The Tribune, Chandigarh, India

PERSPECTIVE

Searching for honour in murder

For ten months, Robert Fisk of The Independent investigated the incidence of honour killings in Pakistan, Jordan and Afghanistan and followed the ugly trail left by primitive justice. On this page and the next, he explores the different facets of the crime against humanity

IT is a tragedy, a horror, a crime against humanity. The details of the murders - of the women beheaded, burned to death, stoned to death, stabbed, electrocuted, strangled and buried alive for the “honour” of their families — are as barbaric as they are shameful. Many women’s groups in the Middle East and South-west Asia suspect the victims are at least four times the United Nations’ latest world figure of around 5,000 deaths a year. Most of the victims are young, many are teenagers, slaughtered under a vile tradition that goes back hundreds of years but which now spans half the globe.

A 10-month investigation by The Independent in Jordan, Pakistan, Egypt, Gaza and the West Bank has unearthed terrifying details of murder most foul. Men are also killed for “honour” and, despite its identification by journalists as a largely Muslim practice, Christian and Hindu communities have stooped to the same crimes. Indeed, the “honour” of families, communities and tribes transcends religion and human mercy. But voluntary women’s groups, human rights organisations, Amnesty International and news archives suggest that the slaughter of the innocent for “dishonouring” their families is increasing by the year.

Iraqi Kurds, Palestinians in Jordan, Pakistan and Turkey appear to be the worst offenders but media freedoms in these countries may over-compensate for the secrecy which surrounds “honour” killings in Egypt — which untruthfully claims there are none — and other Middle East nations in the Gulf and the Levant. But honour crimes long ago spread to Britain, Belgium, Russia and Canada and many other nations. Security authorities and courts across much of the Middle East have connived in reducing or abrogating prison sentences for the family murder of women, often classifying them as suicides to prevent prosecutions.

Robert Fisk

Middle East correspondent of The Independent

Fisk has covered wars across Europe to Asia

It is difficult to remain unemotional at the vast and detailed catalogue of these crimes. How should one react to a man — this has happened in both Jordan and Egypt — who rapes his own daughter and then, when she becomes pregnant, kills her to save the “honour” of his family? Or the Turkish father and grandfather of a 16-year-old girl, Medine Mehmi, in the province of Adiyaman, who was buried alive beneath a chicken coop in February for “befriending boys”? Her body was found 40 days later, in a sitting position and with her hands tied.

Or Aisha Ibrahim Duhulow, 13, who in Somalia in 2008, in front of a thousand people, was dragged to a hole in the ground - all the while screaming, “I’m not going — don’t kill me” — then buried up to her neck and stoned by 50 men for adultery? After 10 minutes, she was dug up, found to be still alive and put back in the hole for further stoning. Her crime? She had been raped by three men and, fatally, her family decided to report the facts to the Al-Shabab militia that runs Kismayo. Or the Al-Shabab Islamic “judge” in the same country who announced the 2009 stoning to death of a woman - the second of its kind the same year - for having an affair? Her boyfriend received a mere 100 lashes.

Or the young woman found in a drainage ditch near Daharki in Pakistan, “honour” killed by her family as she gave birth to her second child, her nose, ears and lips chopped off before being axed to death, her first infant lying dead among her clothes, her newborn’s torso still in her womb, its head already emerging from her body? She was badly decomposed; the local police were asked to bury her. Women carried the three to a grave, but a Muslim cleric refused to say prayers for her because it was “irreligious” to participate in the namaz-e-janaza prayers for “a cursed woman and her illegitimate children”.

So terrible are the details of these “honour” killings, and so many are the women who have been slaughtered, that the story of each one might turn horror into banality. But lest these acts - and the names of the victims, when we are able to discover them - be forgotten, here are the sufferings of a mere handful of women over the past decade, selected at random, country by country, crime after crime.

