Movement against Khap Panchayats: Women’s Fight for Justice in Haryana

In the rural heartland of Haryana, a young woman who had once represented India in international volleyball turned her attention to a different kind of contest. In 1995, a Khap Panchayat in Jind district issued a ruling so disturbing that it would spark one of the most significant women’s movements the state had ever seen. The decree punished a boy for his marriage by ordering that his sister be raped. Jagmati Sangwan refused to stay silent. What began as a single protest grew into a sustained campaign that mobilised tens of thousands of women against honour killings, female foeticide, and the patriarchal authority of caste councils. This is the story of how women in Haryana organised to fight for justice in one of the most challenging social environments in the country.

What are Khap Panchayats?
How Khaps exercise power
The 1995 spark in Jind district
Who is Jagmati Sangwan?
Building a movement: the Janwadi Mahila Samiti
The campaign against female foeticide
The fight against honour killings
Manoj-Babli case: a landmark conviction
The constitutional argument
Why the law alone was not enough
The significance of the movement

What are Khap Panchayats?

Khap Panchayats are traditional caste-based councils found mainly in the rural regions of Haryana, western Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, and parts of Punjab, predominantly among the Jat community. The word “Khap” refers to a cluster of villages that come together to form a council, while “Panchayat” suggests an assembly of elders. These bodies are unelected and have no official status under Indian law.

It is important to understand that Khap Panchayats are completely different from the Panchayati Raj institutions established under the Constitution. The constitutional village panchayat is a democratic body of elected representatives that derives its authority from the law. A Khap, by contrast, is a self-appointed council that enforces community norms based on caste, gotra, and rigid ideas about gender and family. Researchers describe them as bodies that have no constitutional or legal basis and should never be confused with constitutional panchayats.

How Khaps exercise power

Although they lack any legal authority, Khap Panchayats wield enormous social influence in the areas where they operate. They issue diktats on marriage, property disputes, and what they consider social transgressions. Their most controversial rulings concern marriage. Khaps prohibit same-gotra marriages, treating couples from the same gotra as siblings even when they are not directly related. They also oppose certain inter-caste unions. When couples defy these rules, Khaps have ordered social boycotts, forced separations of married couples, and in the most extreme cases, killings carried out in the name of “honour.”

The Supreme Court has been scathing about these councils. In its 2011 ruling in Arumugam Servai v. State of Tamil Nadu, the court denounced Khap Panchayats as “kangaroo courts” that infringe fundamental rights, directing states to take firm action against them. Their decisions routinely conflict with constitutional guarantees of equality and life under Articles 14, 15, and 21.

The 1995 spark in Jind district

The trigger for the women’s movement was a Khap ruling of extraordinary cruelty. In 1995, in Jind district, a Khap Panchayat sought to punish a boy for a marriage it disapproved of. Instead of targeting the boy directly, the council passed a decree ordering that his sister be raped as retribution. This use of a woman’s body as a tool of punishment laid bare the deeply patriarchal logic of these councils, where women were treated as carriers of family and community honour rather than as individuals with rights.

Jagmati Sangwan, then an activist building a women’s organisation in Haryana, stood against the ruling. Her decision to publicly challenge a Khap was remarkable in a context where women were traditionally barred from even attending these councils. In fact, she had earlier shown this courage in 1982 when she barged into a Khap Panchayat meeting at Rohtak despite women being completely excluded from such gatherings at the time. The 1995 protest marked the point where individual defiance began to crystallise into an organised movement.

Who is Jagmati Sangwan?

Jagmati Sangwan was born in 1960 in Butana village of Sonipat district, a region known for its Khaps, honour killings, and discrimination against women. She broke barriers early. She went to university, became part of the Indian volleyball team that won bronze at the Asian Volleyball Championships, and was the first woman sportsperson to receive the Bhim Award in Haryana. She founded the state unit of the All India Democratic Women’s Association (AIDWA) and went on to earn a PhD, later directing the Women’s Studies Centre at Maharshi Dayanand University in Rohtak.

