“She was a dreamer,” says Sandeep Vats, 28, before taking a long pause to regain his composure. Then he says, with some bitterness, “Her family so miserably failed to understand her. They just didn’t let her be happy.”
His wife, Anjali Deshwal, 22, was strangled to death on August 17, allegedly by her parents and younger brother, for marrying against what is considered ‘acceptable’ in rural Haryana’s Surehti village in Jhajjar district. At the couple’s Gurugram apartment, her brother and mother held her, while her father allegedly strangled her to death, the police said. Her husband was not at home. The family allegedly cremated the body hurriedly at their ancestral village, about 70 km south-west of the national capital.
Her crime: marrying a man from the same village and not from the so-called caste she belonged to. Such relationships in Haryana are socially ‘unpardonable’, with families and neighbours getting involved.
