Reporting honour killings

BY Rajashri Dasgupta, la xmi murthy| IN Media Practice | 17/01/2010

If wishes could come true India would soon be a casteless society - with monetary blessings from the State to boot!  To make India a 'barrier-free country', the Central government has communicated to the states that they are to provide financial incentives to couples who marry outside their caste. Yet there's a catch in this apparently admirable directive - the incentive does not cover couples of inter-faith marriages. According to media reports, this is definitely not on the government's list of priorities. Apparently the last thing the government needs is to get mired in controversy over religious laws. Its focus is, at present, on inter-caste marriages alone, and the final decision on inter-religious marriages is still to be made. 

In various parts of the country, couples have been hounded, attacked, ostracized, humiliated, and even killed for defying cultural norms and daring to marry outside their caste or religion. From the 2009 media reports on Uttar Pradesh, the Lucknow-based Association for Advocacy of Legal Initiatives (AALI) has found 70 incidents of 'honour killing' and 64 incidents of ?honour-related crimes? in this state alone. In Haryana, on an average there are 8-10 'honour crimes' or deaths reported every month in the media.  In fact, feminists frequently object to the term 'honour' to describe these incidents because not only does it invoke a sentiment of a code of honour totally inappropriate to these heinous crimes, but also obscures the criminal motives behind them.  Nevertheless, for lack of an alternative, this report continues to use the word 'honour' within quotes for such crimes.

It is a well-known (and much-reported) fact that if the State aspires for a unified society, it will first have to put its own house in order.  In most incidents, allege activists, it is the police and the lower judiciary - the representatives of the State - who have been the obstacles to any satisfactory resolution or closure. The police's usual response has been at best apathy to the plight of couples when they have sought its protection, or at worst violation of human rights themselves by arresting the men in inter-caste/religion couples and/or brutally torturing them!

The lower judiciary is also guilty of a similar bias and there is a wide gap between the written law it supposedly upholds and its actual legal interventions. There are several instances where the judiciary has revealed itself as supporting a paternalistic view, keen to protect the interests of the guardians of the woman rather than that of the besieged couple, even when the woman has provided evidence of her age and voiced her consent to be with her husband/lover, two conditions required by law. 

The role of the media in reporting such cases was the topic of an animated discussion recently in Lucknow, organized by the AALI with a small group of print journalists.  It was an alert media in Calcutta that had exposed the tragedy of Rizwanur Rehman's death in September 2007. Rizwanur's death is one of the most infamous incidents of abuse of power by the guardians of society. Three senior police officials in the police headquarters bullied and threatened Rehman, a teacher, for marrying his student Priyanka, a daughter of the famous Todi business family.

 On September 21, 2007, three weeks after his marriage, Rehman's body was found on the railway tracks, leading to angry protests and demonstrations and the police bring accused of foul play. Following the hue and cry raised by the public and the media, and also afraid that the incident might turn communal, the state government was forced to suspend both the accused officers and the police commissioner for his comments justifying the police brutalities meted out to Rizwanur.

This case is interesting because initially, the media had missed Rehman's story and the media report on the 'unidentified corpse' on the city's train tracks was lost in a paragraph on the inside pages of newspapers. However, an astute and alert human rights activist and a discerning news editor of a Bengali electronic channel who smelt a 'big story' involving 'powerful people' behind the corpse were responsible for highlighting the case soon after by setting up a panel discussion on the role of the police and the Todi family in the mysterious death of Rizwanur Rehman.

Nevertheless in several instances the press is neither alert to such violations nor sensitive in reporting such issues. During the discussion in Lucknow, participants felt that except for a few sensitive reporters, most reports did not deal with the issue with sympathetic understanding for runaway couples, or probe and contextualize the killing or violence in a larger social and cultural milieu. Often the headlines ('Bhai ne premdiwani behen ka sir kalam kar diya', and 'Larki ke bhaiyo ne utara isshk ka bhoot') for the stories were confusing and sensation-mongering. The language used in these reports was also titillating, trivializing the issue and masking the true nature and depth of these crimes on human rights.  The violence faced by the couples or the brutal killing by the family or community was often treated and reported like any other petty crime of the day, such as theft or extortion.

At the meeting a reporter made the point that it was the 'crime beat' reporters who are actually briefed by the police and are the sole source of information of the news reports about such incidents.  Apart from the usual pressure of deadlines and lack of space,  these reporters are neither encouraged to probe the cause of the crime, nor do small newspapers have the financial means to send reporters to the spot of crime to investigate.  A cursory scan of some media reports reveal that seldom do reporters question whether the man involved in the relationship is really a 'rapist' or an 'abductor' ( the usual charges filed by the woman's parents against the man to nail him) or in a consensual relationship. The media swallows the police version ad verbatim without further investigation.

By and large the tone of the Bengali and the Hindi press is generally gossipy and sensational when reporting such cases. Most reports reflect a moralistic tone on how a woman is 'trapped', (not willing), in 'sexual lust',  (not love), without delving into the larger issue of the family's rigid control or the community's interference on matters of adult desire. Couples, or a partner who is driven to suicide, are described poetically in the Bengali media as preme bhiphol or 'failed in love', for which the lovers heroically 'chose death' - 'becche nilen mritu!', rather than highlight the point that these men and women were in fact forced to die from social rejection and frustration.

While strongly condemning such violence against couples, the press, especially the English media, tends to pitch 'honour killings' as a phenomenon restricted to an intolerant, culturally backward rural India. This approach stereotypes rural communities as stagnant and irrational, a section that is responsible for dragging down the development and progress of urban India that is set to make waves worldwide.

But while the English press liberally use the term 'honour killing' to describe the crimes against couples in rural communities, this is completely missing while describing similar murders in urban settings. The press never described Rizwanur Rehman's death in Calcutta as an 'honour crime', and it did not do so even in the case of Nitish Katara.

A Delhi-based business executive, Katara was murdered in 2002 because he was in love with the daughter of DP Yadav, a controversial politician in Uttar Pradesh with several charges of murder against him.  In an earlier interview, feminist historian Uma Charavarti had said:  'The media tends to portray such violence as the typical backwardness of rural regions refusing to modernize. There is seldom any informed discussion or analysis in the media of the patriarchal hurdles couples face at every stage and of customs that perpetuate the violence.'

It would be ironic if the media itself - in its partiality towards sensational language and focus on scandals rather than factual and sensitive reporting - became one more hurdle in the path of the brave couples who actually point the way to a 'barrier-free country' by discarding outdated customs and norms in their fight to be together as life partners.