India, July 22 -- A father killing a daughter might appear shocking to some urban denizens of Delhi and the rest of the civilised world. Not to me, though. It is as routine as the everyday violence that girls and women in India face as in many other countries across the world. Indeed, there is no country that is free of gender violence. India has just about begun to turn its back on a scourge that has haunted its girls for the past several decades - the sex selective abortion of female foetuses, a virulent form of son preference. Many thought this method of daughter killing was an improvement over female infanticide since it arguably absolved one of the guilt stemming from wilfully ending the life of a newborn child. Assisted by state-of-the-art diagnostic technologies, the patriarchal desire for sons resulted in India losing millions of girls. Their aborted birth inflicted involuntary bachelorhood on thousands of men in the northern and western regions of the country. And in a perverse logic, people ended up sympathising with these "hapless" men, who were seen as unfairly deprived of wives of their own culture and community. Such men were "forced" to bring poor women as wives from far-off states such as Assam and West Bengal, suffer the trauma of societal shame and, even worse, accept so-called tainted lineages - a concern that made the Haryana khaps finally come around to the view that killing one's own daughters wasn't perhaps such a good idea. Protecting the old order of caste, community, and kinship pride was the rationale, not that girls inherently deserve to live and thrive. Fathers in the patriarchal (and other) regions of the country have routinely killed daughters; the decade of the 2000s witnessed many so-called honour killings, hate crimes where girls who married outside caste or religion or entered traditionally proscribed marriages were brutally murdered. Such killings met with community and societal approval - after all, hadn't the righteous parent avenged the slight to his (their) personal, family and community honour? The murderers were valorised by the community, their actions commended for their bravery and courage and for having upheld the moral order under threat from wayward girls. Did Radhika Yadav's father kill her to avenge his honour? In Haryana, such a murder would be considered routine since the state has been at the epicentre of both female foeticide and marriage-related honour killings. But there is a new twist in the tale here, it seems. The murder took place in upscale Gurugram, where the rural and the urban leak into each other and which embodies, as Dipankar Gupta would say, "a mistaken modernity". The Yadavs' ancestral village is ensconced within villas and high-rises, with a resident proudly declaring, "We are modern now" and "women work today," leading one to believe that perhaps the family had embraced a patina of urban values, shedding its rural baggage. When it comes to daughters, however, the rural-urban, educated-uneducated divides often collapse, and it is the community consensus - which in this case is clearly supportive of the father - that comes to the fore. To the police, the father, Deepak, cited the frequent taunts from relatives and neighbours about "living off his daughter's income" as causing him great distress and as the primary reason for killing his daughter. It is also reported that Radhika's family "was not facing financial difficulties," and, therefore, she "did not need to work," so why did she have to put her father, who had supported and helped build her tennis career, through this shame and psychological distress? Was it that she was a stubborn girl who refused to acquiesce to his demands to give up her coaching activities after her tennis career was cut short by an injury? Was it because she dared to be disobedient, challenging his authority, control, and power over the family? Were there other points of discord, other intangibles, lurking beneath the surface in the veiled spaces of family life that might still emerge? The silence of the mother, who accompanied the daughter on her reel-making outings, speaks to other gendered fault lines in the family. It seems that Radhika, making breakfast in the family kitchen, was hardly expecting to be shot in the back by her own father. Can a premeditated murder have been wholly unexpected? Or perhaps just its timing was? Or the certainty that her father would not resort to a final solution to their acrimony? Perhaps she had a premonition of it when she expressed to her friend that she would like to get away from her home, even if only temporarily. While the precise psycho-social intricacies of what led to the killing may remain shrouded in mystery, we can only underline the larger societal shifts that help us understand this particular case of filicide. Radhika, by all accounts, was a successful tennis player and her father had, according to neighbours who testified, worked hard to build her career, just as many fathers today are nurturing their daughters in sports and other fields, providing role models to other families and girls. Radhika was certainly one of those new Indian women - independent, aspirational, desirous of mundane things such as a career, economic independence, and a life of her own choosing. By wishing to forge her own life, and not one dictated by patriarchal power and authority, Radhika was challenging the expectations that go along with the social construct of a good daughter of an honourable father. The expectations of good daughterhood far outweigh those of good sonhood in patriarchal societies. While both are subjected to familial and societal expectations, sons' flaws and transgressions are overlooked or concealed, while daughters must pay for theirs. Radhika's murder epitomises the contradictions of the present moment, where young women's desire to write their own futures, away from the shackles of family and community, poses a threat to patriarchy - the rule of the father. The new reality is of women who, with their capability and competence, take risks every day - whether in Iran, China, India, or even in the West - to take their place in a world that can no longer oppress them as easily as before. The death throes of a patriarchy, where society and its powerful henchmen, from politicians to policemen, are ranged against women, promise to be long and bloody....