In a shocking incident exemplifying the stranglehold of caste panchayats in Maharashtra, a 20-year-old woman from Ahmednagar district, has been deserted by her husband and confined to her quarters by her father after she allegedly failed a ‘virginity test’.
The woman recently married a 25-year-old man from Nashik. Both are from the Kanjarbhat community, a nomadic tribe.
The couple subjected themselves to the tribe’s controversial custom of checking whether the bride’s hymen was intact before marriage. This involves the community’s members waiting outside while the couple engages in intercourse on a white sheet. However, according to the husband, the woman did not bleed following intercourse.
The members of the caste panchayat then invalidated the marriage on grounds that the girl was not a virgin, despite her pleas that she had not bled owing to her training and exercise for a police examination.
Her in-laws allegedly took away all her jewellery, following which the victim and her mother attempted to lodge a police complaint against her husband and in-laws. But the woman’s father stepped in, and confined her and his wife to a house and confiscated their mobile phones. The girl’s father thought that involving the police would be a blemish on his caste.
To give her a second chance, the caste panchayat ruled that to prove the validity of her marriage, the victim would have to undergo another test. She would be given a metre of cloth, to be tied either to the upper or lower portion of her body. She was told she would have to run naked with this cloth with the male members of the caste tribunal chasing her, throwing balls of hot flour on her body. The victim rejected the proposal.
“We are trying to persuade the father to let the victim file a police complaint,” said Avinash Patil of the Maharashtra Andhashraddha Nirmulan Samiti (MANS).
“It is indeed a shame that such acts of social exclusion prevail despite Maharashtra being the first to pass a law against social boycott and illegal justice given by caste tribunals,” said Hamid Dabholkar, State convener, MANS, hoping that the Maharashtra Protection of People from Social Boycott (Prevention, Prohibition and Redressal) Act, 2016, is implemented soon.
In March, yet another incident in Satara district came to light wherein a minor girl, who was raped by her father, was later beaten up as ‘punishment’ by a caste tribunal (Jaat panchayat) of the Gopal nomadic community.
