What will any parent do?
No comment.
Asha’s family was opposed to a marriage because Yogesh belonged to a different, lower caste. Police have described the murders as a case of “honour killing”…The bodies were brought out in the morning once the police arrived. And details began to emerge of the torture and beatings to which the young couple were subjected. “Their mouths were stuffed with rags, there were signs of beating and small burns on legs suggesting that they were possibly electrocuted,” a senior police officer who was the first to reach the crime scene told the BBC.
Asha’s uncle and father were arrested but the two men have shown no remorse.
“I’m not sorry,” a defiant Omprakash Saini told reporters after his arrest. “I would punish them again if given a chance.”
The reporter, Geeta Pandey, went to talk to Yogesh’s family.
The neighbours vouch for Yogesh’s character.
“He was a very good boy,” one of them, Meera Devi, says. “We are very angry. We want justice. If they wanted to kill their daughter, that’s okay. But they shouldn’t have killed our boy.”
At Asha’s home, her relatives are equally angry.
Cousin Lokesh Kumar Saini says: “We had talked to Yogesh and his family in the past and told them to stay away. We had also found a good match for Asha and she was engaged.
“What will any parent do if they see their daughter in a compromising position with a man? What would you do if you were in the same situation?” he asks me angrily. “That’s why my uncles killed them.”
What will any parents do if they see their daughter having sex with a man? Torture her to death, of course! That’s so totally obvious!
But of course there are no problems with Indian culture. All their woes are down to evil western imperialists who corrupted the inherently progressive native culture with decadent bourgeois notions like personal freedom and human rights.
Such a depressing comment, isn’t it? And from a woman.
‘Their’ daughter.
I refer to ‘my’ daughter and also to ‘my’ toothbrush. I see them as two distinct uses of the possessive pronoun. Apparently some people don’t. Of course, I already knew that, but constant confirmation is bloody depressing.
(Sub)cultures like this must be treated EXACTLY as if they were a cult of headshrinkers or cannibals or murderous SS thugs guarding a Concentration Camp.
Sorry if some find this comparison excessive but I truly don’t see why one shouldn’t use the harshest language possible for such despicable murderers and the people cheering them on.
“If they wanted to kill their daughter, that’s okay. But they shouldn’t have killed our boy.”
That’s okay. Because she wasn’t a boy. As Ophelia says, obvious, indeed.
These people must be met with the utmost INtolerance, rejection, disgust, ridicule and contempt. They – AND their “culture”, their precious “traditions” – deserve no respect whatsoever.
How specifically one enforces and and implements this attitude in society – in a free and open society – with the minimal amount of violence and unrest is certainly a very difficult and delicate matter. But it requires first a strong commitment by the policital class, or even better by society at large, to the defense of liberal democracy by being illiberal and intollerant towards these thugs.
However, creating and maintaining this commitment seems to be very VERY difficult, both in the West and in the devel0ping world.
What we need are laws that guarantee human rights, strongly enforced.
Fanatics can go on believing whatever they want, but when they hurt or kill people on account of their loonbattery, off to jail they go.
And of course just because people have (and should have) the right to believe in nonsense doesn’t mean we can’t criticize it, which we should loudly and often.
This is, indeed, a terrible case of religious barbarity, and, as Anna says, these murderers and torturers of young lovers should go straight to gaol. But … and here I want to put my gloss on it … when people say that religion and science are compatible they are speaking about this as well as whatever else they think religion is about. People seem to have no idea what is included in religion. It includes the Fred Phelps of this world who try to whip their children into ‘holiness’, as well as the pope who shelters criminals in the Vatican and then sends his storm troops to whip the Irish into line — because it was, after all, their secularism and falling away from the strict teachings of the church and the respect owed to priests (who are a gift to the world as well as little children) that really led all those priests astray.
I don’t want to draw attention away from a terrible atrocity for which the most that can be said is that it is simply unintelligible that people should act this way, except that religion is hovering in the background, and so, suddenly, it all makes sense. Of course, it’s obvious. What else do you do to a daughter who shames you with by falling in love with someone forbidden by your religion? Well, just like the murfer of Aqsa Parvez by her father and brother, because she didn’t want to wear a hijab, and wanted to get a job. Obviously, what else could they do but kill her?
And while we’re attending to this obscenities we should bear in mind that a whole bloc of nation states wants to shelter this kind of religion and protect it from criticism. So when someone from the American Academy for the Advancement of Science suggests that we should be civil to religion, and says fatuously that religion and science are compatible — because, well, it’s obvious, isn’t it?, that science would take the same point of view, and suggest the murder of daughters and their lovers…. Well, anyway, it almost makes one lose perspective altogether and start shouting obscenities (I’ll get to that.)
