Did communal poison injected by politicians lead to killing of Shaukat’s parents?

The killing of a Muslim couple in Uttar Pradesh by their Hindu daughter-in-law’s family shows how corrosive communal hatred has percolated in society.

How does one explain the killing of a middle-aged Muslim couple in Uttar Pradesh on August 18 by the family of their Hindu daughter-in-law?

In ‘honour killings’, a routine crime in India, the victims are usually young: either one or both partners of an inter-caste or inter-faith marriage. The killings are usually carried out by the girl’s family — because even in 21st century India that’s gone to the Moon, daughters continue to be regarded as embodiments of family izzat (honour), not as independent individuals with the right to marry whom they choose.

This time, did the boy’s parents: 53-year-old Khairunnisa and her 55-year-old husband Abbas Ali, end up getting killed only because the Jaiswals couldn’t trace their daughter and her husband? That’s unusual.

In most `honour killing’ cases, unforgiving parents have gone to great lengths to trace out their daughters, often with the police aiding them. The desire to ‘avenge family honour’ by killing their own child who’s seen to have ‘sullied’ it, is so great that some parents have bided their time till the best opportunity to do so has presented itself, even if that has come years later. 

In this case, the fury of the parents can be understood, though not condoned, and certainly not as excuse for murder. This was the second time their daughter eloped with their neighbour Shaukat. Nothing had deterred her, neither the six-month stint in prison her lover had had to undergo after the first elopement (she was then 17, a minor), nor being married off to someone her parents chose when she turned 18.

In between all this, Shaukat had been arrested in an alleged cow-slaughter case. This too, did not matter to her. Obviously, this young woman was certain about whom she wanted as husband. She said as much to the police who traced her after her second elopement. Alas, her family, like many Indians, refused to respect her wish.

After her statement, the Jaiswals knew the police could no longer go after the couple. Did their realisation that their now 20-year-old daughter would not return to them, push them into taking revenge on the parents of the boy she had chosen over them? This — punishing the family for the ‘sins’ of the son — has been done before. What makes that precedent more disturbing is that this illegal punishment was meted out last year not by any vendetta-driven individual, but by the State. First the shops, and then the house of a Muslim who’d eloped with a Hindu girl were bulldozed by the Madhya Pradesh government, leaving his family destitute.

Since 2014, when the BJP took power at the Centre, the ‘love-jihad’ bogey, which originated in Karnataka and Kerala in 2007 and 2009, has been so hyped (even by the media) that there are now laws aimed at preventing Hindu girls from marrying Muslims in almost every BJP-ruled state. They are called anti-conversion laws, but the chief ministers of these states have made their intention clear: to criminalise such marriages.

In BJP-ruled states, Muslim boys seen with Hindu girls have often been attacked, and not just in public places; in Indore, in January, Bajrang Dal members broke into a flat in Indore to attack five Muslim boys attending a Hindu girl’s birthday party to which they were invited. The Muslims were even arrested.

The most comprehensive PEW survey in India, conducted in 2020, revealed that many Indians disapproved of inter-religious marriages. However, while honour killings are an extreme example of this disapproval, the majority do not kill their children. But the way in which relationships between Muslim men and Hindu women have been stigmatised since 2014, and the open season on Muslim men suspected of being in such relationships, would surely have emboldened the more fanatic Hindu parents.

In Uttar Pradesh specially, ‘love jihad’ has been a recurring theme; its stringent 2020 love jihad law became a model for other states. ‘Love jihad’ was touted as the reason for the September 2013 Muzaffarnagar riots. Barely six months later, Narendra Modi himself, as part of his prime ministerial campaign, rued the lack of safety of “our bahu betis”, and the way parents had to accept this situation with their “heads bowed down” because of “vote bank politics”, his euphemism for Muslims. This was at a rally in Baghpat, barely 100 km from Muzaffarnagar.

Later that year, Yogi Adityanath, then not yet Chief Minister, declared that for every one girl “they took”, “we will take 100 Muslim girls”. The Hindutva attitude to women couldn’t have been more vividly articulated.

Did this poisonous environment lead to the killing of Shaukat’s parents?

(Jyoti Punwani is a senior journalist.)

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.