Mariamma last spoke to her son P Muthukumar around 5 pm on November 13, 2014. It was just before he left with a friend to meet his girlfriend in response to a call from her. The 23-year-old, a chemistry postgraduate and the first Dalit youth in their neighbourhood in Palani in southern Tamil Nadu to complete a master’s degree, was in the middle of his BEd. “I tried calling him an hour later but his phone remained switched off,” Mariamma told ET Magazine earlier this week.When a worried Mariamma along with her husband, Paramashivam, went looking for their boy later in the evening, they were told that a body had been found in a well in Virupatchi, around 20 kilometres away. “When we reached the spot, the DSP told us that our son had stolen a chicken and was trying to escape when he tripped and fell into the well,” says Paramashivam at the couple’s two-room house, dominated by photos of a bespectacled Muthukumar.Even then, says Paramashivam, the attempt was to portray his son as a petty thief, to make him fit into the imagined stereotype of a Dalit. Muthukumar’s parents and activists dismiss the accidental death theory and say that those responsible for his death should be brought to book. They allege that his girlfriend’s family got him murdered to safeguard their “honour” — after all, Muthukumar was a Dalit and his girlfriend, Bhuvaneshwari, a Goundar, officially a backward caste but socially dominant. The police registered a case under Section 174, or suspicious death, but the family has now approached the courts to get justice.“Look, this is his watch, which stopped at 5.40 pm… that must be when they killed him,” says a weary Mariamma, taking out the dial from a polythene packet that contains the possessions of her only son, in the forlorn hope that it might serve as some kind of evidence that this was no accident.The site where Muthukumar met his untimely end is just 60 kilometres from the gruesome murder of another young Dalit a fortnight ago. V Sankar was hacked to death in a crowded marketplace and in full view of CCTV cameras. In this case, the assailants were soon hunted down or surrendered on their own.The accused include Sankar’s father-in-law and the men sent by him. At the time of his death, the 21-yearold had been married to Kowsalya, his junior in engineering college and a member of the powerful Thevar community, for all of eight months.This sickening plot line of “honour killings,” where a man or a woman in a relationship is murdered to uphold the socalled honour of the dominant community, was long held to be the problem of states like Haryana, where young couples were killed for marrying within the same gotra (clan). Tamil Nadu began to be clubbed with these states since 2012 when hundreds of Dalit houses in Dharmapuri were torched after a Dalit youth from the region, Ilavarasan, married a girl from the Thevar community.Government data on the number of honour killings is hard to come by as it is yet to be recognised as a separate crime, despite efforts to have a legislation passed to this effect. But according to Evidence, a Dalit rights NGO headquartered in Madurai, 81 honour killings have taken place in Tamil Nadu in the past three years. “Marriage is an individual’s choice, not even families should have the authority to grant or deny permission, leave alone caste,” says Kathir, who founded Evidence in 2005 to work against caste-based violence. “The issue has been out in the open since the violence in Dharmapuri in November 2012. But there are also a lot of cases where the victim’s body is cremated without a postmortem by the family, who then claims it was a suicide,” he says.The tragic end to the all-toobrief marriage of Vimla Devi and Dileep Kumar in 2014 is a case in point. Vimla Devi, a Thevar from Usilampatti town, fell in love with Kumar, a Dalit working as a driver. Knowing that her family would oppose the union, the couple eloped to Kerala and got married at a temple. But her family, who had filed a missing person complaint, brought her back with the help of the police and got her engaged to a man from their own community.Vimla Devi managed to escape house arrest but she was again restrained by the police, who took her back to her parents’ house. The 22-year-old died the same night and her family, claiming it was a suicide, hastily cremated her body.However, aided by activists, her husband filed a complaint that she had been burnt to death by her own family members, and the case was handed over to the CBI on the orders of the Madras High Court.While passing its orders, the court had remarked that the role of the police was far from satisfactory. But this is hardly the exception, says SK Ponnuthai, district secretary of the All India Democratic Women’s Association (AIDWA) in Madurai. “The local police are mostly anti-Dalit and take the side of the dominant community. If the girl is from a powerful backward caste, the police will even go to the boy’s house and threaten his family. Instead of protecting the couple, they will hand them over to the upper castes,” she says.The state’s main political parties shy away from speaking out forcefully against honour killings, for fear of alienating the powerful backward communities, particularly on the eve of an election. To the extent that in 2012, former chief minister O Panneerselvam, a Thevar, denied on the floor of the House that honour killings take place in Tamil Nadu. “The major parties never take a stand. Has even one Thevar leader spoken out against the murder of Sankar? They all run their parties based on caste,” says Henri Tiphagne, a Madurai-based lawyer and human rights activist.And this is the supreme irony. For, Tamil Nadu is the birthplace of the self-respect movement driven by EV Ramasamy Naicker, which encouraged inter-caste marriages and rejected Brahmin domination.In a revolutionary move, then chief minister CN Annadurai went a step further and amended the Hindu Marriage Act in 1967 to legalise such “self-respect marriages”, which did away with the need for Brahmin priests and mangalsutras. The two main parties in the state, the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) and the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK), are the inheritors of this legacy.