We published on the virginity economy yesterday. In the thread, we remembered a very line to us we could not leave alone. Honour killing is what Pakistan took from Indus culture. Acid throwing is what the Indian side took. The data is messier than the line. The line is still broadly right.
The Honour Killing Skew
Between 2018 and 2022, Punjab alone booked 841 incidents with 1,058 victims, 799 of them women. UNFPA’s working estimate is up to 5,000 deaths per year once karo-kari, siyahkari, and “natural cause” burials are folded back in.
India’s NCRB figures for honour killing sit in the low tens per year. This is an undercount so severe it is a category error. Most Indian cases are filed under IPC Section 302 as ordinary murder. The same is true in Pakistan. The difference is that Pakistan’s press, HRCP, and Dawn keep the score. India’s hotspots are Haryana, western UP, and Tamil Nadu (caste-coded).
Adjusted for population, Pakistan’s honour killing intensity is roughly an order of magnitude higher than India’s.
The Acid Attack Skew
India’s NCRB logged 176 acid attacks in 2021 and 306 in 2022, with Delhi the leading metropolitan city and West Bengal and Uttar Pradesh the leading states. Independent estimates put the true annual figure above 1,000.
Pakistan’s acid attacks historically clustered in South Punjab and the Saraiki belt, peaked at around 150 per year, and fell after the Acid Control and Acid Crime Prevention Act 2011. The Acid Survivors Foundation logs 8,500 survivors since 1947, 80 percent of them post-2000.
Two caveats against the neat frame. West Bengal is a top Indian acid state, which sits east of the Yamuna and outside any honest Indus geography. And Pakistan’s acid curve was not zero before 2011; the Saraiki belt produced a steady stream of Fakhra Younus cases through the 2000s. The cleaner statement is that post-2011, India kept the bottle and Pakistan put a lid on it.
Delhi, UP, and Haryana (the Jat belt, culturally contiguous with Pakistani Punjab) are all in the Indian top tier. That piece does track the Great Indus line.
The Shared Substrate
Both practices punish the same offence: female autonomy in the choice of body and partner. The honour killer asserts the daughter’s body was never hers. The acid thrower asserts that if her face will not be his, it will be no one’s.
Read together, they are not two cultures. They are one cultural grammar that has divided its reflexes by geography, by legal system, and by the local availability of weapons. Pakistan’s Punjab reached for the cord. India’s upper Gangetic plain reached for the bottle. Bengal, peculiarly, reached for both.
The Legal Question
Pakistan’s 2016 Criminal Law Act closed the qisas and diyat pardon loophole that had allowed honour killers to walk after family forgiveness. The law is on paper. Conviction rates still run at 0.5 percent. As mentioned previously, Qandeel Baloch’s brother was acquitted in 2022 after their mother pardoned him; the amendment was supposed to prevent exactly that and did not.
India’s 2013 Supreme Court order in Laxmi v. Union of India capped over-the-counter acid sales and mandated licensing. Availability fell roughly in half. The attack count still rose between 2021 and 2022. Both interventions are the right policy. Neither is working at the scale yet required.
Closing
The question for the two countries is not who has the worse statistic. It is whether the cycle of rape and violence against women can be broken.
I once spoke to someone whom knew quite a bit about the BDSM subculture, and asked him why people weren’t calling it sexist. He replied that it wasn’t worse than what practical straight culture was doing to women prior to it.
fascinating