…and this is a 
It's a sad story. Amreen was Muslim, and Lokesh was Hindu, but these two young people loved each other and got married anyway. Isn't that the way it should be, that religion is something that shouldn't dictate the important matters in your lives? Unfortunately, the other people in their small town of Phaphunda couldn't allow that. The village council met and ordered them to annul the marriage — and their families seem to have felt likewise, that their love had to be destroyed.
So Amreen and Lokesh took poison and killed themselves.
If this story sounds vaguely familiar, Cuttlefish has written a poem to clarify the resemblance.
Now the village is turning silent and stony to the outside world; the chief of the village is scurrying about to make sure no one speaks ill of the council or their traditions. It won't help. Amreen and Lokesh spoke loud enough.
Comments
Posted by: The Science Pundit
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June 21, 2009 11:23 AM
Romeo and Juliet indeed. This kind of thing pisses me off. The horrible thing is that the societies that don't allow you to marry who you love, tend to be the same societies that prescribe stoning to death as a punishment for adultery. Savages!
Posted by: Jadehawk, OM
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June 21, 2009 11:32 AM
how fucked up. poor kids
Posted by: 'Tis Himself, OM
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June 21, 2009 11:34 AM
What I find interesting is that the legal authorities are indicting the entire village council for "abetting suicide."
Posted by: BAllanJ | June 21, 2009 11:36 AM
I'm not sure the police inquiries will get anywhere. This village has turned what they thought of as family shame into shame for the whole community in the rest of the world's eyes.
Maybe they should just declare all of the current marriages in the village annulled.
Posted by: jstein
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June 21, 2009 11:36 AM
Wow, PZ, way to brighten my day right before I go to work my nine hour janitorial shift. :-(
Seriously, though, this is a terrible story, and the leadership in the town should be ashamed. The fact that they are trying to cover it up means that they know how disgusting this is.
On another not, happy father's day, PZ. Enjoy you're Sunday with the offspring.
Posted by: Shekar | June 21, 2009 11:36 AM
Born and brought up as a Hindu in India I'm all too familiar with these kinds of cases and it happens all across the country. Families sometimes don't even accept relationships between people belonging to the same religion, and it's all because they belong to a different "caste" of Hinduism. Although I love the poetry, symbolism and philosophy of Hindu culture, its B.S. like this that really ticks me off.
I hope the cops nail those bastards
Posted by: Bryn | June 21, 2009 11:37 AM
Besides being tragic and horribly sad, it's a sad example of the lengths groups will go to to push an agenda. It's also amazing how few of the religious in this country will see themselves mirrored in the faces of the town council. How different is it, after all, to deny a Muslim and a Hindu the act of marriage based on religious grounds from denying two gays the act of marriage on different religious grounds? Yeah, yeah; I know: Christianity is different because Christianity is true. Puke.
Posted by: Aseem | June 21, 2009 11:52 AM
As Shekar @ #6 puts it, this is more common in India than you think. There have been cases of couples being brutally put to death by villagers, endorsed by the couple's parents, only because they boy and girl belonged to different castes, not even different religions. This, of course, usually takes places in remote villages. But even amongst the more educated class, a Hindu-Muslim marriage is likely to be frowned upon by the couple's families, often leading to estrangement.
Religion poisons everything.
Posted by: Sven DiMilo | June 21, 2009 12:01 PM
Right, like knitting.
Posted by: JD | June 21, 2009 12:07 PM
Stupidity cannot be covered up; it shines like a tard in the night. Dogma is the lighthouse for maroons.
Posted by: Mike Haubrich, FCD
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June 21, 2009 12:24 PM
This hits close to home. My daughter is an atheist and in love with an agnostic. I am not sure if I can let that happen.
Posted by: Stanton
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June 21, 2009 12:30 PM
There once was a Muslim boy and a Catholic girl were in love, in Bosnia. Then a soldier saw them when they were on one of their trysts, and shot them both dead.
Posted by: fcaccin | June 21, 2009 12:43 PM
I do not remember who said it, but I think I'll take the chance to repeat it: self-righteousness is the bedrock of true evil. Does anyone wonder whether those pious folk think (better, feel like) they've done anything wrong?
Posted by: Bad Albert | June 21, 2009 12:48 PM
After they ran away to get married, they should have kept on going.
Posted by: Canuck | June 21, 2009 1:36 PM
Religion is totally fucked. These people are mental midgets. They are sick. They will never learn. fuck them
Posted by: pksp | June 21, 2009 1:48 PM
This, unfortunately, is all too common in India, especially in the countryside and villages. One regularly hears of girls committing suicide because they could not marry the person they loved, but had to marry someone within one's own religion and/or caste.
