There has been a severe backlash against Kaam activities of youngsters in North India including Punjab. What is the correct Gurmat stance if a Sikh girl or boy commits such act of Kaam as common now a days?
[
timesofindia.indiatimes.com]
Honour killings: North India wages a vicious war against loveHISSAR: Nineteen honour killings between April 9 and June 30. That translates to 80 days. Roughly, one murder every four days. Clearly, north India is waging an undeclared war against love.
You might think, along with Khap officials, honour killings have to do with caste. But the real casualty is love. None of the murdered couples married by arrangement. Scratch the skin of caste, and out comes love, bleeding. Deep down, the real enemy of Khap is an emotion.
Brothers shooting sisters, grandmother killing granddaughter, mother strangling daughter, father arranging son's death. Honour killings offer a variety of combinations. All of them equally effective, all of them totally result oriented.
The death of the Delhi-based journalist Nirupama Pathak in her Koderma home for her relationship with a boy from a different caste and the arrest of her mother shook the country that has professed to evolve a casteless society.
Nirupama's turned out to be the first of a series of seemingly interminable killings. Not a single day passes without one or two reports of youngsters either being killed or being hounded by their families for the "crime" of falling in love. And it is turning relatives and friends, hitherto affectionate people, into demons.
Sociologist and JNU emeritus professor Yogendra Singh finds the recurring cases of honour killing "bewildering". Many factors seem to have overlapped, he says. "There was always a subterranean sentiment of male chauvinism lurking in the northern parts of the country, where female insubordination was always nipped in the bud. But even here, until recently, criminal acts were not sanctioned. Equally disturbing is the fact that caste killings are soft-pedalled as it hurts vote bank politics."
Capital city Delhi, for all its aspirations to be a truly international cultural centre, has seen three related honour killings in the last fortnight. And these murders were carried out by jeans-and T-shirt wearing youngsters, not the dhoti-kurta-pagri clad caste leaders.
There is a hum of anger in Haryana's Jatland against the state government for its alleged "misguided policies" (read liberal). The politically influential Jats are talking now of a "mahapanchayat", an extra-constitutional authority. And veiled threats are being made about cutting off Delhi's water supply unless the Hindu Marriage Act is changed to ban same-gotra and same-village marriages.
Says Rajkumar Numberdar, one of the more firebrand khap leader of Narnoud village: "It is not as if girls and boys did not fall in love earlier. But, of late, it is becoming difficult to control them because they know they just need to elope and ask for police protection. If politicians want to foist their warped ideas on us, why don't they first kill off village elders?"
Adds pradhan, Rajveer Dhanda: "If the government sends these elopers to jail instead of giving them police protection, the malaise will be taken care of in no time."
Village headmaster Dhoop Singh plays a mellower track, "Today's kids lack values. But, it is also true that we need to become more flexible and move with the times. It may make sense not to marry into the gotra of my mother or my grandmother, but why should entire villages -- at times dozens -- get together to establish brotherhoods and deny their children the right to live their lives their way?"
But Dhoop Singh is an exception. Said a 20-something junior teacher in Dhoop Singh's school to his boss, "Why don't you get your own son and daughter married then? Talk about change after that."
In Delhi, Kanjhawala resident Col (retd) Mehar Singh Dahiya, whose family has traditionally been an important player in the panchayat of the Dahiya Khap, does not agree with the term honour killing. "Why call it honour killing? It is a social compulsion that a father is under, because his daughter has shortchanged him by marrying against his will and has denied him spiritual upliftment that kanyadaan gives. In a way, the person you are calling killer is actually a victim of social circumstances." A daughter is precious, hence the pride in her, he adds. In other words, it's all for love.
Be it Nirupama's mother or the Sonepat grandmother, who killed her grand daughter, women seem to have made the transition from being mere spectators of honour killings to main actors.
"That's a generalization. It really depends on the circumstances in family and society," says DCP (Outer Delhi) Chhaya Sharma. "There is often an element of the killer's self-redemption before the eyes of the family after a daughter's conduct has caused shame. I can't really blame them. These women have for long been used to male domination, and they derive patriarchal values," he adds.
But all is not dark. Close to Narnoud is the Satror Khap comprising 40-50 villages that do not traditionally have intra-village marriages. "There are efforts now," says pradhan Inder Singh of Putthi village, "to break these up into smaller units -- tapas -- of 10-12 villages, where inter-marriage would be allowed."
It is not a sentimental decision. Says the pradhan's son, Bhagat Singh, a schoolteacher: "There are very few girls left and too many boys. Who will the boys marry otherwise?"
If social conditions are harbingers of change, will gotra and village taboos, too, go in the next 50 years? "Wait till the elders breathe their last. You will see change in 25 years," says Bhagat Singh.
But can lovers afford to wait that long?
ਸਤਿਗੁਰਬਚਨਕਮਾਵਣੇਸਚਾਏਹੁਵੀਚਾਰੁ॥
