Family ‘kills’ 15-year-old for eloping with Dalit

She was 15 and said she was in love. She was to be married later this winter but chose to run away with a Dalit boy instead, leaving a seeth...

She was 15 and said she was in love. She was to be married later this winter but chose to run away with a Dalit boy instead, leaving a seething family behind. She was found in Mumbai and brought home. Three weeks later, Neelam died. But nobody is mourning her death in Shahadpur.

Her father Roop Singh’s house is eerily quiet. There are no women in the house, and instead of mourning, the family is busy refuting charges of an ‘‘honour killing’’. On the night of September 22, Neelam died ‘‘under mysterious circumstances’’. At that time, only her grand uncle, father and uncles were home. Quietly, they had reportedly cremated her.

‘‘For two days, we kept hearing about a girl who had been killed by her family for running away with a lower caste boy,’’ recalls Ganpat Ram, SHO of the Mahua police station. By September 25 evening, the police had registered a case of murder against Neelam’s father and uncles. ‘‘We were not convinced with their explanation,’’ says Ram. ‘‘Now, we have initiated a full-blown investigation.’’

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Roop Singh, a government school teacher, refuses to explain why his daughter was cremated in such a hurry. Instead, Neelam’s grand uncle says: ‘‘She was bitten by a snake when she went to the toilet at night.’’ Her other uncles nod in agreement. The family can’t explain why they didn’t take her to a doctor when Mahua town is a 10-minute walk from their house. They also can’t explain why they didn’t wait for the girl’s mother to come back before she was cremated. ‘‘Her mother and aunt have gone to their village in Bharatpur,’’ says Padam Singh. ‘‘They would not have made it back in time for the cremation .’’

In July, Neelam, her brother Mahipal, her friends Rajesh and Vyjanti had run away from home. ‘‘The two couples set up home in Mumbai, where we found them a month later,’’ says Ram.

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