Last March, Munawar Gul shot and killed his 20-year-old sister, Saanga, in the North-West Frontier Province of Pakistan, along with the man he suspected was having “illicit relations” with her, Aslam Khan. In August of 2008, five women were buried alive for “honour crimes” in Baluchistan by armed tribesmen; three of them — Hameeda, Raheema and Fauzia — were teenagers who, after being beaten and shot, were thrown still alive into a ditch where they were covered with stones and earth. When the two older women, aged 45 and 38, protested, they suffered the same fate. The three younger women had tried to choose their own husbands. In the Pakistani parliament, the MP Israrullah Zehri referred to the murders as part of a “centuries-old tradition” which he would “continue to defend”.

In December 2003, a 23-year-old woman in Multan, identified only as Afsheen, was murdered by her father because, after an unhappy arranged marriage, she ran off with a man called Hassan who was from a rival, feuding tribe. Her family was educated - they included civil servants, engineers and lawyers. “I gave her sleeping pills in a cup of tea and then strangled her with a dapatta [a long scarf, part of a woman’s traditional dress],” her father confessed. He told the police: “Honour is the only thing a man has. I can still hear her screams, she was my favourite daughter. I want to destroy my hands and end my life.” The family had found Afsheen with Hassan in Rawalpindi and promised she would not be harmed if she returned home. They were lying.

Zakir Hussain Shah slit the throat of his daughter Sabiha, 18, at Bara Kau in June 2002 because she had “dishonoured” her family. But under Pakistan’s notorious qisas law, heirs have powers to pardon a murderer. In this case, Sabiha’s mother and brother “pardoned” the father and he was freed. When a man killed his four sisters in Mardan in the same year, because they wanted a share of his inheritance, his mother “pardoned” him under the same law. In Sarghoda around the same time, a man opened fire on female members of his family, killing two of his daughters. Yet again, his wife — and several other daughters wounded by him — “pardoned” the murderer because they were his heirs.

Outrageously, rape is also used as a punishment for “honour” crimes. In Meerwala village in the Punjab in 2002, a tribal “jury” claimed that an 11-year-old boy from the Gujar tribe, Abdul Shakoor, had been walking unchaperoned with a 30-year-old woman from the Mastoi tribe, which “dishonoured” the Mastois. The tribal elders decided that to “return” honour to the group, the boy’s 18-year-old sister, Mukhtaran Bibi, should be gang-raped. Her father, warned that all the female members of his family would be raped if he did not bring Mukhtar to them, dutifully brought his daughter to this unholy “jury”. Four men, including one of the “jury”, immediately dragged the girl to a hut and raped her while up to a hundred men laughed and cheered outside. She was then forced to walk naked through the village to her home. It took a week before the police even registered the crime — as a “complaint”.

Acid attacks also play their part in “honour” crime punishments. The Independent itself gave wide coverage in 2001 to a Karachi man called Bilal Khar who poured acid over his wife Fakhra Yunus’s face after she left him and returned to her mother’s home in the red-light area of the city. The acid fused her lips, burned off her hair, melted her breasts and an ear, and turned her face into “a look of melted rubber”. That same year, a 20-year-old woman called Hafiza was shot twice by her brother, Asadullah, in front of a dozen policemen outside a Quetta courthouse because she had refused to follow the tradition of marrying her dead husband’s elder brother. She had then married another man, Fayyaz Moon, but police arrested the girl and brought her back to her family in Quetta on the pretext that the couple could formally marry there. But she was forced to make a claim that Fayaz had kidnapped and raped her. It was when she went to court to announce that her statement was made under pressure - and that she still regarded Fayaz as her husband - that Asadullah murdered her. He handed his pistol to a police constable who had witnessed the killing.

One of the most terrible murders in 1999 was that of a mentally retarded 16-year-old, Lal Jamilla Mandokhel, who was reportedly raped by a junior civil servant in Parachinar in the North-West Frontier Province of Pakistan. Her uncle filed a complaint with the police but handed Lal over to her tribe, whose elders decided she should be killed to preserve tribal “honour”. She was shot dead in front of them. Arbab Khatoon was raped by three men in the Jacobabad district. She filed a complaint with the police. Seven hours later, she was murdered by relatives who claimed she had “dishonoured” them by reporting the crime.

