'If there were no khaps [...] everything will go haywire [...] young boys and girls will start marrying into the same gotra' Understanding khap-Directed 'Honour Killings' in Northern India
Since the early 2000s, the rural landscape of Northern India has been dominated by a parallel system of governance — the khap2 (caste) panchayats.3 These caste panchayats sanction acts of gendered violence and override any notion of equality or gender empowerment, which the Indian constitution endeavoured to provide to women at the grassroots level. Khap panchayat imposes its writ through social boycotts and fines, but also in murdering victims or forcing them to commit suicide (Sangwan, 2010; Gupta and Seth, 2007). The state of Haryana has seen the most extreme cases of these ‘honour’ killings, though other states such as Uttar Pradesh have witnessed similar incidents.4 Most of the caste panchayat diktats are against young girls or against young couples accused of having transgressed customary norms through disapproved marriage. In most cases these young couples have been brutally murdered in full view of the village communities. Though khap panchayats were believed to be multi-caste (sarv jatiya) bodies (Singh, 2010), in a few districts such as Haryana and Western Uttar Pradesh they have come to be dominated by Jats,5 who have used constitutional protections and provisions to expand their political and economic influence (Gupta, 2000). This upwardly mobile ‘backward’ caste has come to exercise considerable influence (Bharadwaj, 2012; Thapar-Bjorkert, 2006) demographically (on the basis of its population), economically (through extensive farm holdings) and politically (through dominance in local administration and politics).
Women as arm-bearers: Gendered caste-violence and the Indian state
This article examines the intersections between gender, caste and violence in a post-colonial context. It analyses how in specific cultural and historical contexts, men, women and children can act ...
Masses, Classes and the State
It is commonplace these days to say that we live in an age of turbulence. What is not clear is the source of this turbulence and the reasons why despite so much of it, it is not being allowed to change the world we live in by those who wield power and authority. What I propose to do in this essay is to explore precisely this relationship-between an increasingly defensive status quo, desperate to retain its power, and the forces of change and transformation that are getting increasingly restive. These forces are conscious of the shackles that bind them and the need to move out of them. They are frustrated and disorganized, yet they seek ways to cope with the growing repression and terror from the status quo. There is nothing new in this undertaking. All social commentators, a t least since the middle of the nineteenth century, who have cared to look at the larger dynamics that lie behind the myriad expressions of the human condition, have sought to deal with this very problem: the encounter between the forces of status quo and those of change. What is new in examining the same problem in our time (and by that I mean the eighties of the twentieth century) is the deep confusion and uncertainty about what really is under way on both sides of the equation-on the side of the global, regional and local forces of status quo and on the side of the agents of change and transformation from the very local and “micro” to the global and planetary “macro” level. It is by seeking to unravel this deep uncertainty about the directions in which the world-both the dominant structures and those opposed to the dominant structures-is moving that we may be able to at least begin to understand what is at work, what new factors have emerged or are emerging, how these are likely to shape the future and what counter-trends, if any, may be in the ofling and may perhaps work. At present no clear framework of understanding, far less of explaining, reality exists, not even a method of coming to grips with it. There has taken place an obsolescence of ideological frameworks, grand theories, and of any clear guide for formulating a praxis. There is a striking decline of confidence among all but the most nayve