Investigating an honour killing
Manoj and Babli: A Hate Story
By Chander Suta Dogra
Penguin Books India 2013
pages: 239, price Rs 299
Two decades ago, they weren't called ‘honour killings’, at least not in journalistic parlance, and they were covered in a vastly different manner from the way they are now. With no 24 hour news channels, and an often quiescent local press, it was left to reporters from a handful of national print publications to communicate the full horror of well-off farming families with running water in their taps, and electrical appliances in their homes, killing their girls for loving the ‘wrong’ men. While those reports did not lack horrifying facts or powerful adjectives, they contributed little, in the end, to reversing the impunity enjoyed by the perpetrators. It is telling that in the Mehrana case of 1991, so gruesome (a 16-year-old Jat girl was hanged to death from a tree with two male friends, whose genitals were first set on fire) that it got what then passed for saturation coverage, the killers went unpunished for over 20 years. It was only in 2011 that a verdict was delivered in the case.
Cut to 2007 and the Manoj-Babli case, placed under a magnifying glass by journalist Chander Suta Dogra in her 239-page book. Many among the cast of characters are chillingly familiar: terse, stone-faced male relatives with blood on their hands, silent, sequestered female relatives, complicit policemen and tacitly approving politicians. But some essentials have changed. Among them, unquestionably, is the role of the media. We learn from this fast-paced account how a competitive, scandal-seeking and invasive media – adjectives we usually use in a negative context -- turns out, warts and all, to be a pretty good friend to those seeking justice for Babli and Manoj, a couple famously murdered by her kinsmen for marrying within the same "gotra". Famously, because this became the first case in which a court sentenced to death those accused of killing for the sake of ‘honour’ – and perhaps even more importantly, the verdict came just three years after the crime was committed.
The case having caught its fancy, the media becomes omnipresent –asking awkward questions in police-stations, getting its cameras broken at district courts, door-stepping officials at the collectorate, recording provocative statements made at khap panchayat meetings. It can do all this because it mostly hails not from the national capital, or even the state capital, but from dusty small towns across Haryana. Its raw energy helps avert a cover-up of the murders, and forces the pace of the investigation. For the researcher, as Chander Suta discovers, it provides a useful archive. In a place that hugs its secrets to itself, video recordings by intrepid local stringers of TV channels and hundreds of news clippings help her capture “the pressures and persuasions taking place outside the courts” and the impact of the case in rural Haryana.
It is in teasing out these pressures and persuasions that Chander Suta’s book extends the existing reportage on the Manoj-Babli case. Having covered Haryana for two decades, she understands well the ties between its politicians, police and panchayats. Combining that knowledge with archival research and extensive interviewing, she details what it really takes to fight lawless patriarchy on its home turf. While some of the larger ‘why’questions about khap panchayats and ‘honour’ killings are addressed on the margins of the story, it is the story of this fight, with its twists and turns, that animates the book.
In trying to bring the couple’s killers to justice, instead of retreating, as is ‘normal’, into terrified acquiescence with their crime, Manoj’s mother, Chandrapati and his sister, Seema, unleash an almighty row. As their alliance with the media, and a group of social activists, takes shape and tastes success, the pressures pile up: the casual crueltyof the police; a chillingly effective social boycott in the village; palpable lack of support from politicians, including the chief minister, who visits the village, consorts with the conspirators, and side-steps the bereaved family; harsh words, magnified by the media, from khap panchayats; cash offers, death threats; a slap from the accused in the courtroom, the searing humiliation of Manoj’s kid brother having to accept a prize at school from the mastermind behind the killings.
Hearteningly, Dogra also details precisely how shifts in the powerplay are achieved to the advantage of the struggling family; how snowballing media attention and visits from Delhi-based outfits like the National Commission for Women make it unviable for politicians to support khap leaders; and how the law, when actually forced to work, reduces seemingly invincible thugs to bitter losers, which in turn gives others the courage to speak up. What comes through is that this is not a stark war between ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’; there are many shades in between.
Embedded in this narrative are many stories of quiet heroism: the woman judge who after a sleepless night mulling the consequences, delivers a strong verdict and refuses a transfer to a safer place; a lawyer who, egged on by his juniors, agrees to take a on the difficult case; social activists from the same Jat community as the murderers and victims, resisting pressure in their personal and professional lives because of the case; a young relative of Manoj’s family turning down a fortune from the accused.
But the story ultimately belongs to the two women at the centre. Rural Haryanvi women often seem feisty, yet put up with huge inequities. Here, the courage runs deep. Respect grows as you learn from this book how they carry on after the media glare has faded from their lives: not with despair but smiling resilience, sharing a village with the families of their boy’s killers, and their tiny toilet with the policemen who guard them day and night.