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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | Love & honour

Love & honour

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published Published on Mar 6, 2010   modified Modified on Mar 6, 2010


A three-hour drive from Delhi a medieval drama is playing out. A khap — or caste — panchayat in Haryana’s Bhiwani district has asked a man and his family to leave the village because he has married a woman of the same “gotra”. The family sought police protection after the panchayat threatened a social boycott and pronounced a ban on the sale of their land, saying that it would be held in custody by the panchayat. Incidents of social boycotts ordered by khap panchayats and consequent tension are becoming all too familiar in north India, never mind that these bodies have no legitimacy of law.

Last month, Law Minister Veerappa Moily gave the go-ahead to the home ministry’s proposal to make honour killing an offence in the Indian Penal Code, separate from the general category of murder. Reports also suggest that the proposed amendment will treat village panchayats issuing such diktats as conspirators to the crime.

However, current laws, if enforced stringently, can also address the issue. Those who provide the social sanction for intimidation can be booked for criminal conspiracy, under an existing provision in the IPC. What has been lacking is political will, because khap panchayats claim to represent the region’s dominant caste. In an ongoing public interest litigation against khap panchayats in the Punjab and Haryana high court, the Haryana government opposed prosecuting these panchayats under the Prevention of Unlawful Activities Act 1967. Haryana Chief Minister Bhupinder Hooda says the government must tread carefully, given that a “rash step” could affect the “law and order situation”. But the current practice of simply offering police protection to those in the eye of the khap panchayats’ diktats is not a solution. It must shock us that these so-called elders can get away with passing judgment on private matters like who a person may or may not marry.


The Indian Express, 6 March, 2010, http://www.indianexpress.com/news/love-&-honour/587513/
 

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