Tribune News Service

Chandigarh, August 21

A book, ‘Killings for Honour: A Culture of Silence’, reveals that honour killing is more likely if the boy is from a lower caste and the girl from an upper caste.

The book, which studies honour-killing cases in Punjab and Haryana, was released at the Chandigarh Press Club today.

Author Dr Puneet Grewal, who works as a state project coordinator with Haryana’s Women and Child Development Department, finds that most of the boys killed were from Scheduled Castes. “The reason for this was the so-called honour of the dominant castes,” she explains.

She has conducted a qualitative analysis of 20 cases of honour killing, which took place between 2009 and 2016, using theoretical sampling.

The study finds that in a majority of the honour killing cases (47 per cent), the girls were found to be pregnant before marriage or had given sleeping pills to their parents to meet the boys at night and were found in compromising position by relatives.

Inter-caste marriages (16%), runaway marriages (16%), talking over phone (11%), elopement (5%) and holding hands in public (5%) are other reasons behind such killings.