HM from Jaipur is telling me about the whispered phone calls. The restrictions on her movements. The threats. The physical abuse from her family pressuring her to fulfil the terms of an illegal marriage. And then he learned she had died. Her family said by suicide. No police complaint was ever filed. No case registered. That was in 2018.

I met HM at a consultation on honour killings — the inappropriately named term for the murder of young people by their parents for marrying against caste and faith.

Organised by Dhanak of Humanity, a non-profit founded in 2004 by Asif Iqbal to help interfaith and inter-caste couples, the consultation coincides with a Supreme Court ruling earlier this week that confirmed the conviction of 11 people in the horrific 2003 Kannagi-Murugesan double murder where a Dalit man and Vanniyar woman in Cuddalore district, Tamil Nadu were killed in public for their crime of falling in love. “At the root of this crime is the deeply entrenched hierarchical caste system in India, and ironically, this most dishonourable act goes by the name of honour-killing,” the court noted.

In 2022, the National Crime Records Bureau reported 18 such killings. That number, say activists, is a massive underestimation as killings are often passed off as suicides or illnesses. When the father or brother is complicit, families are loath to report. And even when cases are reported, conviction is a problem with witnesses turning hostile. “This is a crime where the whole community colludes to cover up,” a police officer in Hisar told me in June last year.

This week alone, two cases made it to the papers. One in Amreli, Gujarat, where the father of a Muslim woman strangled her after she fell in love with a Hindu man and refused to marry the man her father had picked for her. The second is in Jalgaon, Maharashtra where a retired CRPF officer shot dead his daughter and injured her husband. Two years had passed since their marriage, but the father had not been placated because his son-in-law wasn’t as educated as his daughter.

Controlling the autonomy of adult daughters in the name of protecting them remains a concern of recent state laws that make it virtually impossible for interfaith couples to marry by conversion. Modern India’s first uniform civil code has a clause that mandates registration by couples who cohabit. In the name of protection, the Maharashtra assembly in December 2022 set up a committee to track interfaith and inter-caste marriages. “Women are not seen as autonomous human beings,” senior advocate Vrinda Grover said at the consultation . “Yet, they carry the honour of the family, the community, the nation.”

The Supreme Court has, in the past, come out strongly against such killings with a slew of guidelines including safe houses in every district — a directive that only Haryana has followed. Maybe a modern society needs to revisit Periyar EV Ramasamy’s 1925 advocacy of a “self-respect marriage”. It was conducted without rituals, premised on the idea of equality and dignity. Above all, freedom for young people to love as they wish.

Namita Bhandare writes on gender. The views expressed are personal