Seven-fold increase in honour killings; UP tops list

The number of honour killings has seen a whopping seven-fold increase from 28 in 2014 to 251 last year.

Uttar Pradesh accounted for the majority of honour killings (168), followed by Gujarat (25) and Madhya Pradesh (14).

 While the country witnessed 251 cases of honour killings in 2015, another 135 lost their lives to witchcraft and a total of 24 were victims of child or human sacrifice.

 Even love affairs (1,379 cases) and illicit relationships (1,568) can also lead to a number of murders in the country. Of the 32,127 cases of murder in India in 2015, there were 56 cases in which people were killed due to casteism and another 27 due to communalism.
  Of the 251 cases of honour killings, 192 were charged under Section 302 (murder) of the Indian Penal Code, while 59 were charged under Section 304 (culpable homicide not amounting to murder).

 In 2014, Madhya Pradesh topped the list with seven honour killings, while Punjab and Maharashtra reported five cases each. The NCRB started recording the murders under the “honour killing” category from 2014 only.

 While Karnataka and Puducherry found space in the ignominious list in 2014, this year they are out of the list.

However, other south Indian states which had not figured in the list earlier found a place in the 2015 statistics.

 Kerala accounted for five such cases, while Andhra Pradesh had two and Tamil Nadu and Telangana had one each.

 Like in the case of honour killings, the states of Uttar Pradesh (383) and Gujarat (122) figure in list of top three states in murder cases that were due to love affairs. Bihar had 140 such cases, while it did not have any honour killing cases.

Totally, 96 people were killed due to political reasons with Uttar Pradesh again topping the list with 28 cases, followed by Jharkhand (15), Kerala (12), Madhya Pradesh (10) and Karnataka (8).