Honour-Based Violence: Tradition, Control, and Patriarchy

When a young woman in a village in Haryana chooses to marry a man from a different caste, she is not just making a personal decision – in the eyes of her community, she is setting fire to generations of carefully guarded “honour.” That honour, however, has never really belonged to her. It belongs to the men in her family, her caste, and her community. She is simply its vessel. This is the central logic of honour-based violence (HBV) – a deeply patriarchal system in which a woman’s behaviour is treated as the measure of her family’s worth, and any deviation is met with punishment, often violent. Understanding this logic is essential for understanding how and why such violence persists even within modern, constitutional democracies.

What is honour-based violence? 🔗

Honour-based violence refers to any form of violence perpetrated within the framework of patriarchal family structures or communities where the primary justification is the protection of honour – a social construction that functions as a value system, norm, or tradition. The violence is not incidental or personal; it is deliberate, collective, and structural. It is designed to enforce conformity and punish those who deviate from prescribed gender and sexual norms.

As the United Nations has stated, honour violence represents a form of systematic, institutionalised misogyny that encompasses the full spectrum of discrimination and violence against women – involving power, control, domination, and intimidation to preserve patriarchal social order. The individuals who carry out this violence are usually family or community members, and their actions are frequently sanctioned collectively, sometimes even legally, in the societies where they occur.

The forms HBV takes are wide-ranging. They include physical violence, confinement and imprisonment, forced marriage, economic deprivation, acid attacks, and, at the extreme end, killing. A woman may be targeted for losing her virginity before marriage, engaging in an intimate relationship outside approved boundaries, seeking a divorce, dressing in ways deemed inappropriate, or simply pursuing education or employment. Studies show that the violence is triggered when a woman is perceived to have violated female chastity norms – including loss of virginity before marriage, infidelity after marriage, or acting autonomously by gaining an education, securing a job, or leaving an abusive husband.

Honour as a gendered construct 🔗

One of the most important things to understand about honour in this context is its asymmetry. In many communities where HBV occurs, a man’s honour is personal – it rises and falls based on his own actions. A woman’s honour, however, is collective. As one young woman from research conducted in Sweden described it, “A woman’s honor tumbles down on all of us in the family, but a man’s honor is only his.” This captures exactly how patriarchal systems of honour work: women are held responsible not just for their own conduct, but for the reputations of every man connected to them.

This asymmetry is reinforced by religious discourses and cultural codes that construct women as inherently weaker, more prone to moral failure, and therefore in need of constant supervision. In the South Asian context, the concept of lajja (shame) has historically been described as an ornament of women – a particularly admirable feminine quality that incorporated denial, forbiddance, and guilt into female sexuality. Clothing, mobility, education, and marriage choices all became moral indicators, representing ideologically class-gendered ideas of proper conduct enforced through the threat of social and physical violence.

A global problem, not a cultural exception 🔗

It is critical to stress that honour-based violence is not the exclusive domain of any single religion, ethnicity, or region. Honour violence exists all over the world, and while its forms may be regionally distinct, its causes are rooted in the same gender-based and socio-economic inequalities found across patriarchal cultures globally. Framing HBV as a problem of “backward” or “other” cultures – particularly Muslim or Arab cultures – not only misrepresents reality but also renders women in Western contexts invisible to the systems meant to protect them. The patriarchal logic that men have the right to control women exists in most cultures and takes different forms depending on context.

The UN Population Fund estimated that approximately 5,000 women are killed annually in the name of honour – but this number is widely considered a significant undercount given how many cases are misreported as suicides or accidents, or simply go unreported altogether.

The role of khap panchayats in enforcing honour 🔗

In northern India – particularly in the states of Haryana, Punjab, Uttar Pradesh, and Rajasthan – the enforcement of honour-based norms has long been institutionalised through khap panchayats. These are caste-based assemblies, typically comprised of dominant-caste older men, that claim authority over matters of marriage, social conduct, and community morality. They have no legal standing under the Indian Constitution, but their social power in the communities they govern is formidable.

Khap panchayats operate on the principle of endogamy – the idea that all members of a khap (a cluster of villages united by caste and geography) share blood relations and are therefore siblings. This framing categorically prohibits marriage within the same gotra (patrilineal clan) and, in many cases, any marriage outside the accepted caste hierarchy. When individuals violate these codes – by choosing their own partner, marrying across caste lines, or entering into an inter-religious union – the khap issues a diktat. The consequences can range from social boycott to forced separation to death.

Case study: The Manoj-Babli murder 🔗

No case illustrates the lethal reach of khap authority more starkly than the Manoj-Babli murder of 2007. Manoj and Babli were a young couple from Haryana who married despite belonging to the same gotra – a union the local khap panchayat declared invalid and punishable. They were kidnapped and killed on the orders of the khap. In 2010, the Karnal district court awarded the death penalty to five of the accused – the first-ever conviction in an honour killing case in India. However, the Punjab and Haryana High Court later commuted those sentences to life imprisonment, a development that raised sharp questions about how durable judicial interventions really are against deeply entrenched caste power.

Complicity between khaps and the state 🔗

One of the most troubling findings from research on khap panchayats is that they do not operate in isolation from the formal state apparatus – they are often enabled by it. Research published in a peer-reviewed journal on khap panchayats in Haryana found that women’s organisations described a “weak patriarchal state” in which local state agents – including police and elected village officials – often aligned themselves with khap authority rather than constitutional law. In documented cases, local police failed to intervene, women sarpanches (elected village heads) went into hiding rather than confront khap diktats, and their husbands mobilised community men on the khap’s behalf.

