Koderma:
When a young journalist named Nirupama Pathak was found dead in her home in Jharkhand, India was forced to re-evaluate its understanding of honour killings.
Nirupama was a bright 22-year-old working with a business newspaper in New Delhi. The fact that her city life, profession and education at a premier college in Delhi had not helped her withstand the pressure of caste equations at home proved that honour killings were not restricted to families in villages with limited literacy.
Now, however, the police believes that Nirupama committed suicide. Her parents, two brothers, and her boyfriend, Priyabhanshu Ranjan, who was her classmate at the prestigious Indian Institute of Mass Communications (IIMC) in Delhi, have been accused with abetment of suicide.
Nirupama was visiting her family in April last year when she was found hanging in her bedroom at her parents' home in Jharkhand's Koderma district. Her mother was arrested for a few days.
Cellphone records showed Nirupama had been texting Priyabhanshu, complaining that her family had been trying to pressure her to scrap her plans to marry him.
A post-mortem report suggested she had been smothered, and was pregnant when she died. But a team of experts from India's leading hospital, AIIMS, said those conclusions were questionable.
As Nirupama's parents combated accusations of killing Nirupama because of her relationship with a man from a different caste, they said that Priyabhanshu had been blackmailing their daughter to marry him.
Friends of Nirupama and Ranjan in Delhi testified that the couple was in love.
The Koderma police believe that torn between the demands of her family and the man she loved, Nirupama was subjected to excruciating pressure and decided to kill herself.