This type of parochial stupidity and the implicit approval it gets from those who are educated and are the leaders of the community is what drove me away from religion.
Posted by: pksp | June 21, 2009 1:52 PM
This, unfortunately, is all too common in India, especially in the countryside and villages. One regularly hears of girls committing suicide because they could not marry the person they loved, but had to marry someone within one's own religion and/or caste.
This type of parochial stupidity and the implicit approval it gets from those who are educated and are the leaders of the community is what drove me away from religion.
Posted by: peter | June 21, 2009 2:33 PM
There is hope. Apparently world wide, but mostly in India and China there is a lack of several tens of million of women.
Eventually those countries who treat women as chattel or superfluous will see the day when their particular idiocy will vanish by extinction through stupidity. Can't wait.
Posted by: Chiral | June 21, 2009 2:41 PM
About ten years ago, I knew a woman here in the states who was Hindu and married to a Muslim. She and her husband both lied to their families and claimed to still be unmarried. When one of the families came to visit, the other would move out of the house they shared the rest of the year. It seemed pretty bizarre to me. It's kind of scary to think they might be taking the most sensible path available to them.
Posted by: SocraticGadfly | June 21, 2009 3:25 PM
And, on those lines, people like Juan Cole and Andrew Sullivan want to give blind support to the man who has just called for renewing the original principles of the Islamic Republic of Iran. That’s why I said yesterday you shouldn’t give too much space to Iran rallies, PZ.
Posted by: RobertDW | June 21, 2009 4:50 PM
Peter@18 - I'm afraid it doesn't work that way.
Yes, countries like India and China are several million women too short. It's not going to drive them to extinction; the men who do get women tend to go for large families.
It also leaves several million men who are single, not openly gay (due to social pressures) and available to be indoctrinated into other pursuits, esp. the military. Wars have been humanity's way of killing off excess males for a long time now.
Posted by: cicely
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June 21, 2009 5:19 PM
My own brief addendum to Cuttlefish's brilliance:
No happy ending looks to be in store
As elders move to stifle all dissent,
No doubt to value old traditions more
For all the "specialness" they represent.
Posted by: amphiox | June 21, 2009 5:37 PM
@21: Yes, it does appear that societies with an excess of young males without prospect for marriage have historically been more prone to military belligerence.
Doesn't mean they have to go that way, though. So there is still some hope.
(Another historical outlet valve for excess males has been exploration, rather than war, so perhaps we should start cheering a little more for China's space program?)
Posted by: Xavier | June 21, 2009 6:12 PM
Its time that people realised the bad example that sixteenth century english literature sets for impressionable youths!
(and bronze-age superstitions on their parents)
Posted by: Zar | June 21, 2009 6:24 PM
@18, 21
Additionally, a scarcity of women won't necessarily make them "human" in the eyes of the men; it will just make them like any other hot commodity. Already people are kidnapping young girls to be brides for their sons. Shit.
Posted by: MrFire | June 21, 2009 7:53 PM
Reminds me of the Iraqi girl who was honour-killed by her relatives in April. Yet further evidence that tribalism, and its bastard child religiosity, are dangerously obsolete features of society. Fuck these 'elders' and their ossified, constipated, pathetically outdated ways. They are not righteous. They are misanthropic cowards, who would rather cling to their twisted sense of identity than embrace the wishes and interests of their own offspring.
Posted by: SteveL
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June 21, 2009 9:27 PM
#21:
Not in China.
Posted by: foxfire | June 21, 2009 9:36 PM
And so where are Tony Perkins and the rest of the Sanctity of Marriage crowd? Maybe they believe marriage is between a man, woman and a panchayat?
If this was some obscure article about two gay people driven apart by a local governing body, my bet would be that these clowns would be all over it, supporting the "town council" for protecting family values.
Thanks religion, for once again poisoning a good thing.
Posted by: Pankaj Singh | June 21, 2009 9:38 PM
Such cases are extremely common in rural India. This one got famous as two BBC journalists have given it too much attention.
Forget religion, they even make an issue of couples belonging to the same religion but different "castes" of Hinduism.
Posted by: rimpal | June 21, 2009 10:07 PM
This is tragic, senseless, wicked, and unnecessary beyond reason. Terrible! There have been so many movies about inter-religious and inter-community romance, many of them hugely popular. Mani Ratnam's "Bombay" is the most notable hit in recent times, with its story of a Hindu man romancing a Muslim woman in conservative Tamil Nadu and fleeing to Bombay - the big city - to escape from orthodoxy. I would thing that the populariy of such movies and the not infrequent occurence of such romances in real life (my Muslim friend from Calcutta has been very happily married to a Hindu woman for >35 years and has two sons who bear two given names one Hindu and one Muslim - there would be greater acceptance of such marriages. Unfortunately no.
