Over the last week, a lot was being said about khap panchayats. While Union Finance Minister P. Chidambaram said khap panchayats are retrograde organisations that could not be part of India’s culture, Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal said that he did not see the need to ban them because they served a “cultural purpose.” The Chief Minister of Haryana Bhupinder Singh Hooda went ahead and equated khap panchayats with NGOs, saying that they were part of the state's culture.
So what really are khap panchayats all about? Khap panchayats are essentially community groups which comprises elderly men from the Jat community. Jats form more than 25 per cent of Haryana’s population. They set the rules in an area which may include one or more villages. Transgressors’ penalty can be serious and grave. Historians believe that this system existed as early as 600 AD.
Before our judicial system was in place, these khap panchayats helped to resolve issues. They were socially relevant then, but now many believe that their functioning has become less transparent and they are in conflict with the law of the land. Khap panchayats exist in parts of Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan and Haryana.
In 2011, The Supreme court of India declared these khap panchayats illegal as they often encourage honour killings and other atrocities against boys and girls of different castes and religions who wish to get married or are already married. Khap panchayats are also referred to as “kangaroo courts”.
A couple of days back, a man from Rajasthan’s Nagaur district was kidnapped and taken to a Haryana village where he was put through torture and humiliation, allegedly on the orders of a khap panchayat.
The reason for this remains unclear.
There are been plenty of instances where the khap panchayats have brutally acted against people, some politicians continue to support them.
Whether or not vote-bank politics is behind this, it seems that there are still places where khap panchayats have the last word.
