20-year-old Manju Kunwar had been living with her parents in Rajasthan, India for two years, ever since she left her husband. Two weeks ago, she eloped with another man.
On Sunday, her father forced her to return home.
On Monday, he beheaded her.
According to police, her conservative Hindu father , Ogad Singh became increasingly upset because his daughter was engaged in a “series of affairs” with men.
Not only did he behead her, he paraded her head through his village before turning himself in to authorities. The police found the rest of Kunwar’s body at their home.
This is yet another tragic example of an archaic set of rules being forcefully applied to a modern world, and this is by no means the first time something like this has happened. India has recently been rated as the worst of the G20 nations in the world for women, according to a poll by the Thomson Reuters Foundation. It’s not hard to see why.
On the one hand, India had a female prime minister back in the 1960s… but on the other hand, as Shemeer Padinzjharedil, who runs Maps4aid.com, which documents crimes against women, puts it:
As a child, she faces abuse, rape and early marriage and even when she marries, she is killed for dowry. If she survives all of this, as a widow she is discriminated against and given no rights over inheritance or property.
Kunwar’s mother was farming at the time of her daughter’s murder, and was “too distraught to talk.”
