Elusive justice
JUSTICE delayed is justice denied. This cliche rings true in the case of the gruesome murder of the intercaste couple S. Murugesan, a Dalit, and D. Kannagi, a Vanniyar, in 2003. The crime revealed the degradation of a society that does not hesitate to murder young couples who dare cross caste barriers in Tamil Nadu.
Seventeen years have passed but the case is still before the court. While those who killed V. Shankar of Udumalpet, a western Tamil Nadu town, were punished within a year of the crime, the accused in the Murugesan- Kannagi murder case are out on bail, leading a largely normal life.
The problems began when the Vriddhachalam police showed a reluctance to pursue the case to its logical end. Murugesan’s relatives said that the police wished to close the case as “suicide”. A team of lawyers and activists under the banner of the Tamil Nadu Ambedkar Legal Services Movement, led by P. Rathinam, a senior advocate, and activists G. Sukumaran and R. Babu had to intervene to get the police to even register a first information report (FIR).
The Vriddhachalam police filed an FIR against eight persons under Sections 147, 302 and 201 of the Indian Penal Code. Strangely, it did not deem it necessary to invoke provisions of the Scheduled Castes and Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989, although one of the victims was a Dalit. Instead, the police arrested
loss of virginity outside marriage, unapproved relationships, refusal to accept an arranged marriage, girls’ divorce, custody of children, and rape. Almost all these issues are related to women.
A recent phenomenon in the long history of such crimes is the prevalence of the practice among Dalit sub-castes too. The occurrence of such murders is not entirely new, but the scale at which they occur today is shocking. The recent murder of a young Dalit couple belonging to different S.C. sub-sects in Thoothukudi district of Tamil Nadu shocked sociologists, who saw it as the ruthless manifestation of supremacist propensities among these groups.
Consider, for example, the love that bloomed in a salt pan near Kolathur in Thoothukudi district between daily wage workers T. Solairaj (24), who belonged to the Parayar community, and A. Pechiammal alias Jothi (24), who was a Pallar. Both belonged to Dalit sub-castes. Solairaj’s nephew Anandaraj told Frontline that his uncle married Pechiammal on April 15, 2019, at a temple and the couple lived with Solairaj’s parents in Kolathur. The girl’s family was against the marriage because they considered Parayars inferior to Pallars. On July 3, 2019, the couple slept outside their house on account of a power outage. The next morning, both were found dead. The woman’s head had been smashed and her left hand chopped off. Murugesan’s father Samikannu and uncle Ayyasamy, along with two others, both Dalits, in connection with the crime. The police also arrested four Vanniyars, including the girl’s father, C. Doraisamy, and her brother, Maruthapandian.
Samikannu was shocked that his name was included in the FIR. He strongly denied any involvement in his son’s murder. He maintained that he was not even aware of his son’s wedding until the couple’s death. Fearing violence and constant threats from the village’s Vanniyar community, Samikannu’s entire family migrated to another village for livelihood, abandoning their lands and houses. They still live there.
Persons close to Murugesan accused the Vriddhachalam police of selling out to the powerful caste Hindu group of Vanniyars. They told Frontline that the police included the Dalits in the crime primarily to dilute the case. A powerful caste-based political lobby, they claimed, had backed the perpetrators of the crime to save them. But on the advice of Rathinam and his team, Samikannu approached the Madras High Court seeking an investigation by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), and the court agreed.
The CBI took three months to complete its investigation and filed a new charge sheet before the Special Court at Cuddalore, invoking the provisions of the S.CS and S.TS (Prohibition of Atrocities Act), 1989. The investigating agency discharged Samikannu from its charge sheet, retained the names of Ayyasamy and another Dalit, claiming that they had assisted the main
accused in the crime. The CBI named a total of 15 persons of whom 11 are Vanniyars, two are personnel of the Vriddhachalam police station who filed the first FIR and two are Dalits. The case has been transferred to the recently established Special Court to hear S.C./S.T. cases at Cuddalore and promises a quicker verdict.
