New Delhi: Tsk tsk Uttar Pradesh. The original badlands of India has once again lived up to its reputation. This time a top Indian policeman has been caught on camera endorsing ‘honor killing'. The crass comments of the elite Indian Police Service (IPS) officer have stirred the interest of a nation, which has been wracked by a spate of honor killings and where studies indicate that three women a day are victims of honor killings in the country. Deputy Inspector General of Police (DIG) of the Saharanpur range in Uttar Pradesh, Satish Kumar Mathur earlier this week had advised Shaukeen Mohammad, father of a missing daughter, ‘feared eloped', to either “kill her or commit suicide” because of the shame the ‘eloped' daughter brought to the family. Mathur serves in the same Indian state where Mulayam Singh Yadav, father of the incumbent chief minister Akhilesh Yadav, had in his pre-election run up rally had promised a government job to victims of rape in the state. “The incidents of rape will be checked effectively and government jobs will be given to rape victims or one of their family members in the state,” Mulayam told an election rally In response to Mathur's comments, son Akhilesh has however shown an element of prudence, a rarity in the no holds barred political morass called Uttar Pradesh. “I am amazed that officials of such stature and at such senior field posts do not understand the seriousness of their job and the responsibility that comes with it,” the chief minister said, even as the union ministry of home affairs sought a report from the state government over Mathur's remarks. For the hard-boiled Indian news viewer and reader UP no longer fails to shock, whether it's five rapes reported in 48 hours in the state last year or the case of a 12 year old girl who was raped and then set on fire last month. On a broader note Chandigarh-based legal experts Anil Malhotra and his brother Ranjit Malhotra have said in a research paper presented in London a couple of years back that the contiguous states of UP, Punjab and Haryana accounted for over 900 honor killings every year, while in the rest of the country the figures fluctuated between 100 and 300. The researchers further observed that while there was no special legal provision to book a murder as an ‘honor killing' and hence no official data was available which specifically cataloged honor killings. “The total figure for India would be about the same as estimated for Pakistan, which researchers suggest has the highest per capita incidence of honor killings in the world” the report said… Some relief (sic).
