The Bane Of Honour Killings

IN 2005, the Department of Sociology at the Maharshi Dayanand University in Rohtak, Haryana, had organised a seminar called ‘Khap Panchayats: Challenges and Prospects.’ The participants were academics, activists and the heads of khap panchayats. One of the participants, Sooraj Singh, pradhan of the Meham Chaubisi khap (which represents 24 villages in Meham, Haryana), remarked that the caste panchayats enjoyed ‘divine rights’ to adjudicate marriages. “We cannot allow love marriages,” he said. “Sarvakhaps do not recognise court marriages either.” He was, of course, referring to marriages that went against the traditional norms of caste segregation.

Singh’s statements strike at the heart of an issue that has shocked the nation in the past few months. Honour killings, barbaric murders committed for the sake of preserving the honour of a family, a clan or a village, are the medieval remnants of regressive tribal societies that have persisted for far too long into the modern, liberal age. These are acts that the international community had considered as mostly confined to the Arab-Muslim world.

So how do honour killings continue to happen in the not-so-remote neighbourhoods of Delhi, Haryana, and in other northern Indian states, especially at a time when the country is going through rapid social and economic advancements? The answer lies in the discussions at the seminar at the Maharshi Dayanand University: the importance of maintaining caste hierarchies against the will of the times.

The anthropological genesis of honour killings, especially in the Arab world, was in tribal societies, where the state was weak and where people were dependent on tribal or clan protection. With little rule of law exerted by a powerful state over distant desert communities, the tribal elders set the norms, especially with regard to arranged marriages. Restrictions on sexual freedom followed, with the young denied the leeway to follow their hearts and marry against the dictates of the elders. At the heart of the issue were property and propriety, two of the most delicate structures in the human world—the division of assets and the transgression of clan and community boundaries.

The system thus spawned was hierarchical and gendered, with power being vested in men according to age and rank, but never in women. Honour was equated with the chastity of women; any transgression was punished with the harshest attrition, much of it directed disproportionately at women.

The Indian context is complicated by the added dimension of caste. Khap panchayats, medieval institutions originally designed for defence against invaders, were, and remain, essentially caste panchayats comprised of upper and middle-caste landowners. Similar in some ways to the Arab clans, the khap panchayats also function as judicial entities parallel to the state judiciary that have built their power by subordinating the poor. But they are different from the Maghreb societies in that, more than class and clan, their diktats are focused on perpetuating caste hierarchies.

Marriages and unions that transgress the boundaries of caste and gotra and threaten the power structure of these caste panchayats—essentially, all those who defy the rules—have been at the receiving end of extreme wrath from family and community.

Anthropological reasoning has it that honour killings have persisted in West Asia because of the absence of participatory democracy and equitable development. This has let seniors in the tribes and clans exert massive control over their dependents and subordinates into a one-sided reliance on them for protection and support. And this is both buttressed and furthered by a lack of general awareness of and respect for human rights.

India, however, has an institutionalised Panchayati Raj system that enables participatory democracy to flourish at the village level in the form of the gram panchayat, which derives its locus standi from the Indian Constitution. The problem persists because often the members of gram panchayats double as members of khap panchayats, or at the least, the former support the functioning of the latter.

To make matters worse, the khap panchayats often enjoy the tacit support of other local state bodies, especially the police, many of which consider caste an important factor in the quotidian running of village life, and resist meddling in village affairs. It is hardly surprising that most members of the police and other law enforcement agencies who look the other way belong to the upper castes.

Measures such as universal adult franchise and reservations in gram panchayats for the lower castes and for women have already been instituted to break the traditional power structures of the khap panchayats. But we need to go beyond these officious measures and ensure that what is brought to an end is the informal collusion between State actors and the khap panchayats. Most importantly, we need to pay unerring attention to the root cause of this problem and not be seduced away by political exigencies.

Unless this is done, the bane of Indian society, caste, will continue to be perpetuated in its very worst form at a time when democratic equality and a location in the modern world have no place for it.

Anant Nath