Karnataka ‘honour’ killing: Deaths most dishonourable

In one of the most sinister crimes in the year drawing to a close, 19-year-old Manya Vivekananda Doddamani was lethally attacked by her father and his supporters at Inam Veerapur village in Dharwad district in north Karnataka on December 21, 2025. The grievously injured woman, married a few months ago and pregnant, died in the hospital.

What provoked the attack was the marriage of an “upper” caste woman to a “lower” caste man, thereby bringing “dishonour” to her family and clan. Manya (née Manya Patil) was a Lingayat, and her decision to marry a Madiga (Scheduled Caste) man had incurred the family’s wrath.

The couple had married in May despite strong opposition. The tahsildar and the police had intervened, calling both families for a truce. The police registered a case as a precautionary measure. Perceiving threat, the couple had shifted to neighbouring Haveri. However, assuming that tempers had cooled, a pregnant Manya and her husband had returned to her native village in December only to learn in the most tragic way that they were wrong.

Manya’s father, Prakashgouda Patil, and five co-accused are now in custody, while the police are on the lookout for the others among the 15 accused. Two police personnel and a panchayat development officer have been suspended for dereliction of duty. Manya’s husband and in-laws also sustained injuries in the attack and are now recovering.

Also read | Dalits protest against Hubballi ‘honour’ killing

Though there is no segregated data on “honour” killings for 2025 in Karnataka, there were some widely reported cases. In August, 52-year-old Shankar Kollur was arrested from Melakunda village in Kalaburagi district for allegedly murdering his 18-year-old daughter, Kavita. A nursing student from the Lingayat community, she was in love with a Kuruba boy.

In February, the death of a 21-year-old woman, from the Kuruba caste, by drowning in Harohalli on the outskirts of Bengaluru was flagged by her boyfriend, a Naidu, as “honour” killing, though the police recorded it as an accident.

In January, a district court in Gadag in north Karnataka sentenced four men to death for murdering an inter-caste couple — Gangamma Rathod from the Lambani community (‘touchable’ SC) and her husband Ramesh Madar, from the Madiga community (SC ‘Left’) — in 2019. The circumstances leading to the death were similar to Manya’s. The couple had married in 2017 despite the family’s opposition and left their native village Lakkalakatti in Gadag district. They had returned under the false notion that old wounds had healed.

Even though northern States such as Haryana, Jharkhand, and Uttar Pradesh typically hit headlines for “honour” killings, “progressive” States such as Karnataka are clearly not above such crimes. In a paper titled, “In the name of ‘Honour’” published in 2024, the People’s Union for Civil Liberties-Karnataka recorded 13 cases of “honour” attacks from January-2022 to December-2023 where 12 people were murdered. “These killings have taken place in seven districts across Karnataka. Each case is a shocking reminder of the brutal lengths that people have gone to oppose inter-caste and inter-faith fraternising,” read the paper. “In most of the killings in 2022-23, the victim was a woman belonging to the more dominant community. The perpetrators were men in her family.”

Since the incident in Veerapur village earlier this month, there have been protests by Dalit and other progressive organisations. One of their principal demands is a separate law to tackle “honour” crimes and name it after Manya. In the recent winter session of the Legislature, Karnataka passed the Karnataka Protection of People from Social Boycott (Prevention, Prohibition and Redressal) Bill, 2025, for preventing social boycott and discrimination by caste or community panchayats.

While there are provisions in existing laws to prevent caste-related violence, it could be argued that special laws add another layer of fortification. But such fortifications are not hard to breach as long as caste hierarchies and notions of caste superiority have social acceptance. One of the arguments against the caste survey in Karnataka (and elsewhere in India as well) by the “upper” castes has been that such an exercise resurrects archaic practices that have no currency in Viksit Bharat. Manya’s death is a tragically eloquent testimony to the fallacy of this argument.