An Open Letter to Khap Leaders

An Open Letter to Khap Leaders
by Prem Chand Sahajwala
Dear learned leaders of the Khap,

Your Khap panchayats came vigorously into news once again when on 25 Mar. 2010, a Haryana court convicted Khap leader Ganga Raj and six others for killing a young couple Manoj and Babli on 15 Jun. 2007 in Karnal Distt because the hapless couple dared to marry though the two belonged to the same gotra (clan). Calling for a new law to curb these heinous killings, the Addl. Dist. & Sessions Judge Vani Gopal Sharma said “The present case is a classic example and reflects a long standing tradition of oppression against women. It has to be curbed by legislation categorizing such honor killing as a separate offence, giving a clear message to the public.”

While Five of Babli’s family members - her brother Suresh, uncles Rajender and Baru Ram and cousins Satish and Gurdev — were ordered to hang until death for killing the hapless couple, the Khap leader Ganga Raj was served life imprisonment. Equally painful are some more stories like that of Ved Pa Mor of village Singhwal in Jind, who was killed by a mob of villagers while he was proceeding to take back his wife Sonia on orders from High Court (HC).

A few years ago, TV channels had shown the sad story of annulment of Sonia’s marriage to Ved by a Khap Panchayat because they too belonged to the same gotra. The Khap Panchayat even overlooked the fact that the couple had a two year old son and declared that from then onwards the two were brother-sister. Sonia was made homeless overnight and some social organisation took her case to the HC which in 2009 ordered Ved to proceed to Sonia’s village and bring her back and that the two could live as a married couple with their son. A police security officer was provided to Ved but alas, the mob lynched Ved while the helpless lone security officer fled the scene.

I wonder what this gotra is. There are several theories regarding the origin of gotra. Taking one of them at random, Baba Saheb Ambedkar who said that the in charges of various go-shalas (cow crèches) were the originators of gotra which means that each head of a go-shala began a new gotra. Now at the time of origin, the head had a few relatives who were mutually cousins, uncles, aunts and brothers, sisters as in any family of today and all these relatives treated one another as brothers and sisters. Even today, young boys and girls normally move with their first cousins as brothers and sisters. But those original cousins of the birth of gotra days must have now descended into thousands of generations and how frivolous it is of you all to label all these young boys and girls as brothers and sisters? The question is who authorizes you to name various boys’ or girls’ relationships with their friends, with whom they study or serve in an office or play or perform any activity? Are you all out to oppress these youngsters who want just space enough to live their lives their own way and curb their very existence?

In fact, things do not seem to be so simple for you all. Some learned ones among you gathered at the Centre for Study of Developing Sciences (CSDS) 29, Rajpura Road Delhi on 26 May 2010 to explain your stand in a conference called by Madhu Kishwar, India’s most famous feminist who too ironically wants that a law must be made in favour of the Khaps and they be allowed their own way of banning intra-gotra marriages! It was a painful experience of my life to be present at such a gathering where you were brazenly defending your bizarre ways. First, on the screen, a discourse was given differentiating between the central government and these Khaps. The Khaps were being described as democratic which looked very ironical and anyone present there could think that one was being hypnotized! Is it democratic that a few self-styled self-righteous team of old men of a community decide the relationships between people whose own views they never take into account? In the same discourse, the Hindu Marriage Act, 1955 was being termed as dictatorial since only a few learned people passed it in the parliament!

The ‘Hindu Code Bill’ when initially presented by Baba Saheb Ambedkar the then Law Minister was first rejected by many a parliamentarian as also criticized by the president of India. Baba Saheb felt hurt at the immutability of the Hindu theocrats who were against a divorce system for quarrelling couples or a separated wife’s demand for maintenance allowance from her husband, who were against ending bigamy or who were also against giving any concessions to the Hindu woman. Hurt badly, Baba Saheb gave up his cabinet post as Law Minister but subsequently with the wise mobilization by Pandit Nehru and some other equally wise persons, the bill saw the light of the day and is what we know as the ‘Hindu Marriage Act, 1955’.

