Indian police arrested a man and accused him of beheading his own teenage daughter in anger over his relationship with another man he did not like, BBC News reported on Thursday, in what appears to be the last horrible case of the so-called ” honor killing “in the Asian nation. Police in Uttar Pradesh state said Sarvesh Kumar was arrested while walking towards the local police station carrying his daughter’s head.
BBC News said the local police released a video of Kumar confessing to the crime, in which he explains that he was furious when he learned of his daughter’s relationship, returned home to find her alone, arrested her in a room and beheaded her. a with a sharp object.
Neighbors reported to the police the sight of Kumar apparently carrying his daughter’s head across the Hardoi district on Wednesday after he committed the alleged crime.
Sanjeev Verma / Hindustan Times / Getty
Honor killings are the main problem in India, neighbor Pakistanand other countries where family members – mostly women and girls – are attacked and even killed by their relatives for bringing shame on the family. These crimes are more common in rural communities, where centuries-old traditions and deeply rooted cultural norms still dictate the rules of everyday life.
According to the BBC, although there are no official statistics, hundreds of people are believed to be killed in India every year by family members because of relationships or marriages that were against the wishes of their parents or other elderly people.
Honor killing is just one aspect of a much broader problem of violence against women and girls that India has been fighting for years. The BBC said statistics compiled by India’s National Crime Records Bureau show that more crimes were committed against women last year in Uttar Pradesh than in any other Indian state.
In March 2020, India hanged four men for the brutal gang rape of a paramedic student in Delhi in 2012. The rape and murder of the 23-year-old woman sparked massive street protests across India and brought global attention to the situation Indian women.
But Arshad R. Zargar of CBS News reported that little has changed, despite the outburst of public anger. Government data released in September 2020, which showed an average of 87 rapes were reported every day in the previous year – an increase of more than 7% over 2018.
In January, an Indian court’s decision that palpating a child cannot be considered sexual assault, as long as there is no “skin-to-skin contact” or “sexual intent”, was widely criticized by human rights activists.
Judge Pushpa V. Ganediwala’s decision at the Bombay High Court cleared a 39-year-old man who had been accused of sexually assaulting a 12-year-old girl in 2016 for crimes.