Posted by: Paula Helm Murray | June 22, 2009 12:20 AM
You are wrong about China. The government is dead set on a one-child-per-family rule. And the people are dead set on 'if the first fetus is a girl we'll abort or kill it when it's born and try again for a boy."
They're already lots of women short and a government who has a dead-set policy and apparently doesn't give a shit.
The social unrest in Iran is going to look like a picnic when all that hits the fan. And I think the same thing may hit India, if the women decide they don't want to be treated like shit and put the hammer down.
Posted by: Kausik Datta | June 22, 2009 12:56 AM
#31:
Thanks to some political activism by some women ministers and largely to the efforts of women's groups across the country, India now has some strict laws dealing with domestic violence against women. However, a large part of rural Northern India - belaboring under the deadly combination of religion, illiteracy and stupidity - is still unbelievably medieval, and mired in all the evils thereof. This is a sad occurrence but by no way unique. Women suffer everyday like this in that part of the country, and what is sadder is that even some women are complicit in this.
Posted by: Anonymous | June 22, 2009 1:37 AM
I think this is just horrible. I became an atheist after marrying my (christian) wife and everyone in my family freaked out, but they seem to have gotten over it now. Some people had their reservations when we got married because I had been struggling with my religious beliefs right before our marriage, but my wife decided that she loved me so much that she would marry me even though I might decide to be an atheist in the future.
The interesting thing is that after everything calmed down, I could hardly tell that anything was different. I noticed that the important things in life had NOTHING to do with religion ...
Posted by: MadScientist | June 22, 2009 3:45 AM
Pfft - this isn't news, it happens all the time. Why just this year I can recall a few similar reports (and who knows how often we don't hear of these things happening):
- unmarried couple murdered by the morals squad because the woman was in the guy's car without an escort
- married couple murdered by locals because they eloped
- married couple murdered by locals because they had different religions
I could go on and on, but this isn't news. It's a not-so-common-but-happens-all-the-time thing in many god-fearing peace-loving muslim states. A peaceful religion indeed - after all, as MAD put it in their parody of The Gunslinger, "There ain't no one more peaceful than a dead man."
Posted by: Steamshovelmama | June 22, 2009 8:11 AM
How appallingly, tragically unnecessary.
I'm probably going to get shot down for this but... This isn't really entirely a religious issue. As others have pointed out already, out in the sticks of rural India you would probably get as much grief for marrying outside your caste as outside your religion.
The issues here are ignorance, the priviliging of tradition over compassion and the belief that good of The Family takes precedence over the rights and personal feelings of the individuals. Also the pernicious custom where the actions of an individual (usually female) can shame the extended in the eyes of their society.
Actually the truly sad thing, here, is that the two kids cared about and wanted to be with their families so much that they didn't just run off and make a life for themselves elsewhere. It's a cying shame the family elders couldn't see this love and loyalty for what it was and respond in kind.
Posted by: Kausik Datta | June 22, 2009 12:00 PM
#35:
Oh, but in "modern" India, the caste system is inextricably entangled with religion. More of the madness.
#34: Madscientist, the protagonists and the characters in this tragic story - none of them were Muslims. They were dyed in the wool Hindus. Just goes on to show that religion - in whatever flavor - poisons everything.
Posted by: gdlchmst | June 22, 2009 2:36 PM
China's policy is a lot more slack against rural residents and minorities. City-dwellers are generally more progressive and have less of a gender-bias, there are campaigns underway to combat sexism in the rural areas. After all, the chinese government is not stupid, they know that any instability will threaten their single-party rule. And from my personal experience, your description is a gross exaggeration of the general attitude in China.
Posted by: Muffin | June 25, 2009 1:20 PM
Did anybody mention poems?
There once was a man from Phaphunda
Whose marriage was torn asunder
So he and his wife
Took poison, 'cause life
Would be worse than to be six feet under.
Yes, I know, it's quite crappy, not to mention TOTALLY tasteless; I certainly don't mean to belittle the whole thing, either, it's a real tragedy, but... well, the opening line just popped into my head, and the whole thing just pretty much wrote itself after that, so how could I not post it?
My apologies to the friends and families of the couple, to those who knew them, and to all those who are saddened and outraged by these tragic news.
Posted by: Secular Fundamentalist
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July 10, 2009 6:56 PM
Posted by: Secular Fundamentalist
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July 10, 2009 7:04 PM
The "Epic. Absolutely Epic." was supposed to not be in that quote, btw.
Dumb commenter is dumb, I s'pose.