Murdering a man in cold blood in the guise of brotherly or fatherly honour, and thus “eliminating” a woman’s choice of her life partner is a crime of extreme brutality, the Supreme Court said on Monday.
It said honour was not the exclusive property of relatives who kill or assault the very man a girl in the family chooses to love.
The observations came in a 93-page judgment confirming the prison sentence of 25 years without remission to Uttar Pradesh politician D.P. Yadav’s son Vikas Yadav in the murder of young Nitish Katara in 2002. Another convict, Sukhdev Pehelwan, will serve a sentence of 20 years.
Both Vikas and Pehelwan were given an additional sentence of five years despite their longer jail terms. Now, the judgment directed all sentences to run concurrently.
The murder of Katara, an MBA graduate and the son of a Railway official, was considered an “honour killing” to stop his relationship with Vikas’s sister Bharti. A Bench of Justices Dipak Misra and C. Nagappan said it was the very factum of honour killing that led the highest court to uphold the “harsh sentence” awarded by the Delhi High Court. The convicts cannot seek release through remission for the next quarter of a century.
“These are people, despite their good education, still live in the bygone medieval centuries,” Justice Misra described the duo in the judgment.
“One may feel ‘my honour is my life’ but that does not mean sustaining one’s honour at the cost of another,” Justice Misra observed.
“Neither the family members nor the members of the collective have any right to assault the boy chosen by the girl. Her individual choice is her self-respect and creating dent in it is destroying her honour,” Justice Misra wrote.
Terming the Katara murder “planned and cold,” the apex court confirmed the High Court’s finding that the motive to kill the victim was drawn from “some kind of uncalled-for and unwarranted superiority based on caste feelings.” It said the murder and ensuing brutality shown to the victim’s corpse was clearly a result of the “anger of the brother on the involvement of the sister with the deceased.”
“Even in death a person has dignity ... and deserves to be treated with dignity,” Justice Misra wrote.
The court recalled the criminal antecedents of Vikas Yadav, and the fact that he was prosecuted in the celebrity bartender Jessica Lal murder case.
It said the Nitish Katara murder was committed when Vikas was on bail in the Jessica Lal case.
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