HONOR-BASED VIOLENCE OF SOUTH ASIAN WOMEN: A CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS OF PAKISTANI MEDIA DISCOURSE

Abstract

The research uses a Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and feminist post-structuralist framework to discuss the ways in which media and legal discourses construct HBV. It looks into how these constructions affected the perception of the people, their policy, and justice to the victims. The researchers adopt a regional approach to the high-profile urban situations in Pakistan, caste-based violence in northern India, the institutionalization of women's eradication in Taliban-dominated Afghanistan, and the HBV endemic in Baluchistan under-reported. Honor-based violence (HBV) continues to be a prevalent type of gender-based violence in South Asia, where honor ideologies are used to perpetrate murder, rape, and torture against women. The socio-political and discursive processes that have been normalized, justified, or hidden to legitimize HBV in Pakistan, India, and Afghanistan have been critically analyzed in this paper with special reference to the underreported and militarized Balochistan region. Although high-profile cases such as the killing of Qandeel Baloch (2016) and Noor Mukadam (2021) have been used to talk about them, hundreds are invisibilised every single day in Baluchistan in particular through collusion between the tribal systems and state ignorance. Examples of tribal justice and patriarchal dominance over the law of the state are incidents like the killing of five women in Kohlu (2022) or stoning a woman in Turbat (2023). The political violence, particularly of gender and political activism of Baloch women, which has been imposed on them, and the oppressive treatment of female students, is another manifestation of the specific gendered and political violence of the region. HBV is also perpetuated in India by means of caste and religious control, especially in such states as Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, and Rajasthan. Khap panchayats, political silence, and cultural stigma facilitate a murder that is associated with so-called love jihad or caste transgressions.