This story is dedicated to everyone who lost someone or something in the name of honour killing.
In Hyderabad’s Nalgonda district, three persons have been arrested in connection to the murder of a 23-year-old Dalit man, who had married an upper-caste woman. Yet another instance of honour killing in India.
Should we curse about it, or was it our mistake to wrongly interpret the messages left to us by our ancestors? We have been boasting about ourselves as a growing economy, a tech-giant, modernising in all aspects. But aren’t we missing out something in the quest for achieving these things? Aren’t we missing “the ability to accept people”? Why these boundaries? Boundaries that should have been created for the better functioning of the system, not discriminating against people.
So whom do you think we are supposed to blame? One would end up saying, “the government”, “our parents”, or “the society that brought us up”. But it’s none of them; its us. We always had an option to choose what we want, how we wish to be, but we end up not getting out of these boundaries. We limit ourselves to those hidden constraints which we fail to even recognise at the end of the day.
For the past few days, something has been bothering me a lot. “Killing in the name of Honour”. We read, sympathise, debate on it for a day or two, and then the news ends up in the trash, and the cycle continues; an infinite loop. Even after all those incidents don’t change our mindset. I find newsfeeds flooded with posts sympathising with survivors of these crimes, comments trying to support them, but that’s just limited to Facebook. We pretend to act like we’ve accepted society’s faults, but deep inside we are still the same. We still find it difficult to accept the difference among people.
Not very long ago, pretty recent I would call it, we have seen people celebrating the decriminalisation of Section 377. We hugged, kissed, and expressed our joy in all forms, but what would a piece of paper and a signature do without people accepting it? So the question, now, is, when we aren’t able to accept relationships between people from different castes (or, for that matter, status, as some have suggested), do we have the maturity to accept relationships between people of the same gender? Getting back to the topic, of the murder in Nalgonda, and the pregnant wife of the slain man, all I could do for the woman was offer sympathy and hope for a stable life for her and the child in her womb.
As I write this, another tear drop rolls down from my eyes, and I end up feeling helpless, for all I could do was just pen down a post.