Gurugram: A Khap member stood up at a panchayat meeting in Jind and said what many Haryanvi conservative elders may think but rarely say out loud.
Daughters, he said, should not sit astride a motorcycle behind their fathers, one leg on each side, the way sons do. If a girl will not put her phone down, he said, take it from her and smash it.
Two weeks later, the clip from the panchayat has probably done more to show the gap between rural Haryana’s older patriarchs and its Instagram-savvy Gen Z than any court order against Khaps or government campaign against female foeticide has managed in years.
The panchayat that triggered it all
The Naugama Khap met at Ramrai village on 1 August. It banned love marriages within the same village and said that couples who defied the ban would be barred from entering 21 villages under the Khap’s reach.
That wasn’t all. It also said that anyone reporting drug use would be rewarded Rs 5,000 and fines would be charged for playing what they called “obscene” songs at weddings.
A 21-member committee, with one person from each of the 21 villages, was set up to enforce the rules. Each village will also have its own committee, with the power to impose fines on people locally.
But it was one Khap member, Virender Dhull, who teaches at a Jat school in Jind, whose personal remarks on daughters, two-wheelers and phones turned a routine panchayat into a flashpoint.
Contacted by The Print, Dhull said he stood by his views and that expressing his personal view at the panchayat was his right.
The reply, filmed on a phone
Within days, social media—Instagram in particular—was full of response videos. Some have crossed hundreds of thousands of views. Nearly all were made by young Haryanvis speaking directly to an older generation, without the respect such panchayats have usually been given.
Inspired by watching young people taking on the Narendra Modi government during the NEET protests at Jantar Mantar, Haryana’s Gen Z has flooded Instagram with posts expressing their anger against Khaps and holding them responsible for the condition of Haryanvi society today, with a skewed sex ratio and the condition of women.
A search with #khap shows more than 30,000 videos on Instagram alone—19,600 for #khap and 11,100 k for #khapp.
Influencer Paras Yadav asked why Khaps say little about girls killed before birth, dowry deaths or sexual violence, yet move fast to stop love marriages.
“Somebody ask them: you are talking about love marriages, but are marriages really happening in your society? You killed daughters in mothers’ womb, and have been procuring women from other states to marry your sons. Your state is at the bottom on sex ratio,” Yadav angrily tells Khap leaders in an Instagram post.
With an overall sex ratio of 879 girls per 1,000 boys and a child sex ratio (0 to 6 years) of 834 girls per 1,000 boys, Haryana was placed at the bottom in the country in the 2011 Census.
The state is infamous for bringing Molki Bahus or brides procured for money from far-off states like Assam, Bihar and Jharkhand.
Yadav asked how many women even sit on these khaps when decisions about women’s lives are made, and pointed to her constitutional right to life and personal liberty. Her video has drawn over 68,000 views and more than 4,100 comments.
Content creator Geeta Dhanda put the diktat to her followers directly. She asked if girls’ phones would be taken away next, given how much schoolwork now happens on them. Her post drew over 600 comments, most in support.
Another influencer, Anjali, said such demands were an attempt to turn Haryana into what she called a mini-Afghanistan. She added that her own parents, also from Haryana, held no such views.
Rapper Rahul Fazilpuria, known for lending his voice to Ladki Beautiful Kar Gayi Chull with Badshah for the Bollywood film Kapoor & Sons, posted a video saying he could not understand this line of thinking — objecting to daughters sitting astride a scooter or motorcycle behind their own fathers, or banning their phones. What does that say about how they see the bond between a father and daughter, he asked.
His question was why this scrutiny falls only on girls, and never on boys.
This was not really about phones, he said — it was about discrimination. First girls were killed in the womb, he said, and now the same forces want to finish the job while they are alive.
Instead of standing behind girls, society keeps trying to hold them down. He said the Khaps could instead have resolved to run self-defence courses for girls across Haryana’s villages, pushed for tougher laws against crimes on women, or talked about giving them a better education.
He closed by listing out how far Haryana’s girls have come in every field — achievements made, he said, in spite of every restriction society has tried to place on them.
Many other internet users asked Khap leaders why they take pride every time a girl from Haryana brings medals in an international sports event when they are so desperate to snatch basic freedoms from girls.
Sydney-based creator Omprakash Haryana asked what pushing women back into a quieter, older role would actually do for the economy, and pointed to Australia’s own workforce as a counter-example.
Content creator Varsha Chaudhary took a more satirical route.
In a video shot in a gamchha turned into a turban and dark glasses with “I Don’t Care” printed across them, she opens with a mock-respectful “Ram Ram, Tau” and thanks the elders for finally, at this age, sparing a thought for girls.
