The khap trap

What is the best way to deal with an old-fashioned caste council of elders when they invoke customary prohibitions against endogamous, or some kind of consanguineous, marriages?

One way is to shout down their insistence on banning sagotra marriages in the name of modernity and enlightened rationalism.

That has already started happening in the television news channels and in English newspapers.

But this may not be the most effective way of either proving the point or winning the argument. The old mindset survives for various reasons, but customary taboos cannot be wished away just like that. The battle for minds and hearts cannot be won merely through slanging matches or TV debates.

The English-educated crowd here may want to change the laws to change society but that may not be enough. Decades after we made casteism a crime, we still haven’t changed society completely. Compared to caste discrimination, the khap injunction on sagotra weddings is not exactly a crime against humanity.

It’s merely outdated. One of the things sociologists and anthropologists have learned is that customs have something to do with the needs of a society at a particular stage of evolution, and quite often many customs survive as vestiges even after the conditions that gave rise to them have passed away.

The Haryana khap members who ordered a boy killed for violating the sagotra rule are probably unaware of the irrelevance of the ban in current circumstances.

However, it is one thing to tolerate old customs, quite another to justify murder for sagotra marriages. The latter is simply unpardonable.

A dialogue with the diehards may be a good and even useful thing, but even this may turn into a hurdle race of sorts. This is indeed the history of social reforms. It seems that there are not enough reformers from within the communities in many parts of north India. It is a reflection of the limited penetration of modern ideas in this region compared to other parts of the country.

It is useful to remember the Marxist maxim that in the evolution of society a contradiction emerges between the mode of production and the social relations of an earlier mode.

This is what we are witnessing in the life of the Jat and other communities. Rapid and radical economic changes will ultimately wear away the old customs. What north India needs is rapid industrialisation and urbanisation.

Once the closed rural societies melt away, the old customs will die away and some of the rural no-changers will be shouted down by younger members.