Honour Crimes in India: Caste, Gender and the Politics of Izzat

Every year, headlines from small towns and villages report a young couple killed, assaulted, or forced apart simply because they married outside their caste, religion, or community. These are not crimes of passion or family disputes gone wrong. They are calculated acts meant to punish a couple, and often an entire community, for daring to choose. This is the world of honour crimes, and understanding why they persist tells us a great deal about how caste and gender intersect in India today.

What makes a crime an “honour” crime 🔗

An honour crime is any act of violence, harassment, or coercion carried out because someone is believed to have brought shame or “dishonour” upon their family, caste, or community. The most visible form is honour killing, but the category also includes social boycotts, forced separations, custodial confinement, and violent intimidation aimed at couples or individuals who cross socially prescribed boundaries.

Young women and girls are the most frequent targets, particularly when they choose their own partners. But men are targeted too, especially when they belong to a caste considered “lower” than that of the woman they marry. The common thread is not romance gone wrong. It is a challenge to caste and gender hierarchies that families and communities feel entitled to enforce through violence.

Izzat: the patriarchal logic behind the violence 🔗

The word izzat, meaning honour or reputation, sits at the centre of this violence. Feminist scholars studying rural north India have shown how a family’s izzat is treated as something that lives inside the bodies and choices of its women. When a woman marries against her family’s wishes, especially across caste lines, her choice is read as a public loss of the family’s standing, and violence becomes the accepted way to “restore” it.

Caste endogamy and the fear of “mixing” 🔗

Caste in India has historically been maintained through endogamy, meaning marriage within one’s own caste group. Marriages that cross this boundary, particularly when a woman from a dominant caste marries a Dalit man, are seen as a direct threat to caste purity and hierarchy. Historian Prem Chowdhry’s research on Haryana shows that marriages where a lower-caste woman marries an upper-caste man are often tolerated, while the reverse, a woman marrying “down,” triggers far harsher resistance and violence. This asymmetry is not about morality. It is about preserving male control over women’s sexuality and, through it, caste boundaries.

Land, power and the agrarian belt 🔗

It is no accident that honour crimes cluster heavily in agrarian states such as Punjab, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, and Rajasthan. In these regions, land ownership and caste status are closely tied together, and khap panchayats, informal caste-based village councils, have historically drawn their authority from controlling land, marriage alliances, and community reputation. As traditional forms of social and economic power erode with urbanisation and changing politics, some of these councils have used violence against inter-caste couples as a way to reassert relevance, a pattern researchers have linked directly to the declining status of land-owning dominant caste groups.

The Dharmapuri case: love, caste, and collective punishment 🔗

One case that captures how quickly personal choice can spiral into collective violence unfolded in Dharmapuri district, Tamil Nadu, in 2012. A Dalit youth and a woman from a dominant caste community fell in love, and when their families opposed the match, the couple eloped and married. Weeks later, a caste assembly ordered the woman to leave her husband and return home. When she refused, her father, humiliated in front of his community, died by suicide.

His death triggered a wave of collective punishment. A mob numbering well over a thousand people stormed Dalit neighbourhoods near the village, and in a few hours, more than 200 homes were looted, damaged, or burned to the ground. Reports at the time noted that the local police were slow to intervene despite advance knowledge of the tension, raising serious questions about institutional bias.

The story did not end there. Under sustained community and family pressure, the woman later withdrew her earlier statements supporting her marriage. Not long after, her husband was found dead near a railway track. His family insisted it was murder disguised as suicide, pointing to the caste politics and local power structures that shaped the investigation. The case remains one of the starkest illustrations of how a single act of choosing a partner can be treated as an offence against an entire community, and how the machinery meant to protect victims can be shaped by the very caste hierarchies it is supposed to check.

Why the law struggles to keep up 🔗

No specific offence, no reliable count 🔗

India has no standalone law that defines or criminalises honour crimes. Instead, cases are prosecuted under general provisions dealing with murder, abetment, criminal intimidation, or under the SC/ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act when caste is involved. Because there is no dedicated legal category, the National Crime Records Bureau only began separately tracking honour killings in 2014, and even then the numbers reported nationally have stayed remarkably low, in the dozens per year, a figure that researchers and activists widely believe understates the true scale.

