The home minister and the Supreme Court view the gravity of honour killingxs differently when it comes to awarding the death penalty.
There is no need to enact a special law to deal with the heinous crime which is committed with the sole motive of caste, P Chidambaram said, asserting that section 302 (murder) of the Indian Penal Code was enough of a deterrent.
Last year, however, the Supreme Court had commuted the punishment of three Mumbai-based members of a so-called upper-caste Hindu family from Uttar Pradesh from death to life in prison.
They had killed their sister, her husband (a 'low-caste' Keralite), and three other relatives for the family's 'honour'.
The court termed it a case of “abhorrent caste crime” and showed leniency, saying, “If he [the girl’s brother Dilip] became victim of his wrong but genuine caste considerations, it would not justify the death sentence”.
Justice VS Sirpurkar and justice Deepak Verma also said it wasn’t a rarest of rare case. “The murders were the outcome of a social issue like a marriage with a person of so-called lower caste. However, time has come when we have to consider these social issues relevant while considering death sentence in such circumstances,” they said.
In other words, the court classified the shameful caste-based honour killings as different from other homicides in which the maximum punishment of death can be awarded.
The Supreme Court also examined the psyche of the disgraced killers, including the brother of the girl who stepped out of her caste to marry a Keralite. It said, “It is a common experience that when the younger sister commits something unusual — in this case, it was an inter-caste, inter-community marriage out of a secret love affair — in society, it is the elder brother who is justifiably or otherwise held responsible for not stopping such an affair.”
