Tirupur, Dec. 12
Six out of the eight persons who were convicted today in the murder of Dalit man Sankar who was hacked to death in broad daylight at Udumalpet for marrying a caste Hindu girl Kausalya, have been awarded a death sentence by hanging by the Tirupur Principal District and Sessions Court. This includes A1, Sankar's father-in-law Chinnasamy.
The "honour killing" was caught on a surveillance camera installed in a shop nearby. Six police teams were formed to nab the killers. Police filed a chargesheet against 11 persons, including the girl’s parents. Cases under various sections, including the SC/ST Act, were registered.
This included the father (A1) B. Chinnasamy (40), mother (A2) C. Annalakshmi (36), uncle (A3) P. Pandidurai (40), (A4) P. Jegadeesan (32), (A5) M. Manikandan (26), (A6) P. Selvakumar (26), (A7) P. Kalai Tamilvannan (26), (A8) M. Madan alias Michael (26), (A9) K. Tamil alias Dhanraj (23), and (A10) Prasanna and (A11) Manikandan, for planning and executing the crime.
The Court today found B. Chinnasamy (40), P. Jegadeesan (32), M. Manikandan (26), P. Selvakumar (26), M. Madan alias Michael (26), K. Tamil alias Dhanraj (23), P. Kalai Tamilvannan (26), and Manikandan, guilty on all counts. Out of the eight, Chinnasamy, Jegadeesan, M. Manikandan, Selvakumar, Kalai Tamilvannan and Madan alias Michael have been awarded the death sentences.
Dhanraj has been awarded life sentence, while A11 Manikandan will get a five-year imprisonment. A2, A3 and A10 have been acquitted.
the Sankar-Kausalya case had all the makings of a Kollywood crime thriller! There was love, caste factions, opposition, threats, hacking of the man to death, a suicide attempt by the woman, and a rehabilitated life. This alone could have amounted to the customary “happy ending”, only that this was not enough. Some kind of poetic closure came when eight out of the 11 accused were convicted in the Sankar murder case. And, out of the eight, six have been awarded death sentences. Three, including C. Annalakshmi, mother of Kausalya, have been acquitted.
There have been several caste-hate killings, which go by the exalted term of honour killings, in Tamil Nadu. But, the Sankar-Kausalya case in Udumalpet grabbed headlines like no other in the recent past.
The drama surrounding the whole episode itself was enough for it to occupy media space for a long time. But what made the love-caste-murder triangle so much significant was the number of people who, professionally and systematically, conspired to execute the honour killing. To add to the murkiness, it was alleged that the father of the girl was the mastermind behind the killing of his son-in-law and also the murder attempt death of his own daughter.
22-year old Dalit man V. Sankar belonged to Komaralingam town near Udumalpet, while Kausalya, a caste-Hindu belonging to the socially dominant Thevar community from Palani, met at a private engineering college in Pollachi. They fell in love, eloped and got married in July 2015. No amount of cajoling or threatening could convince Kausalya to go back to her family.
Kausalya moved in with her husband’s family at Komaralingam, quit studies to work in Tirupur, while Sankar was pursuing his final-year engineering. On March 13, 2016, eight months after the marriage, Sankar was hacked by three men who came on a motorcycle in broad daylight when the couple had gone for shopping at Udumalpet. Sankar died of his injuries within a few hours. But Kausalya, who was also attacked with sickles, recovered from a fractured skull, and later an unsuccessful suicide attempt, to tell the court the gory details of that morning.