Tamil Nadu: Father-in-law accused in Dalit man’s murder on road, acquitted

Mangalore Today News Network

Chennai, Jun 22, 2020: Over four years after a 23-year-old Dalit engineering student who married an upper caste woman was hacked to death in Tamil Nadu, the Madras High Court today acquitted the woman’s father who was given death penalty and modified the death sentence of the five others to life imprisonment.

 

In December 2017, six men, including the woman’s father, were given death penalty by a lower court for the daylight murder of V Sankar at a market in Tamil Nadu’s Tiruppur in March 2016. The young man’s wife, Kausalya, who was 19 at the time and was accompanying Sankar, was also attacked by the bike-borne men. Kausalya’s father Chinnasamy had allegedly ordered her husband’s killing. The gruesome murder, captured on local CCTV cameras, had shocked the nation, NDTV reported.

The Madras High Court today sentenced the five other accused to life imprisonment for a minimum of 25 years without any right to remission.

Kausalya’s father and the others had challenged the death sentence in the high court.

The lower court had acquitted Kausalya’s mother, uncle and a college student for want of evidence. The high court today confirmed the acquittal of
Kausalya’s mother and the two others.

The family, which belongs to the politically powerful Thevar caste, was allegedly unhappy with the woman marrying Sankar who was from a scheduled caste.

Sankar, a third year student of engineering, and Kausalya had been married for around eight months when the attack took place.

In the CCTV footage of the murder obtained from the market, the couple is seen walking and chatting when three men on a bike stop behind them and suddenly attack Sankar with sharp weapons. When the man stopped moving, they turn on his wife and slash at her till she collapses. The attackers then go away, apparently without any worry about being recognised.

Sankar had died in the hospital from excessive bleeding. Kausalya took a long time to recover. She lived with Sankar’s family, who are farmers, and re-married in December 2018.