Khap panchayats are extra-constitutional bodies – they have no legal authority to issue any binding decisions under Indian law. The Hindu Marriage Act and the Special Marriage Act both explicitly permit inter-caste and inter-religious marriages. And yet, because these assemblies wield wealth, political connections, and social pressure, their word effectively functions as law in the communities they oversee. As research has documented, they succeed in asserting their definitions of honour and dishonour by ruling through violence, fear, and a claim to collective will that presents killings as upholding tradition.

The Mehrana killing and other documented cases 🔗

The pattern goes back decades. In 1991, a woman named Roshni eloped with a man named Vijendra, who belonged to a lower caste, in the village of Mehrana. A friend helped them. All three were captured, and the local khap panchayat ordered them burnt and hung from a tree – an order carried out in front of the entire community the following morning. More recently, in 2018, a Dalit youth named Pranay Perumalla was murdered in Telangana after marrying an upper-caste woman. These cases span geography and decade, but their underlying logic is constant: a woman’s choice of partner is treated as a matter of community property, and a man who enables that choice shares her punishment.

The conflict with modernity: law, democracy, and cultural change 🔗

Honour-based violence does not simply exist alongside the rule of law – it actively undermines it. When khap panchayats issue death sentences, when families kill their own children for exercising constitutionally protected rights, and when local police look the other way, the foundational premises of democratic governance – equal protection, individual liberty, the right to life – are placed in direct conflict with entrenched social authority. This is not a peripheral legal problem. It is, as India’s Supreme Court has stated, a catastrophic crisis for the rule of law.

The Supreme Court’s landmark rulings 🔗

India’s judiciary has been among the most vocal in condemning honour crimes. In 2018, in Shakti Vahini v. Union of India, the Supreme Court issued sweeping guidelines against khap panchayats, making it mandatory for police to videograph khap proceedings, file criminal complaints against those who attend unlawful assemblies, and provide protection to at-risk couples. Chief Justice Dipak Misra wrote unequivocally: “The human rights of a daughter, brother, sister or son are not mortgaged to the so-called or so-understood honour of the family or clan or the collective.” The court also reaffirmed that the right to choose a life partner is integral to the right to a dignified life under Article 21 of the Indian Constitution.

Earlier, in 2006, the Supreme Court had already described khap panchayats as “kangaroo courts, which are wholly illegal,” in the case Lata Singh v. State of UP. And the Law Commission of India, in its 242nd Report, proposed a draft bill to treat informal caste assemblies as “unlawful assemblies” and make their decisions punishable where they amount to harassment, social boycott, or incitement to violence.

Why legal intervention alone is not enough 🔗

Despite these judicial milestones, implementation on the ground remains deeply uneven. The UK government’s 2025 country policy note on India points out that honour crimes are likely under-reported, since there are no specific laws to prosecute them and they are recorded simply as murder cases. India’s National Crime Records Bureau recorded just 18 killings motivated by honour across India in 2022 – a figure that experts widely regard as a drastic undercount given how many cases are concealed as suicides or accidents.

The problem is structural, not just legal. As legal scholars have argued, treating honour killings under general criminal categories without acknowledging their distinct nature as gendered and caste-based violence leaves a systemic gap in enforcement. Witnesses in these cases are often related to perpetrators and turn hostile under family pressure. Khap members who incite killings face little accountability because there are no mandatory reporting obligations for community leaders or religious figures who sanction violence. And the Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam (BSA, 2023) – India’s reformed evidence law – does not yet provide specific protections for vulnerable witnesses in honour-crime prosecutions.

What meaningful reform requires 🔗

Experts and policy bodies have identified several interlocking reforms needed to effectively challenge honour-based violence. These include enacting a dedicated statutory offence for honour-based violence with aggravated sentencing, instituting mandatory duties for police and district magistrates to intervene in at-risk cases, creating anonymous testimony provisions for vulnerable witnesses, shortening the registration period for inter-caste marriages to reduce exposure to threats, and barring those convicted of honour killings from contesting elections. Beyond legal reform, meaningful change requires confronting the structural inequalities – gendered, caste-based, and community-enforced – that make this violence possible in the first place.

Educational campaigns, economic empowerment for women, and community-level engagement with caste norms are equally necessary. International comparative examples are instructive: Jordan, for instance, long had legal provisions allowing lenient sentences for men who killed women in the name of honour. Following international pressure and advocacy, these provisions were partially repealed and special tribunals created. Socio-cultural resistance remains, but the Jordanian experience shows that formal legal change can initiate normative shifts. India stands at a similar juncture – judicial resolve is visible, and parliamentary awareness has grown, but statutory codification and institutional reform have not yet followed at the pace required.

What remains constant across all contexts is that honour-based violence is not about honour at all. It is about control – control over women’s bodies, choices, mobility, and futures. It is a mechanism for maintaining patriarchal and caste-based hierarchies at the cost of individual rights. Recognising it as such – as scholars have argued, as part of the wider continuum of violence against women rather than a culturally specific aberration – is the essential first step toward dismantling it.

What do you think? If honour-based violence is ultimately a mechanism of patriarchal control rather than a genuine expression of cultural tradition, what responsibility do democratic states bear when their own institutions – police, local governance – become complicit in that control? And given that honour killings are significantly under-reported, what structural changes in law enforcement and community accountability would be necessary to bring the true scale of this violence to light?

References

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