A Little Bit of Khap-Wriggling

The Sarv Khap Panchayat recently gave the Supreme Court its perspective on honour killings.

The Sarv Khap Panchayat, an agglomeration of 67 khaps, recently gave the Supreme Court its perspective on honour killings. The bench of Justices Aftab Alam and Ranjana P Desai was hearing a PIL on protecting young couples from the wrath of khaps. Arguing that their functioning not be regulated, the grouping blamed honour killings on the immediate family that ‘cannot resist the social pressure… and the taunts of relatives’, when their siblings, especially girls, marry into another caste or within the same gotra—which is considered incestuous. Such reasoning conveniently ignores the role of these khaps in creating this social pressure, which was evident in the statement: ‘Such incidents happen only [with] peace-loving and law-abiding people of the village and not mischievous families.’ The court, however, said that no one can run parallel family courts to issue diktats against the law and harass couples. The next hearing is on 5 March. khaps will need better arguments to convince the court to leave them to their primitive ways.

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