The Principal District and Sessions Court in Tamil Nadu’s Tirupur on Tuesday sentenced six people to death for murdering a Dalit man in March 2016 because he had married a woman from a higher caste, The Hindu reported.
The 22-year-old Dalit man, Sankar, was hacked to death on March 13, 2016, near a bus stop in Udumalaipettai town in plain view of passersby. He had married Kausalya from the Thevar community, a dominant caste in South India, eight months earlier. She had suffered a severe head injury during the attack, which was carried out at the behest of her father who opposed their inter-caste marriage.
The police had arrested 11 people, including Kausalya’s parents Chinnasamy and Annalakshmi, and her maternal uncle Pandidurai. They had registered cases under seven different sections in the Indian Penal Code and the Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act.
On Tuesday, the court sentenced Chinnasamy and five others to death, but it acquitted Kausalya’s mother, uncle and a 16-year-old for lack of evidence. Of the two remaining accused, one Stephen Dhanraj was sentenced to a double life term, and the other, Manikandan, was sentences to five years of rigorous imprisonment.
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