Murugesan and Kannagi, who were both in their early twenties and hailed from Puthukkooraippettai village in Cuddalore district, fell in love when they were students of Annamalai University in Chidambaram. They got married secretly, fearing a backlash from the girl’s family. They got their marriage registered on May 5, 2003, at Cuddalore. Murugesan was a graduate in chemical engineering while Kannagi was a commerce graduate with an additional qualification of a diploma in co-operation.
The couple decided to keep their marriage a secret until Murugesan got a job. Kannagi was sent to live with a relative of Murugesan. Within a month he got a job at Tirupur and the couple decided to start a life together when they were murdered.
Kannagi’s family members, including her father Doraisamy, who was the panchayat president then, her brother Maruthapandian, a close relative named Rangasamy and others, apprehended Murugesan on July 7, 2003, when he came to take certain documents from his house. Later, the gang traced Kannagi too.
Then the barbaric crime was committed. The couple was forced to drink poison in the presence of many in the early hours of July 8, 2003, near the village
The couple had earlier sought protection by lodging a written complaint with the Kolathur police station.
In a brazen admission to the police, the woman’s father, Alagar, confessed to the murders. He was unwilling to “forgive” his daughter, who was pregnant at the time of her death, for having brought “dishonour” to him and his family. “He told the police that it was a shame for his daughter to marry a Parayar youth,” said Anandaraj. “Honour killings” in Tamil Nadu are not confined to inter-caste and interfaith marriages.
In a recent incident, 21-year old Nambirajan of Marukalkurichi village near Nanguneri in Tirunelveli was killed and his head chopped off for having married a girl from the same village on November 25, 2019. Both the boy and the girl belonged to the intermediate Maravar caste. But the girl’s family was better off than the boy’s family. A fact-finding report by Evidence on the murder revealed that the girl’s brothers were unhappy over the union since the boy was poor.
On November 18, 2019, a caste Hindu mother set her daughter on fire for deciding to marry a Dalit youth at a village in Nagapattinam district. The couple postponed their marriage since the girl was to turn 18 in a week. However, she died in hospital.
These killings prove the claim of Honour-based Violence Awareness Network (HBVAN), an international cremation ground. The bodies were then burnt and word spread that the two had committed suicide. After a week or so, a local Tamil magazine exposed the heinous crime in detail. The Communist Party of India (Marxist) took up the issue. The Viduthalai Chiruthaigal Katchi also raised the issue. An FIR (Crime No. 356/2003) was registered against four Vanniyars and four Dalits. The accused were released on bail within three weeks.
P.K. Ilavarasan, a lawyer who filed a writ petition in connection with the case in 2017, claimed that the CBI’S investigating officers were “corrupt and cunning” since the agency did not cite Murugesan’s stepmother Chinnapillai as an eyewitness to the gruesome incident.
The petition drew attention to the “uncivilised intervention of a leader of Dalit political party” who pressured Samikannu to accept a huge amount of money offered by the accused. The petition urged the court to expedite the ongoing hearing in the case in the Cuddalore court.
But almost all witnesses, except Chinnapillai, have turned hostile in this case. One of the witnesses, M. Selvaraj, committed suicide. “We have to build a strong case against the interference of extraneous forces. We need to save the two innocent Dalits who have been charge-sheeted and get justice for the deaths of Murugesan and Kannagi,” said the activist Sukumaran.
The case is in an advanced stage before the Cuddalore court. digital resource centre working on honour-based violence (HBV), that “honour killings” are committed within families of social groups “to control the behaviour of individuals, mainly women, to protect honour”.
CASTE-PATRIARCHY INTERPLAY
At the root of these crimes are rigid patriarchal and feudal values that zealously preserve endogamy and continue to treat women as objects of servility.
