Sunday, May 9, 2010

[ZESTCaste] Caste in the stone age

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/India/Caste-in-the-stone-age-/articleshow/5906263.cms

Caste in the stone age
TOI Crest, May 8, 2010, 11.19am IST

Ever heard of a body that can not only annul a marriage but also
convert husband and wife into brother and sister? Well, an
extra-constitutional authority called khap panchayat has been
traditionally allowed to exercise such extraordinary powers,
destroying families and claiming the lives of innocent couples. And,
thanks to the cowardice of the political class, khap panchayats —
medieval caste institutions found mostly in Haryana, western Uttar
Pradesh and Rajasthan — are now also beginning to look like super
legislatures.

For, in deference to the numerical strength of khap panchayats,
politicians did not dare protest any violation of the freedom to marry
a person of one's choice. If anything, former chief minister of
Haryana, Om Prakash Chautala, supported their demand to amend the
Hindu Marriage Act providing a statutory backing to their traditional
ban on marriages within the same gotra and within the same village.

The contention of these retrograde elements is that any marriage that
takes place in violation of their restrictions should be deemed to be
between brother and sister. Their anxiety to prevent incest is however
gratuitous as the law already deals with it adequately through the
concept of 'sapinda' (third generation in the line of ascent through
mother and fifth in the line of ascent through father). The khap
panchayat notion of extending prohibited relationships to the whole
gotra and the whole village creates a category of people running into
thousands or even lakhs.

Though khap panchayats have traditionally engaged in honour killings
in the course of their vigilantism, the judiciary got the full measure
of this crime for the first time only on March 30, when it imposed
death sentence on five perpetrators and life sentence on one khap
member for the double murder in 2007 of Manoj and Babli, a newly
married couple belonging to the same gotra in Kaithal. The couple was
murdered even after being provided security by the court. If the
pattern of impunity in honour killings ended with this one, it is
thanks to the exceptional courage displayed by Manoj's mother
Chanderpati and the trial judge Vani Gopal Sharma. Thanks to the clout
wielded by khap panchayats, Sharma was subsequently forced to seek a
transfer fearing for her life.

Besides breaking marriages, khap panchayats have a record of
instigating caste atrocities against Dalits. One such case came to
light last month in a Haryana village called Mirchpur where Jats,
jealous of the growing prosperity of Dalits, especially Valmikis,
allegedly engineered an arson attack in which 18 houses of the
targeted community were destroyed and, worse, a man and his
polio-stricken daughter were burnt alive.

Mercifully, this incident provoked an unusually angry reaction from
the political establishment. Congress chief Sonia Gandhi sent a
stinker to Haryana chief minister B S Hooda saying it was a "matter of
shame and horror" that such an incident occurred at all, that too in
the presence of the police. "This cannot be allowed to pass without
firm and severe action against those responsible for the crime," Sonia
thundered. Equally significant, her intervention was followed by a
visit to Mirchpur by Rahul Gandhi. It is just as well that the first
family of the Congress responded to the Mirchpur tragedy as the
20-year-old atrocities law, which is a legacy of Rajiv Gandhi, has
been subverted across the nation by local authorities through errors
of omission and commission.


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