Over 10 years ago, Pakistan’s Human Rights Commission was recording “honour” killings at the rate of a thousand a year. But if Pakistan seems to have the worst track record of “honour” crimes — and we must remember that many countries falsely claim to have none — Turkey might run a close second. According to police figures between 2000 and 2006, a reported 480 women — 20 per cent of them between the ages of 19 and 25 —- were killed in “honour” crimes and feuds.

In 2006, authorities in the Kurdish area of South-east Anatolia were recording that a woman tried to commit suicide every few weeks on the orders of her family. Others were stoned to death, shot, buried alive or strangled. A 17-year-old woman called Derya who fell in love with a boy at her school received a text message from her uncle on her mobile phone. It read: “You have blackened our name. Kill yourself and clean our shame or we will kill you first.” Derya’s aunt had been killed by her grandfather for an identical reason. Her brothers also sent text messages, sometimes 15 a day. Derya tried to carry out her family’s wishes. She jumped into the Tigris river, tried to hang herself and slashed her wrists - all to no avail. Then she ran away to a women’s shelter.

It took 13 years before Murat Kara, 40, admitted in 2007 that he had fired seven bullets into his younger sister after his widowed mother and uncles told him to kill her for eloping with her boyfriend. Before he murdered his sister in the Kurdish city of Dyabakir, neighbours had refused to talk to Murat Kara and the imam said he was disobeying the word of God if he did not kill his sister. So he became a murderer. Honour restored.

In his book Women In The Grip Of Tribal Customs, a Turkish journalist, Mehmet Farac, records the “honour” killing of five girls in the late 1990s in the province of Sanliurfa. Two of them - one was only 12 - had their throats slit in public squares, two others had tractors driven over them, the fifth was shot dead by her younger brother. One of the women who had her throat cut was called Sevda Gok. Her brothers held her arms down as her adolescent cousin cut her throat.

But the “honour” killing of women is not a uniquely Kurdish crime, even if it is committed in rural areas of the country. In 2001, Sait Kina stabbed his 13-year-old daughter to death for talking to boys in the street. He attacked her in the bathroom with an axe and a kitchen knife. When the police discovered her corpse, they found the girl’s head had been so mutilated that the family had tied it together with a scarf. Sait Kina told the police: “I have fulfilled my duty.”

In the same year, an Istanbul court reduced a sentence against three brothers from life imprisonment to between four and 12 years after they threw their sister to her death from a bridge after accusing her of being a prostitute. The court concluded that her behaviour had “provoked” the murder. For centuries, virginity tests have been considered a normal part of rural tradition before a woman’s marriage. In 1998, when five young women attempted suicide before these tests, the Turkish family affairs minister defended mandated medical examinations for girls in foster homes.

In Jordan, women’s organisations say that per capita, the Christian minority in this country of just over five million people are involved in more “honour” killings than Muslims — often because Christian women want to marry Muslim men. But the Christian community is loath to discuss its crimes and the majority of known cases of murder are committed by Muslims. Their stories are wearily and sickeningly familiar.

Here is Sirhan in 1999, boasting of the efficiency with which he killed his young sister, Suzanne. Three days after the 16-year-old had told police she had been raped, Sirhan shot her in the head four times. “She committed a mistake, even if it was against her will,” he said. “Anyway, it’s better to have one person die than to have the whole family die of shame.” Since then, a deeply distressing pageant of “honour” crimes has been revealed to the Jordanian public, condemned by the royal family and slowly countered with ever tougher criminal penalties by the courts.

These are just a few of the murders, a few names, a small selection of horror stories across the world to prove the pervasive, spreading infection of what must be recognised as a mass crime, a tradition of family savagery that brooks no merciful intervention, no state law, rarely any remorse.

OPED

The truth about honour killings

‘Women have no independent identities, they are not independent human beings. Men also think of women as an extension of themselves. When women violate these standards, this is a direct blow to the man’s sense of identity’

THE old Pakistani maulawi laid two currency bills on the table between us, one for 50 rupees, the other for 100 rupees. “Now tell me,” Rahat Gul asked, “which is the more valuable?” I thought it was a trap - which it was, in a way - but he lost patience with me and seized the 100 rupee note. “Now come with me.” And he stood up and led me down a narrow corridor into a small bedroom. There was a camp bed, a military radio and, at the far end, a giant British-made safe. He fiddled with the combination and hauled on the iron door. Then he placed the 100 rupee bill inside and locked the vault. “You see?” he said. “This is like a woman. She must be protected and looked after, because she is more precious than us.”

