As I read this true-life story (I really could not figure out where the author fictionalised it, so seamless it was) I remembered a few young couples I met six months ago in a secret shelter run by an NGO in Delhi. Very young, frightened but overjoyed to be together, hiding from their families yet missing them — any one of them could have met the fate of Manoj and Babli.

What could be more tragic — for couples like Manoj and Babli as well as their parents — than that they should be killed in the name of family honour by those who nurtured them and loved them.
In all likelihood, those who will read Chander Suta Dogra’s book or this review would be far removed from the world of Haryana’s Jat khaps and their Talibanic diktats that Manoj and Babli lived in: which is precisely why you should read it.
Manoj and Babli: A Hate Story is a harsh yet hopeful book which opens a window on the social stresses of rural Haryana as outdated, and at times brutal, traditions come in conflict with a quick-changing society.
Most of us who live in northern India are familiar with honour killings — we read about it in the papers — young couples killed for defying their parents and marrying for love in neighbourhoods not far from our homes.
Every other family with links to rural areas of Haryana, western Uttar Pradesh or Rajasthan have a story or two of young people marrying against social mores.
Manoj and Babli were both Banwala Jats and they came from the same village and in the eyes of the community they were brother and sister — a union was incestuous, unthinkable, sacrilege, in the eyes of the community elders.
Marriages between a couple of the same gotra, the same village, or bhaichara (brother) villages and different castes or religions are all taboo in Haryana’s Jat communities.
It is usually the family of the girl which reacts, as in the case of Manoj and Babli, where menfolk of Babli’s family — brother, uncles, cousins, aged between 23 and 51 — killed both for smirching the family’s honour by getting married.
But Dogra’s book takes us much deeper than the immediate life of such couples, it opens a window onto how the traditional caste khaps or councils of Haryana’s Jat communities give their rulings, how they are struggling to retain identity, control and survive as more and more young people move to cities, mingle and cock a snook at traditions.
It also gives a sharp insight into the play of politics, caste and power and how interlinked they are in this region.
To give a quick run through of the story — there is nothing much to give away as the killings and the judgment giving death sentences to five men of Babli’s family for the crime received wide publicity.
But just in case you missed it. The book begins with Manoj and Babli’s brief love story cut short by their barbaric killing and then on it’s a story of hate, of anger and also courage.
There are many players in the story who are etched out finely like characters in a film and portrayed through their reactions to the event or the lack of it, especially an inept and colluding police who are cut from the same cloth as the rigid men of the khaps.
There is a lawyer who resists being drawn into the case and then plunges in wholeheartedly cheered on by his young associates. There’s a woman judge who comes from a milieu removed from Haryana’s Jat heartland and is bewildered by the reaction to her landmark judgment in the case giving death sentences to the five accused.
Then there are the NGO workers, so much and so important a part of the rural landscape these days, providing support, sustenance and guiding the women of Manoj’s family through the dank and dangerous corridors of crime and justice at considerable risk to themselves.
An active media, Dogra a part of it, helped by keeping a sustained spotlight on the story and the Jat khaps’ meetings and diktats, many of which were recorded on video by intrepid local journalists.
There are little vignettes of hope too as some young men of Manoj and Babli’s village attempt to defy their elders, even “wanting to defy” is a step forward; the future, after all, belongs to these youth rather than the khap elders.
And overshadowing it all is the vicious caste politics of Haryana — a microcosm of what happens across much of India — where votebanks are prime consideration rather than right or wrong.
For me, at the centre of Dogra’s book stand two women — the rustic, illiterate yet strong Chandrapati, Manoj’s mother, and his sister Seema, outspoken, brave, treading where others would fear even to blow a breath. With every twist and turn in the heartrending tale, they grow in strength and resilience.
A boycott by the village on the order of the khap after the two women register a complaint with police about the killing of Manoj and Babli force them to travel to the town, other villages, with shops and other amenities closed to them; no one joins them as Babli’s immediate family carry out funeral rites for the children; in their deepest crisis no one talks to them, no one visits their home.
Later with their lives under constant threat, these women and the two younger siblings in the family live under the constant vigil of police guards, threats, intimidation, attempts of murder, offers to bribe them to withdraw the cases against the accused — one can only marvel at the moral fibre, the inner strength of these women that they chose to and managed to withstand pressures under which even the best of men have crumbled.
Their story, however, is lost in those instant television bites and news reports. It needs to be told at length and in depth and Dogra has done a fine job of telling it, clinical yet fictionalised, making it eminently readable.
Dogra doggedly pursued the story and then went back for several interviews, researched, talked to all the players and over years stitched it all into this excellent book, which I would say, fiction notwithstanding, is journalism at its best.
I hope she’s planning to have a Hindi translation so that the book takes the story of Chandrapati and Seema’s battle deeper and wider, perhaps to places where the tale is rooted.

Sunrita Sen is a freelance writer