Part of the problem is classification. Deaths are frequently recorded as suicides or accidents rather than homicides connected to caste or marriage disputes, which makes systematic tracking almost impossible. A study by the Dalit Human Rights Defenders Network across seven states concluded that the actual scale of caste-based honour killings cannot be established without a dedicated law and a dedicated database. Without a specific offence, there is no specific data, and without data, the scale of the problem stays hidden from policy makers.

What the courts have said 🔗

In the absence of legislation, the judiciary has stepped in repeatedly. As early as 2006, in Lata Singh v State of Uttar Pradesh, the Supreme Court made clear that no offence is committed simply by marrying outside one’s caste, since no law bars inter-caste marriage. A decade later, in Vikas Yadav v State of Uttar Pradesh, the Court held that a woman’s freedom and independence cannot be overridden by what it called “self-assumed” honour claimed by her family.

The most significant intervention came in 2018, in Shakti Vahini v Union of India, filed by an NGO working on the issue. The Supreme Court ruled that the right to choose one’s life partner is a fundamental right protected under the Constitution, and that no khap panchayat, family, or community has the authority to interfere in the marriage of consenting adults. The judgment laid out preventive and remedial directions, including special protection cells and mandatory police action when threats to couples are reported. These are binding guidelines, meant to hold until Parliament passes a dedicated law, something that has still not happened.

Beyond killing: the everyday forms of honour-based control 🔗

Focusing only on killings misses how much of this violence is quieter and more sustained. Couples are frequently separated by force, confined by their families, subjected to social boycotts, or pressured into retracting police statements, exactly as happened in the Dharmapuri case. Journalist accounts have also highlighted how the label “honour killing” itself gets applied selectively. In one widely discussed case from Jharkhand, a young woman killed by her family for wanting to marry outside her caste was initially not classified as an honour killing by a national women’s body, on the grounds that such crimes were assumed to be specific to regions where khap panchayats formally exist. This shows how even recognising a crime as honour-based can depend on region and perception rather than the nature of the act itself.

This selective recognition matters because it shapes who gets counted, who gets protection, and who gets justice. A crime that isn’t named accurately is far harder to prevent.

Signs of movement, even without a national law 🔗

Some change is visible at the state level. A few states have introduced or debated dedicated legislation criminalising honour-based violence, and courts continue to issue strong observations linking these crimes directly to caste hierarchy rather than treating them as isolated family disputes. Civil society organisations continue to push for a central law that would define honour crimes clearly, mandate uniform data collection, and remove the ambiguity that currently lets so many cases slip through as unrelated murders or accidents.

What remains consistent across every documented case, from Haryana’s khap-dominated villages to Tamil Nadu’s Dharmapuri, is the same underlying pattern: caste hierarchy and patriarchal control over women’s choices reinforcing each other, with violence used to keep both intact.

What do you think? Why do you think crimes rooted in caste hierarchy are still not treated as a distinct legal category in India? And what would change if honour crimes were tracked with the same seriousness as other forms of gender-based violence?

References

1. https://feminisminindia.com/2022/05/25/how-continuous-caste-based-honour-killings-in-india-prove-that-mere-love-is-not-enough/
2. https://time.com/archive/6950131/why-are-hindu-honor-killings-rising-in-india/
3. https://feminisminindia.com/2019/04/26/dharmapuri-caste-violence/
4. https://vidhilegalpolicy.in/blog/in-the-name-of-honour/
5. https://m.thewire.in/article/caste/caste-honour-killings-cases-laws
6. https://clpr.org.in/blog/an-analysis-of-indian-supreme-judgments-on-honour-crimes/
7. https://www.drishtijudiciary.com/indian-penal-code/shakti-vahini-v-union-of-india-air-2018-supreme-court-1601
8. https://www.aljazeera.com/amp/opinions/2018/3/14/honour-crimes-in-india-an-assault-on-womens-autonomy