Cut the "Khap".....(oops..Crap...)

Recent times have seen a string of "honour" killings trigerred by the decision of few young men and women to marry, discarding the so called traditions of our society.

In a modern democracy which aspires to be in the league of superpowers, such regressive beliefs and practices are not only condemnamble, but highly derogatory.

Some of the killings were systematically ordered by the self proclaimed moral guardians and granted sanction by the village lords "Khap Panchayats" which disapproves intra gotra marriages.

Let us move towards the genesis of the two terms involved: "Khap Panchayats" and "Gotra".

Khap panchayat is an age old caste based body which controls the system of justice delivery by virtue of its caste members being in majority over a particular area. They were granted some sort of legal sanction during the british rule. After all the Britishers main aim was not justice delivery and the less nuisance they faced on this front the better it was for them. It helped them in maintaining social control and acted as a filter between the masses and the mainstream justice delivery mechanism.

Some vedic texts point to the fact the concept of Gotra emerged from the following of various religious saints. The followers of a particular saint were classified as being members of one Gotra and intra gotra marriage was prohibited. Thus the followers of Kashyap rishi were classified as belonging to the Kashyap gotra and that of Rishi Atri as belonging to Atri gotra. It is more to do with learning lineage than patrilineal descent. The motivating factor behind prohibiting intra gotra marriage was perhaps not incest but the belief that marrying a person of other gotra would result in increase in number of followers of that saint.

Now in the present circumstance how much of it is relevant?

To make matters worse the union of India has intervened in the social arena by making distinct laws related to marriage:The Hindu Marriage Act,1955 and The Special Marriage Act,1954. Section 29 of the hindu marriage act already prohibits certain kinds of marriages as being incestuous. At the same time it allows certain real incestuous marriages such as marriage with one's niece among some communities, considering local traditions. This itself smacks of appeasement of caste in-groups. The state cannot be on both sides at the same time. If you are giving sanction to the local sentiments, you will have to give value to all local sentiments irrespective of region, religion etc. Or otherwise the better option is obviously to have a uniform civil code which is compatible with the democratic ethos of a progressive country.The state has itself left the scope for illegitimate demands to be made from various groups.

In times when even the SC has asked the state to incentivise inter caste and inter religion marriages the state has created a separate piece of legislation "The Special Marriage Act" for such marriages though a welcome step in this direction but the 30-day notice period stipulated in the act itself smacks of double standards. I suppose even the makers of this legislation were not fully convinced with the idea of inter caste/religion marriages. I believe that apart from cricket and bollywood, the only thing which has the potential to create a non parochial, non fundamentalist society is inter religion, region and caste marriage. After all love knows no boundaries, so should marriage.

This was about criticising others, now let us come to our own selves. Many of us boast of being an "open-minded", "liberal" person but the truth can be gauged every sunday by just making a passing reference to the newspaper matrimonial ads. Almost all of them are highly educated people: some Manager in a top notch company, some IAS officer, all vying for marriage "strictly" within their own caste. We expect our politicians to follow the model code of conduct when elections are announced but we ourselves cannot devise a uniform code of conduct for simple thing as marriage. Don't forget that at least our political parties had the alacrity to develop a model code of conduct for themselves...but alas we don't have it.

Solution: another law? Obviously not. We already have the Section 302 of the IPC for murder and I think it is sufficient to deal with any kind of murder irrespective of its motive. If we continue to make laws based on each motive we will have hundreds, if not thousands. Moreover a new law cannot change long instilled social beliefs which have become regressive. Its time we change the mindsets of people around us, ourselves, our friends, relatives and what not. Let us atleast be vocal against such parochial mindset. Let all the religious leaders and community members meet and devise a uniform civil code for all of us. After all who is the state to decide who should we marry or not. And as far as the Khaps are concerned....lets cut the "Kh"(Cr)ap....

As far as I am concerned I don't know my gotra and not even concerned. Are you?