In sharply placing the onus of preventing brutal community “justice” on the district-level civil bureaucracy and the police, the Supreme Court has taken the first firm step in a long time to deal with a matter that politicians and civil servants have done their best to ignore to avoid taking on local bullies or vested interests who cite custom

for their criminal behaviour. There is little that distinguishes the rough so-called “justice” — which generally ends in the brutal, often broad daylight killing of innocent people — imposed by certain community-level mechanisms such as “khap panchayats” in North India and “katta panchayats” in parts of the South, from similar “justice” that the Taliban mete out at their pleasure. In both cases, dispensers of the medieval notion of fair treatment for a presumed offence invoke their understanding of tradition or religion.
It cannot be emphasised firmly enough that this barbarism is completely at odds with civilised norms, leave alone democratic values. More, they represent the sharpest deviation from the principles of our Constitution, in which laws of the land are framed by Parliament and interpreted by the judiciary, leaving no room whatsoever for individuals, communities or other institutions to take the law into their own hands. There is “nothing honourable” about the phenomenon of “honour killings”, as a Supreme Court bench of Justices Markandey Katju and Gyan Sudha Mishra observed Tuesday, while ruling on a four-year-old case from Tamil Nadu. The country’s political executive and the bureaucracy should take note that the judges held that the “institutionalised atrocities” in question were “wholly illegal” and must be “ruthlessly stamped out”.
In recent times, certain politicians have made excuses for the practice of sati (burning a wife on her husband’s funeral pyre), and others such as Haryana chief minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda have offered glib explanations when under khap “rules” eloping couples have been murdered. The implied sanction of politicians to barbarous acts stems from their fear of alienating votebanks. The homegrown custodians of morality thus get away even when they are participants in the proceedings of kangaroo courts. This leaves ordinary people stricken with fear. They then prolong the cult of silence in the face of blatant crime. At a village in Haryana’s Bhiwani district the other day, two widows in their thirties were reportedly beaten to death by a young male relative of one of them — who happens to be a convicted rapist, out of jail on parole — on the suspicion that they were involved in so-called immorality. Over 100 people watched the horror mutely. One of the murderers calmly smoked a bidi sitting on a corpse, striking a posture of triumphal patriarchy. Typically, the police arrived on the scene two hours after the event.
District magistrates and police chiefs of districts, under the
Supreme Court’s order, will face suspension, departmental proceedings and criminal action if they fail to check these atrocities when their occurrence is likely. They are to be dealt with in the same way if they do not immediately act to apprehend the culprits in the event such an atrocity occurs without the officials getting to know of it in time to prevent it. The court’s ruling will be widely welcomed. Now politicians at different levels can’t hope to maintain a wretched status quo with a view to protecting their electoral base, as the onus has been placed on the district administration. Upholding the law is in any case the primary function of the latter. If the basic integrity of the notion of human rights and justice, and the legitimate autonomy of the individual, cannot be upheld at the ground level, all talk of democratic governance ends up being a sham.