Social and cultural controls over women’s bodies and
A recent phenomenon in the long history of such crimes is the prevalence of the practice among Dalit sub-castes too. The scale at which they occur today is shocking.
minds condition them to meekly fall in line with misogynistic and medieval practices based on notions of honour and purity. Punishing young women who dare to break free of these controls is always a collective decision of the community and families.
A similar type of conditioning is taking place among Dalits too. To decipher this complex phenomenon, one has to understand Tamil society’s feudal, patriarchal and casteist psyche and how it operates collectively in multiple ways. It has been structured in such a way that the social hierarchy, constructed predominantly by birthbased descent, is also compliant with patriarchal control of female sexuality and Hindu undivided family assets. This system hence forbids marrying outside the caste.
Evidence’s executive director, A. Kadir, explains this system by pointing to the brutal killings that frequently take place among caste-hindu groups—within backward castes (B.CS) and MBCS and between the two groups. “Economic factors play a vital role in the killings and the idea is that property should not go out of families. All behave clannishly,” he said.
Nandish’s brother Shankar also mentioned the economic angle. He said that common properties such as land and houses of the family of his brother’s wife remained undivided. “Hence, her uncles did not like to give a share to Swathi, who married my brother, a Dalit,” he said.
According to statistics collected by Evidence, several murders have taken place in caste Hindu families because of inter-caste marriages. In 2014, Sathyabama, an MBC girl, was killed for marrying a youth from the Kongu Vellallar community, another intermediate caste group, at Sithode village near Coimbatore; in the same year, Poopathi, a B.C. girl belonging to the Udayar community, was murdered for marrying another B.C. youth in Bodinayakanur in Theni district. In 2015, a Nadar youth was killed for marrying a Kallar girl at Tirunelveli. Many such cases go unreported too. Kadir said that even a Brahmin youth was killed by a Dalit youth for marrying his sister in July this year in Tiruchi. “A case has been registered in this connection,” he said.
The Supreme Court has noted in various rulings that honour killings were reported mostly from Haryana, Punjab, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, besides “some incidents” in Delhi and Tamil Nadu. The Tamil Nadu government had even filed an affidavit before the Madras High Court on July 29, 2019, in which it claimed that 23 killings had taken place since 2003. Activists working in this area see this as a case of gross underreporting.
BRUTAL KILLINGS
In 2012, Pattali Makkal Katchi (PMK) leader Dr S. Ramadoss accused Dalit youths of luring non-dalit girls by “wearing goggles, T-shirts and jeans”. The number of honour killings reported in the State has risen exponentially ever since. In perhaps the first such reported case, in 2003, a couple was force-fed poison. This incident, involving a Dalit youth named S. Murugesan and a Vanniyar girl named D. Kannagi, was first reported in a Tamil weekly.
The couple was traced and brought back to their village near Vriddhachalam town. When the girl refused to open her mouth the poison was reportedly poured down her ears and nose. Both died. The girl’s relatives allegedly committed the heinous crime in the village while a few of the boy’s relatives watched helplessly from a distance. The case is still at the trial stage in a court in Cuddalore town.
In yet another shocking instance, Bhavani, a 25-yearold MBC mother of two from Kuyavankudi village in Ramanathapuram district, was murdered by her brother for marrying a Dalit, Sathish Kumar, of Cuddalore in 2014. The two met at a garment unit in Tiruppur town and got married at a temple in Ramanathapuram. They lived in Tiruppur and later in Cuddalore and had two children. After Sathish Kumar got a job in Malaysia, Bhavani moved to Ramanathapuram with her children and lived with her grandparents when she was murdered. The murder took place four years after her marriage.
In the same year, in neighbouring Muthukulathur, a caste Hindu named Allirajan was arrested for killing his 16-year-old daughter, Divya, who reportedly eloped with a Dalit youth. Allirajan tried to cover up the murder by making it appear as a suicide. He later confessed to the police to having smothered his daughter with a pillow while she was asleep.