“We never realised that phones and sitting astride a bike were spoiling us — if only someone had told us sooner, we could have been saved from ruin, and from rape. Thank you, Tau, for saving us”, she signs off.
A user posting as @iamkrishan7 was far less gentle. He said any man handing down such diktats was, in his words, weak and insecure — arguing that a man who has stopped being heard tends to turn his frustration on women instead, lecturing them on becoming “sanskari” and “well-behaved”.
Haryana’s women are already held back, he said, and men like these take a perverse satisfaction in holding them back further.
He also took aim at the khaps’ stand on love marriages, arguing that it is precisely this record that now makes families elsewhere reluctant to marry their daughters into Haryanvi households.
“You lose nothing. You will hold your panchayats for a few more years and then be gone, but mark this, half of Haryana’s young men will grow old drawing a bachelor’s pension,” he said, addressing the khap leaders directly.
A user called Shitu offered a gentler note amid the storm, saying what stood out to her was how many men were coming forward to make videos standing up for girls.
The anger was not limited to these videos alone. Some of the sharpest comments came under Dhull’s video, where users mocked what they called the “outdated software” running Haryana’s khap leadership.
Not a one-off
Khap panchayats are not new to controversies.
Khaps are informal councils of village elders, usually from a single caste or clan, that have operated across rural Haryana, western Uttar Pradesh, parts of Punjab and Rajasthan for generations.
For most of that time, their word on marriage, land and local disputes went largely unchallenged.
The case that first forced India to sit up and take Khaps seriously was that of Manoj and Babli, a young couple from Karora village in Kaithal district.
In 2007, they married against the wishes of the local Khap, which held that they belonged to the same gotra and were therefore as good as brother and sister, making their marriage unacceptable.
Days later, Babli’s relatives abducted and killed them.
In 2010, a Karnal court sentenced five of the killers to death and the Khap leader who had backed the decision to life in prison, the first time an Indian court had handed down death sentences in an honour killing case, and the first time a Khap’s role in ordering one had been tried in a courtroom.
The years since have brought a steady stream of Khap orders on how young people, and especially young women, should live: bans on jeans and mobile phones for girls in some villages, and repeated diktats against love and inter-caste marriage, including same-gotra unions treated as taboo regardless of the law.
In 2018, the Supreme Court stepped in, ruling that Khap Panchayats or any other group have no authority to question, obstruct or punish two consenting adults who choose to marry.
Set against that history, Dhull’s remarks on daughters and their two-wheelers and phones do not read as an isolated outburst so much as the latest entry in a long list, one that a generation raised on smartphones is now answering back, in real time, on camera.
What the law says
Seema Sindhu, a lawyer practising in the Supreme Court, said that the Khap diktat banning love marriages or barring couples’ entry to villages was against the law of the land.
She said that so far as the ban on marriages within the same gotra is concerned, the Hindu Marriage Act itself already restricts marriage within certain degrees of relationship.
Sindhu added that adults have a constitutional right to marry whom they choose, a position the Supreme Court has upheld in several rulings, including in the 2018 Shakti Vahini and Shafin Jahan cases, saying family, community or Khap panchayats cannot step into an adult couple’s decision to marry or live together.
Threatening, assaulting, or forcing such a couple out of their village, she said, is a criminal act.
A generational reckoning
What sets this moment apart from Haryana’s earlier Khap controversies, and there have been many, is how fast and how loud the pushback has been, and who is doing the pushing back.
This time it is not urban liberals, leftist organisations or outside commentators leading the charge. It is young men and women from the very villages and the very Haryanvi society the Khaps claim to speak for, using the same phones they have been told to give up.
Jagmati Sangwan, vice-president of the All India Democratic Women’s Association (AIDWA) and a long-time critic of Khaps for what she calls their extra-constitutional overreach, told The Print that the young generation’s response this time has come as a new ray of hope.
“The patriarchal mindset in Haryana has always tried to suppress women in society,” Sangwan said. “And this mindset is not limited to Haryana alone.”
“Look at the way certain Delhi Police personnel targeted the sexual organs of young women with their sticks during the Cockroach Janta Party protest at Jantar Mantar,” she said.
So many young women had turned up there to protest, and what those policemen did to them was meant to send a message — that it wasn’t safe for them to take part in protests, and that they should stay home instead, she added.
Haryana’s Gen Z, she added, deserved credit for standing up to the Khap leadership’s patriarchal mindset.
Whether the response of Gen Z in Haryana marks the start of a lasting revolt against Khap authority, or it is just a louder version of complaints as old as the Khap system itself, is not yet clear. But for the first time in years, Khap diktats are not going unchallenged.
(Edited by Sugita Katyal)
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