Murder can’t be justified by honour

The recent incident of a mother burning her daughter alive after she married for love, is an incident has left the rest of our society completely in a standstill and numb as it is the worst of its kind reported.

How can a mother, whose love is like nothing else in this world, the most pure form of love, do such a thing? On the contrary, here is the mother who doused her teenage daughter with kerosene and set her ablaze for the honour of her family.

As the circumstantial evidence suggests, the mother had been helped by other family members in killing of the poor girl. Ironically, the couple was legally married and was in love since their school days, but the family had rejected several marriage proposals, forcing them to elope. Consequently, the girl’s family pretended guarantee of the couple’s safety and that the family would throw a proper wedding party, but it was all pretext and deception.

Here we have created a dystopian society where youth can’t breathe a word before parents, ultimately having to make such daunting decisions on their own.

A renowned documentarian Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy won an Oscar Award on her documentary, ‘A girl in the river’, in which a drowned girl forgives her father at last for what he has done. Why is there a question of forgiveness in Pakistan’s laws for such honour crimes. If we don’t punish the perpetrators of such heinous crimes and we let them get away with it, then these incidents will be witnessed across Pakistan.

- The reader is an assistant director based in Hyderabad, Pakistan.