The original ‘Hindu Code Bill’ had to be split into some parts and each part separately passed as Act. One Khap leader claimed that the Khaps never ordered the killing of any violator of the ‘no intra-gotra marriage’ rule. But the conference attended by many learned writers and journalists of Delhi and surroundings, saw many of them grilling these self-styled myrmidons of justice and question them that if they don’t order killings, do they even condemn killings or support the punishments given to these killers by Indian courts? Instead, the whole community stands united in defence of the killers and declares that those convicted and punished would be defended! I put a question there that if in the case of Sonia and Ved, you can dare give the verdict that they are brother-sister from the day of judgment onwards, then do we have the right to declare a Muslim Panchayat wrong which ordered a Muslim woman raped by her father-in-law to live then onwards as her father-in-law’s wife and husband’s mother?

You all, Col. M.S. Dahiya, Hawa Singh Sangwan (Author and Researcher), Om Prakash Malik ( Sarvakhap Swarup Samiti- an initiative towards modernization of Khaps), Master Rampal Dahiya (Head of Dahiya Khap), Ch. Ranjit Singh (Secretary, Dalal Khap), Capt. J.S.Dalal (Dalal Khap), Narender Kharab (social activist from Hissar), Dr. O.P. Dhankar (Dhankar Khap), Diwan Singh (social activist and, environmentalist) - the learned sages present at the CSDS conference, claimed that the Khaps never sit themselves, but like courts, are requested to sit on any person’s/community’s request.

Dear sages, the same is the case of Deoband’s Dar-ul-uloom. When the Dar-ul-uloom gives fatwa that Muslim women should not go and work anywhere to earn money, they do so when only a Muslim petition asks them for a right answer. The Dar-ul-Uloom throws the fatwa that investing in stock exchanges is un-Islamic only on query by some Muslim. And on a query only the Dar-ul-Uloom would pass a fatwa that earning simple or compound interest from banks is un-Islamic. How do we cope up with such strange phenomenon? Do the Muslim women who work even as judges in the Supreme Court or women like Shabana Azmi who are actresses par excellence, care for the Dar-ul-Uloom? Does Sania Mirza care for the Muslim fanatics when they question her low skirt which she wears as a compulsion while playing a tennis match? The day may not be far when a Muslim woman becomes India’s Chief Justice or say, even president or prime minister. The progressive part of the Muslim community takes pride in the fact that MS Fatima was the first Muslim woman to be a judge in the Supreme Court. The question of real democracy lies here only. The norms followed by the people are the laws and not those dictated by the Dar-ul-Ulooms or the Khaps.

Dear so called fathers of the constitutions of your communities, you all want the parliament to pass a special Act which disallows intra-gotra marriages. For this you have grilled politicians like Naveen Jindal whose case is the most unfortunate one as he is known to be an icon of the India’s young generation and the one who is a proud member of the Rahul brigade to which other proud young spirits like Sachin Pilot, Jiten Prasada, Jyotiraditya Scindia and Agatha Sangma too belong and who shines as the future hope of the country that will lead India to a superpower status.
You have all cleverly held the politicians by their weak nerves since you know that the only weakness of a politician lies in his votes. The politicians would stoop to the lowest ebb for gaining power and for the same reason, leaders like Om Prakash Chautala too are singing psalms in favor of what Chetan Bhagat calls the ‘no same gotra marriage T-shirt’. A party like the BJP which had brazenly taken avtar only to target the Muslims and for that reason, has been clamoring for a Uniform Civil Code is also lured by your good selves and on this subject, it now takes refrain on the necessity of a consensus!

Today one reads with agony, the so called ‘personal view’ of Bhupinder Singh Huda, the Haryana CM who too says that he is against the ‘sa-gotra’ marriages! Such tactics of netting politicians is in reality tantamount to blackmailing!

If a law is passed in favor of the Khap panchayats, then why should we continuously curse Rajiv Gandhi for a legislation in back date in the case of a poor woman Shah Bano? In that case too, it was the low-rung Muslim politician like Shahab-ud-din who held the parliament to ransom and held demonstrations/rallies everywhere. Under him, the Muslim community organised a ‘Shariah Bachao Week’ to save the Muslim Shariah. This country’s right thinking intellectuals never forgave the then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi for snatching a petty maintenance allowance of Rs. 179.20 per month from a hapless 75 years old woman. She died unprotected in 1991 while the Muslim fundamentalists had their way by keeping their Shariah close to heart. If a law is passed in your favor then dear Sirs, one wonders how many young couples will suffer the agony of suppression of their freedoms. If a law is passed in your favour, do you all who were present at the conference and the ones who were not there, think that that would be the end of the matter? Will the people from Rajasthan then not organise dharnas for legitimizing child marriages? Unfortunately some of them had the tactics of sitting on dharnas on railway tracks and didn’t even allow the cremation of those who died in a hunger strike for the purpose of reservations?

