Telangana: Father kills teen daughter for being in a relationship

A 15-year-old girl was hacked to death allegedly by her own father in Pathapally village, in the Wanaparthy district of Telangana, for being in a relationship. The incident took place on October 25, Tuesday noon. According to reports, the victim R Geetha, a student of class 10 was in a relationship with a boy from the same village. According to the police, the father warned the girl against it, and was enraged when he found that she was in touch with the other teenager. On Tuesday, the father, Rajasekhar, confronted his daughter and blamed her for bringing disrepute to the family. 

“In a fit of rage he [Rajasekhar] killed her using a sharp object,” Wanaparthy District Superintendent of Police K Apoorva told TNM. While some news outlets have reported the incident as a case of “honour” killing– which generally implies a crime triggered by caste divisions–police clarified that both the victim and the boy belonged to the same community.  “Both the victim and the boy belong to the Boya caste. So it is not a case of caste killing,” the DSP said. 

Meanwhile, police have detained Rajasekhar and filed a case of murder under section 302 of the Indian Penal Code.  A similar crime took place in Karnataka earlier in June, when a father killed his 17-year-old daughter, Shalini, for allegedly being in relationship with a man from a Dalit community. Shalini was strangled to death by her father, Suresh, who belonged to the Vokkaliga community, which is considered an upper caste community. After killing Shalini, Suresh dumped the body in the farmland belonging to the Dalit man.

In another such case this year, a Dalit man, B Nagaraju was killed in Saroornagar, Hyderabad for marrying a woman from the Muslim community, against her family’s wishes. The incident led to communal tensions.