Religion is a desperately distorted way of looking at the world, and the more religions start jostling up against each other in the public space, the more important it is to point out just how distorted religious ways of thinking are. This is no time for scientific organisations to go around talking about the compatibility of science with all those things that are included in such distorted ways of perceiving the world, human life and social priorities, and it’s high time the idiots who are making such claims should have a few home truths pointed out to them. We’re not talking about the mild-mannered Lutheran pastor down the street who thinks Jesus is all about love and forgiveness. We’re talking about huge social movements and institutions or quasi institutions (like Islam or Hinduism, for instance, that don’t have institutional structures, and are for that reason probably less controllable and accountable than those that do) that infect people’s lifes and impose the most benighted morals and beliefs on them. They should read Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s Nomad and recognise when they’re defending religion, they’re defending the things that she broke free from, they’re defending the most terrible injustices and cruelties to women, children, and people who really do love, and don’t just talk about it in windy generalised ways that have as much application to real life as astrology, except that astrologers probably don’t kill their daughters for falling in love, since it’s all in the stars anyway. After awhile it just makes one sick to hear of one more outrage committed by religious believers, while at the same time there is this great defensive movement that doesn’t want anyone to be nasty to or critical about religion. Fuck the fucking fuckers, is what I say!
Please, someone tell me this sentence was never uttered. I can’t take it. I literally want to cry and thrash the hell out of that person. Boy, there’s no better feeling than being so provoked by barbarity you start feeling barbaric urges yourself.
@Jacob Tomasovich,
Yes,I’ve heard that argument before,rather too often. How can Westerners criticize the Caste system,after all it’s sanctioned by religion?
Fucking hell.
Btw, Ophelia and others, I’ve just (belatedly, since it was published eight years ago) read Brian Barry’s Culture and Equality. I can’t agree with absolutely everything in the book – what book can anyone say that about? – but I go very close with this one. What’s more … though it’s a rather weighty tome, it’s a pleasure to read: it’s hilariously funny in a style not greatly different from Bertrand Russell’s. Barry was one philosopher who didn’t mind a bit of mockery of ideas that struck him as absurd. Unfortunately, he died last year – not all that old by my current standards – and I now realise what a huge loss he was. He was a genuine liberal in the spirit of Mill, and an intellectual powerhouse. (No wonder he never received the kudos that goes to all the political philosophers who are prepared to flirt with illiberal ideas.)
Any of y’all who haven’t already read it, and who would like to read a thorough critique of strong multiculturalist policies, fight your way through the crowds to get your hands on this book. Someone should force feed Taner Edis with it.
Thanks Russell: that recommendation goes at the top of the list.
Just read in the India Times that Yogesh Kumar was a Dalit (Sonipat) from the Jatav caste. So he was basically an untouchable in the eyes of his murderers, that they had to maul him to death. Yeah, these so-called high-caste torturers certainly touched up the untouchable. They think they have the god-given right to decide who lives and who does not, the creeps. I sincerely hope that justice is seen to be done in this Delhi city.
Yes, Russell, it’s a great book, My copy, bought back in 2001 when it first came out, is heavily highlighted, though I will have to bring it forward, now that you have reminded me that I read it once in happier times. It is a delight to read, and full of great insights and much wisdom. It is, however, one of the sources of my contempt for this bizarre idea that we should all celebrate our differences, as in the recent AAAS endorsement of the compatibility of religion and science. Religion is a hydra with many many heads. The suggestion that science is compatible with something so multiplex and amorphous is ludicrous, and when you add to that the continuing flood of religious outrages world wide, and the effort of religions to silence criticism — what else is accomodationism all about? — it is simply self-destructive. As Barry says, liberal rights trump any appeal to cultural or religious diversity. No one gets to kill daughters or their lovers for any reason, least of all religious ones. No one gets to say, either, that the forces that led to this atrocity are in any sense compatible with science. It’s time a few people woke up to some simple home truths about religion. It is a vile, oppresive miasma in which too many people in the world are sunk.
There’s no honor in any kind of killing, be it the killed one is a psychotic killer.
Wrong view/thinking is a really dangerous source of evil.
I’d be very careful about attributing this to Indian culture or Hinduism or what-have-you–that strikes me as a knee-jerk, racist, imperialist response. Men killing women for sexual behavior is far too common in the west as well. I’m not aware of any comprehensive study done that shows that it’s more common in India than in (say) America. In fact historian/anthropologist Veena Oldenburg noted several commonalities between patterns of violence against women in 1990s New York City vs. New Delhi.