“What the parties declare in their constitutions and what they practise are very different,” says C Lakshmanan, associate professor at the Madras Institute of Development Studies, whose specialisation includes Dravidian politics. “The DMK’s constitution even says that if a member is found to belong to a caste or religious group, they would cease to be a member of the party. Yet, tickets are distributed only on the basis of a candidate’s caste.”TKS Elangovan, DMK spokesperson and member of Parliament, denies this and says that both Karunanidhi and his son and heir Stalin had condemned the recent killing. Elangovan tries to lay the blame for honour killings on the recent emergence of castebased organisations. “Today, there are many casteist parties in Tamil Nadu which talk about caste to muster the support of their community. These groups are involved in such incidents and need to be stopped,” he says.Elangovan’s statement is not without some truth. It is widely accepted that backward caste groupings in Tamil Nadu, particularly the Thevar, Goundar and Vanniyar communities, have been asserting their caste identity and pushing back against what they see as the increasing empowerment of Dalits. In December 2012, soon after the Dharmapuri incident, Pattali Makkal Katchi leader S Ramadoss launched a platform explicitly for intermediate caste groups and implicitly against Dalits, to fight “intercaste fake love marriages”.The rhetoric was eerily similar to the Hindutva rightwing’s “love jihad” scaremongering, with Ramadoss accusing young Dalit men of “luring” dominant caste girls by wearing jeans and sneakers. Dalits marrying “their” women was portrayed as a direct challenge to their masculinity. His strategy might not have helped him reap electoral dividends but it had other repercussions.“Ramadoss’s bravado encouraged Yuvaraj, who in turn encouraged Sankar’s killers. They draw courage from each other’s impunity,” says Evidence’s Kathir. Yuvaraj is one of the main accused in the murder of Dalit youth Gokulraj, who was abducted soon after he was found talking to a girl from Yuvaraj’s Gounder community. President of the Dheeran Chinnamalai Peravai, a fringe caste outfit, Yuvaraj made a mockery of the police by giving interviews while on the run. When he finally surrendered after three months, he was accompanied by hundreds of supporters, according to media reports. The message was clear: he was projecting himself as a hero of his community, never mind that he was a criminal in the eyes of the law.While sustained social interventions would be the only long-term answer to bring about change, Dalit and women’s rights activists strongly feel a separate law against honour killings would go a long way in combating the evil. “It is not as though we are looking at law as the only solution. But it can be an important enabling factor in challenging norms which are anti-constitutional and militate against basic human rights.Without a legal framework, you cannot ensure accountability. Therefore, the question is, why is there no law?” asks Brinda Karat, CPM politburo member. The AIDWA, of which Karat is a member, had drafted a law in 2010 titled “The Prevention of Crimes in the Name of Honour and Tradition Bill”, which sought to deal with various aspects of the crime but the bill, after various modifications, is currently in cold storage.Madurai-based activist Ponnuthai says if such a law is enacted, it would have provisions to rehabilitate victims like Kowsalya, who now faces an uncertain future. At her husband’s house in the village of Kumarlingam, over 160 kilometres from Madurai, her father-in-law, Veluchamy, says that if she were to return, she might be endangering the lives of other family members, including Sankar’s two younger brothers. “I have to go to work every day. How long will they be here to protect us?” he asks, nodding in the direction of the four policemen fanning themselves under a shamiana in front of the two-room house.Like Veluchamy, who works as a daily wage labourer, earning around Rs 200 a day, other families too are victims.Dileep Kumar’s family has been living in a rented hut away from their native village for two years, out of fear of retribution. “We had a house and a little land in our village but now we can’t go back. They have told us that if our son steps into the village, they will kill him,” says Balachandran, Kumar’s father. Kumar himself is now in Chennai, working as a driver.But for every Yuvaraj in Tamil Nadu, there is Kowsalya, who is determined that those responsible for killing her husband shall be punished, and Vignesh, Sankar’s younger brother. When asked whether he might now think twice about an inter-caste marriage, the 19-year-old says, “Maybe we can decide who we want to marry but we cannot decide who we will fall in love with, right?”V Sankar, a 22-year-old Dalit man, was hacked to death in a crowded market in Tirupur by three bike-borne assailants. The accused are alleged to have been sent by the family of his wife, Kowsalya, who belongs to the powerful Thevar communityDecapitated body of Dalit youth Gokulraj was found on railway tracks near Namakkal. Yuvaraj, a local Gounder leader, was arrested. He reportedly confessed to the crime. He and his accomplices murdered Gokulraj after they saw him talking to a girl from their community.Vimla Devi, a 21-year-old Thevar girl who had married a Dalit, Dilip Kumar, died at her parents’ house in suspicious circumstances, with her body cremated the same night without informing the police. On her husband’s complaint that she was killed, the case was finally handed over to the CBIDalit youth Ilavarasan, 19, was found dead on railway tracks. His marriage to Divya, a Vanniyar, and her father’s suicide over the assumed ignominy had triggered caste clashes in which several Dalit houses in Dharmapuri were burnt down. Succumbing to pressure, Divya left her husband and returned to her mother’s house.Murugesan, 25, a Dalit, and Kannagi, 22, a member of the Vanniyar community, married in the face of opposition. It is alleged that the couple were forced to consume poison in public and then burnt, to destroy the evidence.