The panchayat of Panchewa, a village in Madhya Pradesh’s Ratlam district, has declared that any family from which a member marries by choice must henceforth be ostracised by its entire population. The declaration was made at a recent public gathering, with a decree being read out in Hindi by a young, tilak-wearing man — as can be seen in a video that has circulated online. Media reports furnish the details: these families will not only be boycotted socially, but will lose access to dairy supplies, the rights to employ labour or service providers or to themselves be hired and the right to lease their fields. Any resident of the village who supports or assists members of an ostracised family will also face the same punishments.
After the video came to light, district authorities have reportedly visited Panchewa to remind its residents that such declarations are illegal. The Gram Sabha has yet to ratify its decree, and by Indian law it cannot. The Supreme Court of India is clear, at present, that consenting heterosexual adults remain free to marry if they wish to. This includes across lines of caste and religion, both of which are upheld through the institution of arranged marriage.
Love remains radical – in action, and even in concept – in this country. Panchewa’s panchayat has simply attempted to formally authenticate a longstanding lived practice of punishing love that transgresses patriarchal bounds. The village is not large — according to the 2011 census, it had a population of 2,951, with projections indicating that its resident number under 4,000 today. But to pretend that its sociocultural ethos, which either its majority or at least its more powerful sections want to turn into policy, is not reflective of how much of India feels and how much of India lives is denial.
But also: what the powers-that-be in Panchewa have declared may be embarrassing to some of India, because it so openly states what is usually done more covertly, but with the complicity of all. Then again, it may also be emboldening. It is the kind of thing that upper-caste families will reference — alongside “honour” killings which they consider themselves too civilised to do — as they place their own kinds of pressure on their members to remain within the fold, which is clearly the better place to be. To remain and thereby to marry within it, and to repopulate it. By “choice”.
All this is to say: it’s not shocking, what Panchewa has done and what some of its residents still want to do. They will do it, with or without the authority to. They have already been doing so for centuries, as has the rest of the country. Social, economic and other forms of ostracisation are very commonly experienced by people who enter inter-caste and inter-religious marriages, which are but a tiny fraction of all marriages that occur. Their families too often experience stigmatisation.
It is good that Ratlam’s local administration took the panchayat’s disrespect for human rights seriously. But what has been vocalised there is not anomalous, and it is not only challenges to legality that must be watched. Legality shifts; the true test of righteousness is elsewhere.