Gujjars killing their own children for the sake of saving their dignity and honor or there are some other factors behind it. please read in details:http://ashokharsana.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=gurjarsThe Indian Express talks about honour Killings in Gujjar on its sunday special page, in detail. (8th August, 2010)Read below:http://www.indianexpress.com/news/in-the-city-beyond-its-limits/657429/5Or see the complete (original printed paper online) at:http://epaper.indianexpress.com/IE/IEH/2010/08/08/INDEX.SHTML(go to the Sunday story on 14th page)http://gujar.co.nrOrhttp://ashokharsana.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=gurjars&action=display&thread=258
Below a photograph of Katrina Kaif cut from a glossy magazine cover, Khushboo Nagar wrote her name in blue on the first page of her diary. They said she resembled the Bollywood actor. Her hair was styled like Katrina’s, cut in layers, framing her face. She believed in the comparison but the 18-year-old Gurjjar girl wanted to go beyond the resemblance. She wanted to be the cover girl.
On the next page, she scribbled, “Height—5.5, Weight—50 kg, Age—18 years”.
The other pages held cuttings from newspapers—mostly beauty tips. In those pages, floating between the beauty tips and the astrology predictions she cut out and pasted, there was an undercurrent of the conflict between modernity and tradition that her life had come to embody.
Khushboo, a Gurjjar girl in Wazirpur, one of the many urban villages in Delhi, dared to dream past her village’s boundaries. Khushboo wanted to be a model, fell in love with a model coordinator, and eloped with him. She crossed into what they call the ugliness of the other side.
It’s been over two months since Khushboo went missing from her Wazirpur house. And while the family was searching for her, her cousin Monica and her sister Shobha were killed in cold blood, allegedly by her family for choosing their partners and defying the unspoken rules of the village. These are rules that have been laid out by a community that’s struggling to hold on to its ‘tradition’, in a city that is lurching forward in its obsession with modernity and with being a world class city.
Shobha, Monica and her husband were the first casualties in the battle of identities between the village and the city. This was the battle between the core and the periphery.
In the heartland of this city, the national capital that will be showcased to the world this October during the Commonwealth Games, there are urban villages that are unwilling to give up on their ‘tradition’.
The national capital has around 135 urban villages. They are no longer surrounded by farmland. Instead, they are in the midst of untamed development. These are spaces where municipal planning rules do not apply. Basic services like roads, water supply and drainage have not reached them. But cars, amenities, and other such luxuries have.
Monica, Shobha, and Khushboo were hemmed in in such a space. Caught between the aspirations of the city and the limits set by their village.
Five years ago, Monica, Khushboo’s cousin, married a Rajput boy from the same village. In the 400-year-old history of the village, no girl had dared to do this. Monica left the village and stayed away.
But when Monica’s cousins, Shobha and Khushboo, too crossed over to the ‘other side’, ‘they’ decided to intervene. It began as a childish dare between Mandeep, Khushboo’s brother, and Ankit, Monica’s brother. When Mandeep taunted his cousin Ankit, saying he wasn’t able to stop his sister Monica from marrying outside her community, Ankit retorted saying Mandeep too was not able to rein in his sisters. Shobha was having an affair with Nawab Raja, a Muslim boy who ran dance classes in Ashok Vihar, and then in May, Khushboo eloped.
That’s when the killings happened—on June 20, this year. Three in a day, within minutes of each other—Monica and her husband Kuldeep were hunted down and killed outside their flat in Ashok Vihar. Shobha was killed the same day but her body was discovered only a couple of days later from a car parked in the neighbourhood and only after the stench from the body gave the killing away. All three were shot at point blank range in the head by their brothers.
In the past year, a number of honour killings have rocked Delhi and the NCR region. According to the police, the number of couples seeking protection has gone up in the last few months. Officials at the Delhi Commission for Women say that they receive at least one or two letters every day seeking protection from their parents and at least two couples drop by personally.
“After the recent honour killings in Haryana, we got at least 20 such complaints from Delhi. We used to get cases earlier too but after the killings in Delhi, the couples are more scared,” a DCW official says.
So, what has contributed to the growing number of honour killings in Delhi? According to sociologists, as more and more villagers adopt an urban lifestyle, traditional cultures feel threatened.
But it’s not as if honour killings are a recent phenomenon. Such killings happened earlier too, but they didn’t make it to the headlines. The death of a daughter or a sister gone ‘astray’ would be termed as an accident or a suicide. Penetrating the layers of the village to investigate the deaths would often be a futile chase, says a Jat community member.
Choudhary Charan Singh Lohmod, a member of the Ghitorni village panchayat in Delhi, says more than 15 years ago, Ghitorni witnessed its first honour killing. A Gurjjar girl was strangled for marrying a boy from the barber community. No police report was filed. The body was cremated and it was reported as suicide.
Seventeen years ago, there was another case of honour killing in Dayal Pur village in East Delhi. “They killed the boy. I don’t know what happened to the girl. The khap dictated the family must be boycotted,” Charan Singh says. “Today the world is changing. Although I don’t approve of inter-gotra marriages, a murder can’t be condoned.”
Charan Singh has been around long enough to know that things are beginning to change. Along with urbanisation and development have come new attitudes. Young and educated people don’t care much about their traditions anymore, he says.
“In all these killings, there’s a desperation to hold on to something that we are losing. Delhi has been witnessing the dilution of caste and gotra barriers,” says Charan Singh.
