During the past few years, outrageous, vicious and tragic results of marriages within “gotra” (clan) in the Jat community have come to light. Often, couples who have eloped have been brutally murdered following the diktats of the village elders. These acts are dubbed as “honour killings” though there is nothing honourable about them. Ironically, these cases are mostly reported from Haryana, Western Uttar Pradesh and the rural belt of Delhi — areas that have reaped the fruits of modernisation and access to various facilities such as educational institutions, health centres, modernised roads and multinational business establishments that have encouraged foreign investment.
Chander Suta Dogra’s evocative narrative centres on the gruesome murder of one such couple, Manoj and Babli, in 2007 by their own relatives. They had fallen in love, eloped and then got married, inviting the wrath of the Khap — caste panchayat — in their village Karora in Kaithal district of Haryana.
A Khap is an unelected union of elders comprising a cluster of villages mainly in north India though it exists in similar forms in the rest of the nation. Lately khaps have emerged as quasi-judicial bodies that pronounce harsh punishments based on customs and traditions, often bordering on regressive measures to modern problems. There exists a poignant contradiction between the forces modernisation that have been unleashed in the region and the almost feudal mindsets of organisations like the Khap panchayats that force couples who have entered intra-gotra marriages to return to the community fold, even to the extent of forcing them to live like siblings. A number of wedded couples have even lost their lives. The Khap panchayats try to legitimise their actions by quoting historical antecedents of uncertain origin. They claim to be an age-old institution, having its foundation in the early medieval period.
“The first time I encountered an honour killing was in 2004, in a village near Meham in Haryana. A girl had been done to death by her father and brothers for eloping with a boy from a neighbouring village. When I went to her house, I found that the only person grieving for the girl was her mother,” recalls Dogra in the preface.
The book combines fact and fiction, changing the names but essentially portraying the reality as the narrative is based on the police FIRs about honour killings, courts records and video recordings of major players in the tragic drama.
To unearth facts about Manoj and Babli, Dogra had to make repeated visits to their village and spend time with their families. She must have been aware of the hostile social milieu and must be complemented for her communication skills.
The book powerfully describes how with the support of the media and women activists, they stood up to ostracism and the fury of the khaps across North India, not just Haryana, when the five accused were sentenced to death in a landmark judgment. Her book is not just a tale of Manoj and Babli, it is also a narration of Manoj’s sister and mother’s battle with patriarchy and legal system. Dogra has managed to come out with a brilliant exposé of the face-off between those who abide by the law and the upholders of archaic traditions that clash with it.
The issues Dogra discusses have wider ramifications for the attitudes that typifying the khap mode prevail throughout India. The recent case of Divya and Elavarasan down south is an illustrative example.
Vigorous laws and their proactive enforcement is no doubt required to give the right message to perpetrators of such crimes. But the society, in which Elavarasan, Manoj and Babli lived and died, is in a state of transition. It is a clash of old social mores and compulsions and liberties of modern living. The sooner society leaders realise this, the better it will be for the younger generation caught in this cleft.