Reader, this is no joke. This whole piece of entirely spontaneous theatre occurred several years ago in what was then called the North West Frontier Province. But I actually possess a videotape of the entire proceedings, in which you see me following the divine to his safe and hear him comparing the worth of the currency bill to the worth of a woman. I was supposed to be impressed by the high status which he accorded women. What struck me, of course, was that this high status appeared to accord women an exclusively economic value - she was a bank account - and that this might lie behind the whole misogynistic system which led us to the curse of “honour” crime.

“Two things will happen when you write your reports about ‘honour’ killing, Mr Robert,” an old Egyptian friend tells me in Alexandria. “Firstly, they will say you are using Muslims as whipping boys - even though this has nothing to do with Islam. And then you will be accused of demeaning the Arab nation or Egypt or Jordan or Pakistan or Turkey.” Well, we shall see.

I walk into the office of Ahmed Najdawi, an elderly Jordanian lawyer whose walls are decorated with photographs of his hero, Saddam Hussein. There is even a picture of Saddam greeting a very proud Mr Najdawi. A secular man, then, a man of the people, for Saddam remains a hero to many in Amman. But no, Ahmed Najdawi often represents the families who commit “honour” killings, those who have killed their wives or daughters or sisters.

He believes the whole subject has become “super-exposed” for political reasons, because “Muslims are an easy target”. This happens all over the world, he insists. “Although mostly it has to do with Eastern cultures.” He talks about the Ottoman empire, how its rules formulated “primitive laws that defended primitive customs”, how “customs are stronger than laws.”

I know what’s coming next. Didn’t we Westerners used to treat women the same way? “In Europe, they used to burn women for adultery.” Yes, it’s true. And not long ago, unmarried British women who were pregnant were locked up in lunatic asylums. Anyway, didn’t “honour” matter to European men in the Renaissance?

And back in Beirut, I open my old copy of Shakespeare, to that most bloody of plays, to Titus Andronicus. The hero’s daughter Lavinia has been raped and mutilated, and Andronicus is contemplating her “honour” killing.

Titus: Was it well done of rash Virginius. To slay his daughter with his own right hand Because she was enforced, stained and deflowered? Saturninus: It was, Andronicus... Because the girl should not survive her shameAnd by her presence still renew his sorrows. So Lavinia’s fate is sealed. Titus: Die, die, Lavinia, and thy shame with thee, And with thy shame thy father’s sorrows die.

But does the father’s sorrow die? “There is remorse, for sure,” Najdawi says. “They commit these crimes, motivated by the cultural aspects. But when time calms them down, they feel regret. Nobody kills a wife or a sister or a daughter without later feeling remorse.”

Yet nothing comes closer to Titus Andronicus than the insistent, terrible stories of gang rape by United States personnel in Abu Ghraib. You hear this repeatedly in Amman, and a very accurate source of mine in Washington - a man who deals with military personnel - tells me they are true. This, he says, is why Barack Obama changed his mind about releasing the photographs which George W. Bush refused to make public. The pictures we saw - of the humiliation of men - were outrageous enough. But the ones we haven’t seen show Americans raping Iraqi women.

Lima Nabil, a journalist who now runs a home for on-the-run girls, sips coffee as the boiling Jordanian sun frowns through the window at us. “In Abu Ghraib,” she says, “women were tortured by the Americans much more than the men. One woman said she witnessed five girls being raped. Most of the women in the prison were raped - some of them left prison pregnant. Families killed some of these women - because of the shame.”

Lima has written many articles about Jordan’s “honour” crimes. At least one was censored. She has - like other journalists - been threatened. “Out here, we have closed communities, where everyone knows everyone else. In tribal law, in the old days, the sheikh would protect you. Now the government is trying to take over.”

