killing is not new in India especially in places like Haryana, where this incident has taken place. A lot of innocent people have lost their lives like that in the name of ‘honor killing’.
You can’t pin point a community but the problem of honor killing still exists in many parts of India, especially north India. We talk about changing our country and every day we open the newspaper or switch to a news channel to find disturbing news like this. Talk about development and here it is, right before our eyes where two people who want to marry each other are killed because the so called norms of this society tells them not to. Their own parents kill them and they don’t regret any single action done in this blind adherence to ‘customs’.
Have you ever wondered who make these norms in our society? People are not born with the ‘gotra’ written on their foreheads and which set of people they are not allowed to marry. Even after all this, we call ourselves a democracy. A democratic country where people old enough to take their own decisions are killed because they make a little effort to live their own lives. It is their very family who claims to love them which creates an obstacle. A person who has legally acquired the right to marry anyone they want to should be able to exercise it.
Is this the kind of place we wish to live in? Is this really about honor or about forcing the people follow these blind prohibitions?
What is the use of getting educated when the people of this country still want to live like illiterates? So many things have been said about honor killing and the government promises to take action against this but we still come across such instances almost every day. It should be called ‘dishonor killing’, killing just for the sake to satisfy the ego that dwells in them.
The lady in the court holding the balance for justice has a blindfold upon her eyes too. Is justice for these young people still lurking in the dark? Will there ever be enough independence to make our own decisions? We are called ‘the future of our country’. Are we? Is this the change that everybody was talking about?
The so-called society makers appear to be heartless creatures who never lived their lives and now they have taken up the job of forcing others to do the same. But they have forgotten that it just takes a match stick to burn down the whole forest and it is yet to come.