It wouldn’t surprise me if it were more common in India, mind. But it also wouldn’t surprise me if it were about equally common, and the difference lay more in the nuances (i.e. motivations of caste vs. race/class, whether the woman is more likely to be killed by her father or by her husband) than in the number of occurrences. In any case, the point is that it’s foolish and bigoted to jump to blame such a cross-culturally widespread type of occurrence on a particular backwards “culture” or “religion.” Your original post didn’t do this, Ophelia, but it seems like some of the commenters are doing it. And this is only ever done when the murderer and victim are brown. If a white man butchers a woman, few people but the few, the proud, the hardcore feminists start babbling about Christian male supremacist culture. Even though many white (and non-white Western) men defend their actions with a “well, what would any man do?” type of excuse as well. We’re very quick to attribute this violence to some exotic, barbaric “culture” when it happens outside the West but then ignore the contributions of our own “culture” when it happens within.
Jenavir, the problem with your argument is that the Indian media themselves put the blame on the caste system. And you must be aware, surely, of the criticism of the caste system coming from inside India and that many reformers and activists in the last century (including Gandhi) wanted to end these kind of backward attitudes toward lower castes, women and non-Hindus? To end it not only legally (and the Indian constitution doesn’t recognize castes, IIRC) but to really convince people to act on it?
Which is true, and you are right to point that in such a case, a lot of people in Western countries tend to “excuse” the man (or at least search for mitigating circumstances), except of course for a few feminist voices.
But then, that last part of your argument is about the misogynistic trends in Western culture. If you accept that such trends exist in Western cultures, why not in other cultures as well?
It’s not just ” few feminist voices”, Irene. Many men, as well as women, would like to see the whole provocation partial defence to murder removed, and that has actually happened in Victoria … and doubtless some other Western jurisdictions. It is not acceptable to “lose control” and kill someone because you have been “provoked”.
And, Jenavir, why the moral equivalence? Sure, there have been men who have murdered their wives for being “unfaithful”, “cheating on” them, or whatever. Many, many cases like that, no doubt. But in most cases these days, those men are actually punished for murder or at worst manslaughter. In any event, although it’s still a problem, it relates to a vastly narrower set of circumstances than those used to justify honor killings. Even those men (and women) who think “unfaithful” wives deserve to be murdered for their “betrayal” don’t usually think that young lovers, for example, deserve to be murdered – not even if they think sex outside of marriage is a “sin”. My heavy use of scare quotes in this para shows how suspect I think a lot this discourse is, but that’s a matter for another day.
More generally, I get tired of moral equivalence arguments. It’s like Germaine Greer semi-defending female genital mutilation on the basis that Western women often wear high heels. Say what? I actually agree that high heels are a health hazard and that wearing the things should be discouraged, especially for girls who are still growing. Here in the West, we have certain widespread conceptions of female beauty that are harmful. But that doesn’t mean I’m going to stop criticising female genital mutilation. The fact that there are problems in secular Western culture, too, doesn’t create some kind of estoppel. It shouldn’t shut us up.
Irene: if you read my comment again, you’ll see that I said that culture does make a difference–with respect to the nuances and details of how the crime happens. My point was that men killing women for sexual behavior was a near-universal, and cultural specificity determines exactly how it happens.
Russell: who said anything about shutting up, or creating estoppel? I just said we shouldn’t jump to blame it on a foreign “culture” as if it’s somehow alien to us. It’s clearly not. I also said I didn’t know how bad/common the problem was in the West relative to India–in short, I don’t know if there is a moral equivalence or not. If it’s more common (and, as you said, applied to a broader set of circumstances) in India, then it’s not morally equivalent.
I’m just not sure it *is* more common, more accepted, etc. You point to the fact that men who kill “unfaithful” wives in the West get sent to jail for manslaughter–but let’s not forget that *these* murderers were arrested, and may well be convicted. So where’s the evidence that India is so much worse in this particular regard? All I’m saying is that we should make these judgments based on evidence. It’s easy to fall prey to spin due to the way these things get reported in the media. This type of murder gets portrayed as part of mainstream cultural identity when it happens in a “brown” country, but gets portrayed as an aberration and the result of a sick, pathological individual when it happens in a “white” country.
And yes, I fully agree that we can draw distinctions between FGM and high heels, between honor killings and other types of violence, etc. I’m emphatically not saying we can’t criticize other cultures until our own house is in perfect order.
Do you have any actual evidence for that? Or are you just assuming it?
You could be right, of course – but you could also be wrong.
On the face of it, it seems to me unlikely that in a parallel murder case here, reporters would be able to find a neighbor who would say “If they want to kill their daughter, that’s fine…”
And it’s not necessarily imperialist to make a point of the difference. It really is better for women and girls to live in places where that thought is strange and indigestible than it is for them to live in places where it is at least thinkable.