OF HONOUR
Veluchamy Shankar, who belonged to the Pallar Scheduled Caste community , in 2016. He was hacked to death in full public view at Udumalpet town in Tamil Nadu’s Tiruppur district for having married Kausalya, who hails from the intermediate Agamudaiyar caste.
These murders are indicators of caste-based hatred and the prevalence of medieval practices that seek to tear asunder the very fabric of what was once considered a progressive society. The National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), the official agency providing annual statistics on all crimes across the country, has not released any specific data on such killings since 2017, so non-governmental organisations such as Madurai-based Evidence are the only source of data on such crimes in Tamil Nadu.
These organisations mine information from multiple sources such as police documents and replies to right to information (RTI) queries. State government data that have been submitted in courts on several occasions, giving a count largely on the lower side, are invariably at variance with the statistics that organisations such as Evidence provide.
The perpetrators’ claims of preserving caste purity and family honour are red herrings. The real motive is to safeguard family property. Besides the obvious factors of caste, a host of other causes linked to social and economic status are also at play behind these hideous killings.
The Supreme Court had, in one of its judgments, identified several reasons for the murders; they included