Mr Najdawi agrees. “We have just had an amendment to the law - it gives equality to men and women over ‘honour’-related issues. It says that a woman must be treated the same way if she kills her husband. But either way, if a husband kills his wife, this is regarded as murder with intent and he cannot receive less than 10 years. However many mitigating circumstances, the crime was still intentional.” And it’s true that Amman courts have now been handing out 14-year sentences to men for “honour” crimes and intend to make the guilty serve their full sentences.

Lima Nabil tells a story that I hear from three other journalists and NGOs in Amman. The details are the same - and the story is true. In the town of Madabad, a wife left her husband for a lover and they went to the tribal leader to prevent family “honour” being invoked. “The tribal leader gave the husband a divorce and ordered the wife to marry her lover,” she says, “Then he ordered her lover’s sister to marry the abandoned husband. Thus if the lover claimed he’d stolen another man’s wife, the husband could say he was sleeping with his sister!” But each time I heard this tale, I asked myself the same question. Tribal “law” may have prevented violence — but what about the sister who was forced to marry the divorced husband?

Among the toughest of the women to whom I spoke was Frazana Bari. A lecturer at the Qaid al-Azzam University in Islamabad, she makes frequent appearances on television, and manages - by her free thinking - to provoke the anger of some of her own students; which could be a dangerous thing to do in Pakistan. Outside her office, I notice that students have scribbled their displeasure on a flyer for a theatre workshop in which she collaborates. Bari is thus a necessary figure in her country, a solo voice amid a choir of familiar chants.

“Honour for men is connected with women’s behaviour because they are seen as the property of the family - and of the community,” she says. “They have no independent identities, they are not independent human beings. Men also think of women as an extension of themselves. When women violate these standards, this is a direct blow to the man’s sense of identity.

Relatives with blood on their hands

SO far, I’ve lost eight women from my shelter,” Hina Jilani says. “One went out for a job in town, she left our shelter, got on a bus - and was gunned down by her brother. Her name was Shagofta, she was in her late twenties. She had already married the man she loved but the parents had disapproved. Her brother got straight off the bus and went to the police station and gave himself up. But his father - Shagofta’s father - ‘forgave’ him. So he was let off. And nothing happened.”

Ms Jilani is a tough, brave lawyer with a harsh way of describing the “honour killing” - the murder - of young women. She has to be tough, given the death threats she’s received from Pakistan’s Islamists. She speaks with contempt for the families who murder their women - with even more contempt for the police and the judges who allow the killers to go free. Pakistan has the grotesque reputation of being one of the leading “honour-killing” countries in the world.

“Some of the women in our Dastak shelter in Lahore left us after assurances from their families that they would not be harmed,” Ms Jilani says. “We always tell the women not to accept these assurances. In the Lahore High Court, I was sitting there when the judge was insisting that a women from our shelter should go back to her parents. The more the judge insisted, the more the woman resisted. He made her sit in his chambers and then in the court. And then, as she left the High Court gate, they shot her down. The judge said nothing.”

Before he resigned in 2008, President Pervez Musharraf was asked why nothing had been done to alleviate the plight of women in Pakistan. There was no money available, the General said. But Pakistan had to spend money on nuclear and conventional weapons “in order to live honourably”. National honour, it seemed, mattered more than the lives and honour of the women of Pakistan.

In Ms Jilani’s office in Lahore, where fans whirl against the heat in small rooms crammed with legal files, faded documents and trilling telephones, an armed guard sits at the door. “The eight women from our shelter who were murdered — this has become a big scandal,” Ms Jilani says, her voice rising as her anger rekindles itself. “There is a law in this country — it’s always the family that conspires to kill, so if the father or brother kills, the family forgives him and there’s no charge. The law says there can be a ‘compromise’ at any stage without any evidence coming into court. The trial simply stops if there is a compromise. The court has to give its permission for a compromise — but it always gives permission. This means an automatic acquittal. This means that there is no stain on the murderers.”

