The alleged honour-killing of a 21-year-old Sri Venkateshwara College girl by her parents because she chose to marry outside her caste and region is shocking to say the least. What is especially worrisome is that the incident took place in Delhi although the girl’s parents, who lived in southwest Delhi’s Bharat Vihar locality, are originally from Alwar in Rajasthan.

According to the police the parents of the girl, Bhavna, disapproved of her decision to marry 24-year-old Abhishek Seth. Once the two got married at an Arya Samaj temple on November 12, Bhavna’s parents threatened the couple but her father Jagmohan later persuaded her to return home so that the family could solemnise the union formally.

But on November 15, according to the confession by Jagmohan and his wife, after their arrest, they assaulted her and then strangled her to death.

The incident has brought to light the fact that despite the external trappings of modernity – fashionable and trendy clothes, access to education, the use of smartphones – honour killings, stemming from deeply held prejudices are not unknown even in an urban sprawl such as Delhi.

For Jagmohan, killing his daughter for perceived loss of prestige within his community was more important than the punishment that he is bound to get within the framework of the rule of law. Honour killing is practiced as a means to control the violators and to punish them for vice and deviancy from the prescribed social/community norms.

Certain social groups normalise violence against women and men who they believe transgress familial, religious, racial, class and caste-based normativities which are used against adult women who seek to enter a sphere of modernity very different from the individual and collective imaginings of such groups and seek to exercise their right to choose whom they want to marry.

Within the framework of generally accepted social rules and the prevailing narrow understanding and practice of modernity, judicial reasoning must reckon with the abhorrent custom and how customary practices abrogate rights of women and how they are constituted by the patriarchal understanding of shame and honour.

The liberalisation of the economy, which ought to bring with it cognitive modernity by way of greater access to education, creates new bridges to corresponding reforms in the social sphere.

But honour killings and other forms of violence against women, in the name of transgressing certain social practices reflects that unequal trajectory that modernity has followed in India where individuals and non-state adjudicatory bodies like khap panchayats have appropriated notions of justice and rights in the name of caste, religion, culture and community histories.