Opinion Community injustice

Are the winds of change blowing through that most atavistic of institutions, the khap panchayat? After lifting the customary ban on inter-caste and inter-village marriage, the Satrol khap panchayat has gone as far as to appoint a women’s wing. Two years ago, khap panchayats banded together to oppose female foeticide. Some imagine that this amounts to taking the khap out of the khap panchayat. But those may be unrealistic hopes, over-reading changes that are skin-deep, intended primarily to preserve the deeper status quo of clan exogamy, in a context of falling sex ratios.

The khap panchayat, a traditional form of Jat social organisation that exists from Rajasthan to western UP, has a special sway in rural Haryana, where it dispenses justice, arbitrates disputes, but mainly defends the patriarchal code on marriage and property and the ban on mixed-gotra relationships. They enforce their writ through a mix of social intimidation, fines, even violence, in the cluster of villages each khap presides over. This local hegemony has been challenged lately, after news of gruesome “honour killings” and inter-caste conflict made news in urban India, drawing media and civil society outrage, prompting the Supreme Court to point out that their judgments were illegal and unconstitutional. But within their own contexts, khap panchayats remain resilient institutions, seen as a bulwark against the forces of modernity and globalisation. Police and administrative officials often refuse to interfere in the structural injustice of these systems, explaining them away as “customs”.

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Formal grassroots democracy is weak or co-opted, and mainstream political parties are strongly complicit in the workings of khap panchayats, because it is in their interest to keep electoral mobilisations effective. The Congress, INLD and even the Aam Aadmi Party have justified their place as cultural entities, and not one of Haryana’s young and seemingly progressive political leaders has resisted this stand. Political parties, who are actively enabled by khap panchayats, are not likely to call for their dismantling.

No matter what gestures they make to survive, khap panchayats can never be reconciled with the
idea of liberal citizenship and individual freedom. The only lasting way to undermine them is urbanisation, messy and difficult as that transition will be.