Over the past few years, the real estate boom has pushed the city’s boundaries into villages and their cultures. As the demand for space went up, the Gurjjars and the Jats, the two communities that had their villages in and around Delhi, experienced the rush, the high that comes with wealth, the transition that it promises.
In Wazirpur in north Delhi, farmers sold their land to the government in the 1960s and multi-storey buildings came up, jostling with each other for space. There was an influx of migrants soon after. But here in this village, even the tenants are expected to subscribe to the village rules.
While the Gurjjar community says they don’t have khap panchayats like the Jats, the other predominant community that have followed the same trajectory in terms of socio-economic status, they have village elders whose diktat is as good as the word of law. Even on matrimonial websites like www.jeevansathi.com, most Gurjjar girls, including doctors and MBAs, have listed their gotras in their profiles.
“Everything comes with a price tag. Same is the case with development. The negative change in the new generation is the price we Gurjjars are paying as the cost for this development,” writes a member who identified himself as Gurjar Krishan Kumar on www.ashokharsana.proboards.com, an interactive web portal for the Gurjjar community set up by Ashok Harsana, a Gurjjar, a few years ago.
Another observation by someone who calls himself ‘Hardcore Gurjar’ reads: “Very often there is news that some Gurjjar boy has had a love marriage or yet another Gurjjar girl has run away with a boy, and Gurjjars outside Delhi say that we are not real Gurjjars because we can’t save the honour of our families.”
Kanwar Singh Tanwar, a former BSP member who has now joined the Congress and is a heavyweight Gurjjar leader in South Delhi, says it is difficult to let go of the system that has anchored them for centuries.
And the new fighters for old customs are very often the young. Like Pramod Mavi, an engineer who set up the Youth Gurjar Federation last year to reach out to the community and focus on “education”. Mavi travels regularly to Delhi’s urban villages on weekends to talk to the youth about their culture and the gotra system. He is also collecting material for a book on Gurjjar culture, listing all the gotras in Gurjjar villages across India.
Ram Niwas Gurjjar, of the Federation, says they have been holding meetings in Delhi, Haryana, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan regularly to educate youngsters about the Gurjjar tradition.
“Money has gone to their head. We tell them that you need to hold on to tradition,” he says. “This is to make sure people don’t have to resort to such things as honour killings.”
At a point where Ghitorni, another urban village in south Delhi with a predominantly Gurjjar population, opens up to the metropolis, a swanky car showroom has set shop. On display is the dream car—a two-door red Mercedes sports car. Its doors open out like giant wings. The blazing red car already has 80 suitors. Many are from the nearby urban villages of Khanpur and Sultanpur, where there are no concrete roads.
Money knows no limits here. The farmers have sold off their land to private builders. Resto bars have come up on both sides of the road.
Youngsters, their muscles pumped-up from working out for hours in the local gyms that dot the village, hang out at offices of property dealers. In the evenings, they pack themselves away in swanky cars and drive through the village’s crumbling roads, loud trance and techno music playing, and hit the pubs in the city.
The pradhan of Wazirpur, Choudhury Subhash Khari, says it was land that played an anchor to the villagers. Now the land has gone, replaced by an inflated bank account. The villagers have been rendered rootless, but with thick wads of notes, they have no option but to indulge.
Riya Lohia, a 12-year-old who studies at the Poorna Prajna Public School, is a product of that conflict. At her age, she knows she has to live within an invisible boundary. Her friends from school hang out, stay over at each others’ houses, but Riya is chaperoned if she has to attend anything outside school. “They can go out. We can’t go alone for outings. We have different lives,” she says.
Like hundreds of other urban villages clustered in the heart of the national capital, Wazirpur would have remained an obscure village trying to insulate itself against the city’s overtures had it not been for the “folly” of the three Gurjjar girls.
Cars can’t navigate the narrow lanes of the urban village that is not very far from the city’s glass-and-steel structures, the glittering malls. A young girl stands on the second-floor balcony of a multi-storey house in Wazirpur. Behind her, a older woman stands as if on guard, craning her neck to follow the girl’s eyes. About 200 metres away is the house where the two “disgraced” girls lived.
Khushboo left her house on May 25. The family waited until June 3 to file a complaint at the Ashok Vihar police station. Every morning, the family sent out two cars to look for the youngest daughter of the house who had “brought shame to the family, to the village and to the community”.
But they didn’t find her. According to Ashok Vihar police officials, Khushboo is in an undisclosed location with her husband—she had sought protection fearing the same fate as was meted out to Shobha.
The father Jai Singh Nagar shrugs off the death of his daughter, Shobha. “What’s done can’t be undone. But I want to know where Khushboo is. Her marriage was a fraud,” he says.
He is still waiting for Khushboo, his daughter who loved dressing up, and who, he says, was misled by an advertisement in the local paper about a modeling agency and eloped with Ravi, a model co-ordinator.
There’s an old family photograph, a black-and-white framed picture shot in a studio with mountains and trees as backdrop. It still holds a place of pride in the family’s living room. In it, Khushboo sits on her father’s lap, the youngest of six siblings—four girls and two boys. Shobha is in the frame too.
In the wedding album of their eldest sister Rajni, who married within the community but outside their gotra in December 2008, Shobha and Khushboo wore jeans and satin shirts. They danced through the night. They were wild, but innocent, says Jai Singh.
No, they won’t kill Khushboo, the runaway child who doesn’t know the difference between right or wrong, he says. But no one can be certain. The clash of the village and the city has already claimed many.
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