Imagine, that the uneducated though so called erudite leaders of village panchayats of Rajasthan hold the governments to ransom in a similar way for the passage of a law in favour of child marriages! The matter doesn’t stop there. Some communities of Rajasthan are also known to be true worshippers of the Sati temples if not the Sati tradition itself in this 21st century. They would continue to think that the Sati is a symbol of woman power and devotion to her husband and would completely turn a blind eye towards the fact that these hapless Satis died for no fault by sitting on the funeral fires of their deceased husbands, leaving their children as orphans. Their properties went into mischievous hands of mischievous relatives who left the children to live a wretched life of hungry and orphans. These communities would also coerce the governments to make a law which permits women to become Satis and also which permits the worship of Satis in the Sati temples.

Today in this modern era, wherein India is proud to be a close friend of the US and is a global market in itself, we are unfortunate enough to witness cases where social reformer’s both hands are cut by villagers when she goes to stop a child marriage. In one case, a woman died, may be accidentally at the funeral fire of her deceased husband but even before it could be ascertained whether it was accident or Sati, the people of the concerned village were seen lying horizontally on the ground to prostrate before the ashes of the so believed Sati of their village! So dear gotra lovers, your campaign may open a hornet’s nest and a myriad of Indian communities may make a queue outside the parliament for the passages of laws in their favor. Blackmailing politicians for votes, they would make them dance to their tunes and have their way.

It was also funny to witness that in the said conference some learned speakers made a fine misuse of Mahatma Gandhi’s conviction in the village panchayats. Gandhi was against adult franchise and he believed in village republics. He believed that only elected members of the panchayats should be the voters for assemblies and parliament while a bulk of the local decisions should be left to the panchayats. The speakers saw virtue in Gandhi’s vision for the sake of their own frivolous principles. Did Gandhi visualise these panchayats which give bizarre verdicts in cases of marriages like declaring a husband-wife as brother-sister? One proud member of a khap panchayat said that the khap in his village does not order killing but it orders the parents of the erring couple to sell their land property and leave the village! This too is a deprivation of the fundamental right of a citizen to own property anywhere in this democratic nation.

One of the opponents of these leaders rightly asked the khap leaders whether they ever contemplated on other issues like the environment, poverty or development or they had simply a one point programme of asserting their authorities regarding the gotra? Are these so called ‘informal social organisations’ as Bhupinder Singh Huda prefers to call them, concerned about the education system of their villages? One really feels miffed at the wisdom of the social leaders of Indian villages.

While concluding this article, I suddenly happen to remember a date 4 Nov. 1948 when Baba Saheb Ambedkar introduced India’s draft constitution in the Constituent Assembly. A part of his long speech also dealt with Indian villages. He said that many honorable members of the Assembly lamented that the new constitution was not built upon Village Panchayats and District Panchayats. But Baba Saheb simply poo poohed the objections of these tear-shedders who had pointed out to Metcalf’s theory that the ‘village communities lasted where nothing else lasts’. Baba Saheb just questioned this survival by saying – ‘The question is, on what plane they have survived. Surely, on a low, on a selfish level… What is a village, but a sink of localism, a den of ignorance, narrow-mindedness and communalism? I am glad that the Draft constitution has discarded the village and adopted the individual as its unit’ (The Essential Writings of BR Ambedkar edited by Valerian Rodrigues pp 485-486).

One of Baba Saheb’s own agonies was that the villages never moved ahead of where they were and were never a part of the progressive march of the nation. This may further be elaborated by the fact that the self-styled self-righteous rightists and the so called owners of the legacy of this great nation have always cursed Bobington Macaulay for bringing the English education and hence civilization in this country. The miserable state of affairs in the villages of our country is a fitting answer to such Macaulay baiters whose education system educated the woman of India and emulated her to man. It is the Macaulay-educated urban woman who reached the space, who occupied positions as big as the president or the Prime Minister of India and the CM of many a state. One of the erudite speakers in this conference was clearly saying that the khap panchayats do not allow women as members of the panchayats. One question is therefore clear – ‘Are the villages of India and the village communities walking with the nation or as Baba Saheb said, they are, just sinks of localism, dens of ignorance, narrow-mindedness and communalism? One prays that you are all able to answer this question to your good selves.