Ms Jilani went to the police after Shagofta was killed by her brother on the Lahore bus. “We asked them what they were doing. They said the family had forgiven the brother. ‘We have no power now to investigate,’ they said. I sent this to the Commission on the Status of Women - and they took this case up with the Inspector General of Punjab. So far, there has been no response. I sent letters to the IG myself. Then he said that the ‘investigation’ was still going on. But there was no ‘evidence’ - of course not, because the girl was killed, as they say, ‘in the heart of the family’.”

Ms Jilani sighs, often. Sitting in the chair opposite her desk at the end of her office, listening to her furious indignation, I get the impression - indeed, I have the absolute conviction — that she faces a set of Islamist laws going back to the time of another dictator, Zia al-Haq, that are constantly undermining her lawyer’s soul. “There was a girl here and she wanted to marry against her parents’ wishes. So her brother killed her husband-to-be. He went to jail after being sentenced to 14 years. He wanted to go after the girl, his sister. She sought shelter here with us. Her family blame her because her brother is in jail.

“To this day, we don’t know what to do with the girl. She is now doing secretarial work here in our office. She has enough economic independence. But her fiancé’s family have no sympathy with her because their son is dead. And her protection is the duty of the state — not mine. She’s been here in the office for two years now. Our office guard brings her here and back to the shelter every day.”

One of the most savage of all the “honour” murders was committed in the very office in which we are sitting. A decade ago, it brought world publicity and caused international outrage - which had not the slightest effect. The killing of Samia Sarwar still haunts Ms Jalani. “She was shot where you are sitting,” she said. “I saw the holes in her head. Her brains were on the wall behind you.”

Most “honour” crimes are committed by the poor and deprived. But 29-year-old Samia was the daughter of Haj Ghulam Sarwar, a rich man and head of the Peshawar chamber of commerce in the North West Frontier Province of Pakistan. Her mother was a doctor. Samia was married to her aunt’s son. The couple had two children, the elder nine years old.

She claimed that her husband beat her constantly and wanted to leave home, and her father invited her to return to her family home — on the condition that she did not remarry. But Samia fell in love with an army officer, Nadir, told her parents about him and asked them to secure a divorce.

Mr Sarwar refused, on the grounds that this would split the family. Then Samia eloped with Nadir. Threatened by the father, she fled to Lahore - and to Ms Jilani’s shelter. Under the rules of the Dastak shelter, Samia’s mother was told her daughter was in Lahore.

“First an official came to see me from the North West Frontier Province,” Ms Jilani recalls. “He was a scoundrel. He demanded that Samia return to her family. I said, ‘That’s her decision’. Her father came to Lahore. I told Samia that he wanted to see her. Her hands were trembling - like this.” And here Ms Jalani shakes her hands over her desk. “She told me, ‘Madam, they will kill me, they will kill me.’ You learn to believe what these women say. I believed her. I always tell my colleagues: never think the woman is exaggerating her fears.”

Samia’s parents appointed one of Ms Jilani’s legal colleagues to represent them to plead for a meeting with their daughter. Samia refused. Then her mother called by phone, offering to give her divorce papers so she could marry Nadir. Samia - fatally, as it turned out — trusted her mother’s word. According to Ms Jilani, Samia told her: “I will see my mother — but she must come alone. I will only meet her in your presence.” The meeting was set for mid-afternoon in the lawyer’s office. The armed guard was told to ensure nobody arrived with a weapon.

“I was sitting here and she was sitting there, where you are. We were chatting about her case. The office staff were leaving — it was around 4pm — and suddenly the door opened and this woman entered with a man. I didn’t recognise the man. Someone from my office brought them both. But there had been a security lapse as the office was closing. The woman said, ‘This is my driver.’ I looked up and said, ‘You can send your driver away now — come and sit down.’

“Samia didn’t apprehend any danger. She said ‘Salaam aleikum’ to her mother. And just as she said that, this man whipped out a pistol — in a split second, just as Samia was greeting her mother — and shot her. I was still sitting down and I felt the bullet go past my ear. He shot Samia in the head the first time, then in the stomach. I saw her fall down.” Ms Jilani says she collapsed in shock but managed to press the security alarm.

