Transcending the khap diktat
Reviewed by Raaja Bhasin

Manoj and Babli: A Hate Story 
by Chander Suta Dogra
Penguin, India. Rs 299

Chander Suta Dogra is petite and soft spoken. You sometimes have to strain to hear what she is saying. Her gentle manner belies the fact that she is tenacious and to use an old-fashioned phrase, is 'a person with grit.' It came as a bit of a surprise to learn that she is an accomplished rally driver and just as her first book Manoj and Babli: A Hate Story arrived in the bookshops, she was off on the gruelling Mughal Rally.

The book she has done would have required far more endurance and determination than brakes and clutches or gears and gradients.

Among other things, her job as a reporter for the magazine, Outlook included covering honour killings, especially in Haryana. In 2007, Manoj and Babli were brutally murdered for marrying as they belonged to the same caste. The bodies were tossed into a canal; the decomposed remains could only be identified by the clothes and ornaments. The crime had the tacit if not open approval of the entire village. No one attended the funeral (the family could not even buy the asthi kalash, the vessel for the ashes in their village and had to go elsewhere). The police were tardy at best and the girl's influential family pulled all the strings they could to block investigations.

In numerous similar cases, things have been hushed up. The power of ostracism in the rural hinterland is enormous: no one will talk to you; no one will sell you groceries. The police are indifferent and families are close-mouthed. The writ of the traditional khap panchayats that issue and enforce such heinous diktat runs large. This time, however, they had to contend with people of greater mettle. Manoj's widowed mother, the uneducated Chandrapati, and his sister Seema, refused to be cowed down and went in search of justice.

Women activists and the local media stepped in and took the fight to another level. The five accused were arrested. The turning point in what had now become a larger battle for social reform and the rule of law came when all five, much to the shock of the hidebound Jat councils, were handed the death sentence.

The book is set with all the imagery of rural Haryana — its landscape, villages and fields and centuries of male-dominated decision making. Like a jigsaw puzzle put together (with pieces missing or painted over), Dogra has not only managed to painstakingly reconstruct the sequence of events but also the conversations. The dramatis personae appear by name and deed — the good, the bad and mostly, the ugly.

The book is fast-paced and does not lapse into all too easy pontificating. (Though the last chapter places the khap panchayats in their historical perspective). It takes courage, professional competence and integrity to write a book like this. It also takes a measure of courage to read it. You cannot remain unmoved.

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