This question is explored in an Asia Times overview of the problem:
In the name of family honor, India is dishonored.
The issue is dramatised in a new film, Chauranga.
Quote: Kill a child for honor, but how heinous!
BY GAUTAMAN BHASKARAN on JANUARY 30, 2016 in ASIA TIMES NEWS & FEATURES, INDIA
India is a cauldron of conflicting content. While womanhood is revered and celebrated, a woman is often tortured, maimed and murdered.
Quote: A few weeks ago, debutant director, Bikas Ranjan Mishra’s Chauranga (also from Bollywood), came as a powerful indictment of honor killing. A low-caste Dalit teenager, a pig-rearer, makes the fatal mistake of taking a fancy for a schoolgirl, whose land-owning father is an upper caste Hindu. The boy writes a love letter to the girl, and the father happens to read it, and it is Hell after that.
The boy and his slightly older brother are beaten, and one of them is bludgeoned to death. Mishra, while elaborating the bestiality of it all in his fiction feature inspired by an actual incident in central India, exposes the hypocrisy of the father, who has no qualms, whatsoever, about sleeping with the mother of the boys!
The problem is not confined to rural areas, and the executions of the killings expose minds that approve of the most brutal violence.
Quote: "Last year, a 20-year-old youth in New Delhi was crushed to death under the wheels of a car, driven by a relative of a 16-year-old girl after an affair between the two young people was discovered. The girl begged her relative to show mercy while he kept running his vehicle over the hapless youth — whose death could have only been painfully torturous.
Nor is the problem confined to India. Honor killings, also take place in the UK and other locations.
Quote: A BBC report quoting women’s advocacy groups says 20,000 women are killed for honor worldwide.
In 2010, the British police recorded 2800-plus incidents of honor crime, which included murder, mutilation and facial disfigurement. Most of these occurred among south-Asian families from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh.
Source: http://atimes.com/2016/01/kill-a-child-for-honor-but-how-heinous/