At Wazirpur village, honour is a flighty commodity. Lost if your sister gets married on her own. And it is reclaimed if your relatives and friends hail that sister's murder at your hands, on camera. A brother-in-law shot dead is also thrown in as icing.
Because, in the fringes of the national capital this has come to mean 'honour'.
When one was barely done being outraged by the Khap pronunciations on marriage and the 'science' behind it, a spate of blood spilling blood began in the capital. Caste or economic status were passed off as the reasons, only too often by the papers.
In the Wazirpur and Swaroop Nagar murders, it was the girls' families who struck. In both multiple murders, the burden of the family's 'honour', established by wealth or by caste, lay on the girls. It was the male relatives who objected with the female relatives nodding. The women in both houses were vocal only in highlighting the girls 'crimes' and defending those of their men.
It is easy to believe that honour has been defined in both families as preserving the patriarchal order, where women are expected to toe the line. Any form of assertion of free will by the girls was probably seen as a threat to that honour so well-presevered by acquiesence of the older women.
But the differences are equally stark.
At Swaroop Nagar, neighbours had tried to intervene when Asha Saini and her boyfriend, Yogesh were being beaten to death. At Wazirpur, the neighbours are busy putting a halo over the head of Ankit Chaudhary and Mandeep Nagar who along with their friend Nakul, shot Ankit's sister Monica, her husband Kuldeep and Mandeep's sister Shubha.
Yogesh drove an autorickshaw for a living and Kuldeep was killed in his Esteem.
But the most important difference has to be that while Saini was killed by her father and his elder brother- both in their 50s - Monica, her husband Kuldeep and cousin Shubha were killed by three men in their early 20s.
Saini's uncle Om Prakash and her father Suraj Kumar said that they did not regret what they did. Asha had "frustrated them" by continuing her relationship (strike three) with Yogesh who belonged to a different caste (strike two) and was an autorickshaw driver (strike one).
Ankit and Mandeep hold on to their Gujjar identity as their defence. After all, life in the playground had become difficult for them ever since Monica married Kuldeep against the family's wishes and Shubha eloped with a Muslim man and returned a few months later. Friends' taunts would hurt harder than brawls over them, they say.
This warped logic of honour being a variable of the collective - starting with the family, moving on to the neighbourhood and ending with the community - has transcended generations. Educated, urban youth who are exposed to a cultural mismash where freedom competes with being seen as liberated (not universally held as a desirable trait), are choosing to imbibe crude definitions of honour. A taint on this 'honour' and these boys are ready to kill without the fear of consequence.
The stray voices of support from Wazirpur must be feeding the boys' delusions of honour, and martyrdom defending it if they are punished. An uncle mouthing "Yeh murder samaj ke liye zaroori tha" must have already sent the worst message he could have to the youth in his community. Ankit and Mandeep, killers, could already be the Indian Idol for some misguided youngster, in the absence of a real role model.
Most of this happened because the state has been lax in enforcing laws. A Special Marriage Act makes inter-caste marriage legal, but not protected from those who oppose it, and how! A murder is termed a 'honour killing' repeatedly by the media, everytime stacking social sanction for a crime. And at both instances, state fails the victims - present and future. A lax enforcement of law goes on to create 'martyrs'. And the killers spawn another generation guided by what they understand of honour.
Never accepting that their real shame is in being tagged a murderer. The real dishonour is in the act of killing one's own.
