After a dalit (lower caste) man from Baghpat, Uttar Pradesh in Indian eloped with an upper caste jat woman, a council ordered that his two sisters, aged 23 and 15, be raped, have their faces blackened and paraded naked around the streets to highlight the family’s shame. The family has fled to Delhi after receiving threats and having their house ransacked. They have also accused the local police of drumming up a false narcotics charge against their brother and arresting him. Here in Pakistan too, local panchayats and other such unofficial councils of village elders pass such criminal verdicts and escape accountability. Although Amnesty International is petitioning the Supreme Court of India to provide the girls protection, the fact that they could not go to the police to report the threats shows how inaccessible justice is to the most vulnerable members of society. Very few of such cases, such as that of Mukhtaran Mai, have caught public attention. These girls are very lucky to have escaped the horrible fate that their village’s council had planned for them but there are probably countless other women who do not escape. There is no accurate figure of how many women are raped, assaulted or murdered for honour, either in India or in Pakistan, because a significant proportion of these crimes go unreported. Over 1,000 of the 5,000 recorded honour killings are reported from India and another 1,000 from Pakistan but human rights NGOs believe that these figures might be much higher. Even in this day and age, women in this part of the world are seen as chattel to be passed on from their parents to their in-laws. Their only value for many traditional families is as representatives of the family’s honour. No matter what atrocities these so-called elders are capable of, the perceived impurity of their women is considered the greatest possible shame and results in violence against women. The men believe that they are dishonoured when the honour of the women in their families is called into question by society. Following this convoluted logic, it may seem reasonable to repay dishonour with dishonour in these backward community justice systems, even if that means committing acts as horrendous as rape against someone who was merely an innocent bystander in the original offence. Pakistan, despite its stringent adherence to very literal interpretations of Islamic injunctions, has inherited many of the traditional Hindu values of the Indian subcontinent, such as marriage rituals and social strata based on caste. South Asia as a whole needs to move beyond these barbaric practices and into the modern age. If India and Pakistan in particular are to become successful and progressive democracies, these backward, irrational and inhumane forms of justice must be outlawed and those who commit crimes in the name of honour must be brought to justice. *