“I could see Samia was dead — she had a hole in her head and her brains were coming out. Some of my staff came. But the mother, she just looked at her daughter. Then she turned round and walked out. She and the man with the pistol went to the door, and I shouted, ‘Call the police.’ The man was holding another of my lawyers at gunpoint. Then he shot at the office guard, who fired back. The gunman was carrying an ID card which said he was an official driver in the North West Frontier Province.”

To this day, Ms Jilani is overwhelmed not just by the failure of security in her office — it was presumably the armed guard who let the uncle in — but the growing suspicion that the police were somehow involved.

Profile
Ramanaidu: A film producer par excellence
by Harihar Swarup

Daggubati Ramanaidu is the most versatile film producer aptly called the Movie Mughal. Though he began his career in Telugu film world, he expanded his prolific genius to produce over 150 films in 12 languages and they included English, Hindi, Tamil, Kannada and Bengali.

He proposes to start producing a film in Punjabi soon. He has also the credit of introducing 11 heroines, four heroes, 23 directors and four music directors to filmdom. The Guinness Book of World Records lists him as the most prolific producer of films.

Another feather was added to Ramanaidu's cap last week when it was decided to honour him the highest film award, the Dadasaheb Phalke Award. He was elated and him impromptu comment was: “I feel honoured. I have served the film industry with commitment for over 45 years now”.

Now 74, Daggubati has tried his luck in many walks of life but finally choose to settle down in the glamorous world of films. Born in a village of Prakasam district of Andhra Pradesh, he wanted to become an agriculturist, be on the top and produce more paddy than others. He grew up to become a farmer. He had a rice mill and ventured into the transport business. However, he donated land to Acharya Vinoba Bhave for his Bhoodan movement. “If I had not given my father's land, I would have given my mother’s”, he says.

In 1962, Daggubati closed down his business, went to Chennai and stayed in his uncle's house and thought of doing brick business. Since the red soil in central Chennai was not conducive for bricks, he contemplated getting into the real estate business. Call it a turn of destiny, it was precisely at that point in time that his uncle took him to the Andhra Club, which was visited by most Telugu artistes and film directors. His meeting with film personalities set the course for his entry into the celluloid world.

Daggubati also tried his luck in politics. He was a member of the Thirteenth Lok Sabha representing the Telugu Desam Party from 1999 to 2004. He was often seen in the Central Hall of Parliament but rarely heard in the House.

However, politics did not suit his temperament. He was defeated in the 2004 general elections. Though he bade farewell to politics, he is still a TDP member. “I don't want to enter politics again. I do not fit in...”, he reportedly said.

In 1963, he produced his first Telugu film Anuragam, followed by a very successful Ramudu Bheemudu starring N.T. Rama Rao in 1964. Ramanaidu has been married to Rajeshwari. His elder son D. Suresh Babu runs one of the most prestigious production houses of the Telugu film industry, Suresh Production. His other son D. Venkatesh, also called Victory Venkatesh, is a very prominent actor with over 65 films to his name. He has a daughter, Lakshmi. Daggubati's entire family is in the film business.

He had worked with a number of stalwarts of the Indian film industry such as N. T. Rama Rao, Sivaji Ganesan, Jaya Prada, Chiranjeevi, Rajnikanth, Rajesh Khanna, Hema Malini, Rekha and Sreedevi. Prominent artistes introduced by him include his son Venkatesh, Harish,Vanisri, Aryan Rajesh, Tabu, Kushboo Sundar, Allari Naresh and Malasree. Ramanaidu has also set up studios, recording, preview and dubbing theatres and laboratories in Hyderabad and Visakhapatnam.

His film Surigadu was selected for the Indian Panorama in 1993. Asukh, a Bengali film, won the National Award for the Best Film in 1999. Apart from this, his films have been honoured with several awards by the Andhra Pradesh government. He has also produced a film titled Hamari Beti (my daughter) in Hindi which focusses on how handicapped people can lead a normal life and achieve their goals. The protagonist in the film is a girl who is severely handicapped in real life. This film has been screened in the International Film Festivals in Chicago and Venice.

Ramanaidu has reached heights like no other film producer but he has no plan to retire. He says, “movie-making is the only avocation I have. I will never retire. If I don't make movies I wouldn't know what to do.”