In second known instance of honour killing in the state, a Lingayat woman lecturer was on Tuesday allegedly murdered by her brother for marrying her Dalit lover in secret. Smruthi (27), a Kannada lecturer in the Government First Grade College at Kuder, Chamarajanagar taluk, was found dead early morning in a rented house in Alanahalli on T. Narasipur Road in Nazarabad police station limits.
Her grandmother, Nanjamma (72), allegedly witness the “honour killing”. Smruthi, who was from Periyapatna taluk in Mysore, was in love with Sudeep Kumar, an assistant director with the physical education department in Tumkur for the last seven years. The two met while she was pursuing her MA in Kannada and he was doing his Master of Physical Education at Mysore University in 2004. They had a registered marriage in Mysore on November 23, 2011 without the consent of their families. But they decided to stay apart till they informed them and got their blessings, said Deputy Commissioner of Police (law and order), Basavaraj Malagatti.
After Sudeep convinced his family, the couple met Smruti's brother Mahadev and uncle at a temple near JSS Law College in Mysore on March 9 to tell them they were married. While Mahadev seemed to accept the marriage to begin with, he later began harassing Smruthi.
Late on Monday night, he arrived at her rented house, where she was staying with her grandmother and friend Savita Hegde, and picked up a quarrel with her, Nazarabad inspector, Mathews Thomas said. A neighbour, Vinay and his mother, who heard the shouting, rushed to the house around 1.30 am and rang the doorbell for nearly 30 minutes. But when there was no response, they went back to bed.
Savitha found her friend dead when she returned home around 4.30 am. The police believe she was murdered between 2 am and 4 am. Sudeep told the police that Smruthi's family tried to take away her body to paint her death as a suicide. He seemed stunned that her brother Mahadev could have committed the crime, when the couple trusted him the most. “I have known Mahadev for the past three years and he was quite close to me. That’s why we decided to tell him first about our marriage. Never did we think he was capable of something like this," he said. But Mahadev, a school dropout and a drunkard, had often pestered Smruthi for money, and he had even advised Mahadev to mend his ways, he added.
Smruthi’s older brother, Dinesh, seemed shocked by the murder, saying the rest of the family was not aware she had got married in secret. “She was the youngest and the only educated person in our family. We would have wanted a grand wedding for her,” he said. Sudeep's father, Rachaiah, a retired head constable, and his sister, Saraswati, an advocate in Mysore, appeared stunned by the turn of events. The police have launched a manhunt for Mahadev.
Smruti's body was handed over to Sudeep after the postmortem, when he produced a copy of their marriage certificate. This is the second “honour killing” in the region after the one reported in Abalavadi some months ago.