Haryana’s powerful khap panchayats have served an ultimatum on all MPs and MLAs from the state to extend their support to amending the Hindu Marriage Act to ban same gotra marriages. The panchayats are up in arms against the judiciary and police after a Karnal court recently sentenced five people to death and one to life imprisonment for killing a young couple, Manoj and Babli, who had married going against...

In what is being hailed as the “first ever honour killing conviction” in Haryana, the Karnal Sessions Court on March 25 held six residents of Karora village guilty of a gruesome double murder. The sentencing will take place tomorrow. In April 2007, Manoj, 24, and Babli, 18, had drawn the ire of Karora’s khap panchayat for eloping to Chandigarh and getting married. They belonged to the same gotra, Berwal, and...

ON February 12, Meham town in Rohtak district, Haryana, saw a citizens’ convention that was unusual in more than one sense. First, it was being held from the ramparts of the Meham Chaubisi Chabootara, a platform reserved for members of the Meham panchayat (a conglomeration of 24 villages, better known as the Meham Chaubisi). Second, the meeting was not dominated by any one caste. Third, it was a congregation of...

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...

Rattled by the spate of honour killings in northern states, the UPA government is preparing a legislative route to amend Indian Penal Code (IPC) and provide a deterrent punishment against khap panchayats, which order death penalty to young couples who marry defying caste barrier. "We are seriously considering amending Indian Penal Code to make honour killing a separate and distinct offence and provide deterrent punishment," a top home ministry source...