This background mattered. A woman from within the Jat community, with sporting fame and educational credentials, carried a credibility that was difficult for the Khaps to dismiss. She used that position to confront the very social structures she had grown up around.

Building a movement: the Janwadi Mahila Samiti

Confronting a Khap once is brave; building a lasting movement is harder. Sangwan joined the Haryana Janwadi Mahila Samiti to take up the cause of women across the state. She became its State President and, crucially, enrolled more than 50,000 women as members. This was not a small urban network but a mass organisation reaching into villages where Khap authority was strongest.

The strategy combined grassroots mobilisation with public awareness. Sangwan launched campaigns in almost all the districts of Haryana, encouraging women to recognise and resist the crimes committed against them. Bringing such large numbers of rural women into a political organisation challenged the idea that women had no place in public decision-making. It created a collective voice in a region where individual women had little power to speak up.

The campaign against female foeticide

One of the central concerns of the movement was female foeticide, a severe problem in Haryana. The state had long carried the burden of one of the lowest child sex ratios in the country. According to the 2011 Census, Haryana recorded around 877 females per 1,000 males, reflecting a deep-rooted preference for sons and bias against daughters.

The Janwadi Mahila Samiti ran a relentless campaign against the practice. Sangwan publicly honoured couples who had a single girl child, directly countering the social pressure to abort female foetuses. These efforts contributed to a broader shift in the state. Over time, even some Khaps, facing criticism of their anti-women image, began passing resolutions demanding that female foeticide be treated as murder, a notable change from their earlier silence.

The fight against honour killings

The campaign against honour killings became the most visible front of the movement. Sangwan took up cases where Khaps tore apart legally valid marriages. In one instance, she challenged a Khap that annulled the already solemnised marriage of a couple, Sonia and Rampal, even though they had a child from the union. The annulment of a valid marriage with a child showed how Khap diktats overrode not only personal choice but also the law of the land.

The defining case came in 2007 with the brutal murder of Manoj and Babli, a young couple from the Kaithal district. A Khap had ruled that because they belonged to the same Banwala gotra, they were to be treated as siblings and their marriage was invalid. Despite the ruling, the couple married. They were then abducted and killed by the girl’s relatives, their bodies dumped in a canal.

Manoj-Babli case: a landmark conviction

Sangwan and AIDWA fought tenaciously to ensure the killers faced justice. The challenge was immense. Police were initially reluctant to act. A senior officer even told the court that a key accused could not be arrested because his arrest might create a law and order situation, illustrating how Khap influence had penetrated the machinery of the state itself.

In 2010, the court delivered a historic verdict, sentencing five of the accused to death and a Khap leader to life imprisonment. This was widely seen as the first case to convict defendants for an honour killing in this manner. Yet the backlash was immediate. Groups claiming to represent dozens of Khaps from Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, and Delhi rallied in support of the convicted, even demanding amendments to the Hindu Marriage Act to legitimise their views on marriage. The movement’s victory in court was real, but it provoked a determined counter-mobilisation.

The constitutional argument

At its core, the movement was a demand that constitutional rights prevail over caste custom. The Khap position rests on a misreading of marriage law. Same-gotra and inter-caste marriages are entirely legal in India. The Hindu Marriage Act of 1955 does not prohibit them, and the views of village elders cannot be forced upon a willing couple.

This legal foundation was strengthened in 2018 when the Supreme Court ruled in Shakti Vahini v. Union of India. The court held that the right to choose one’s life partner is a fundamental right protected under Articles 19 and 21 of the Constitution, regardless of caste, clan, or community pressure. It declared that Khap Panchayats have no legal authority to interfere in such matters. The court also issued preventive, remedial, and punitive measures, directing states to set up special cells, provide safe houses for couples, and establish fast-track courts.

Why the law alone was not enough

Court judgments and existing laws did not automatically end the problem. Despite the Indian Penal Code provisions on murder and intimidation, prosecuting honour crimes remained difficult. As Sangwan herself pointed out, these killings often happen with the participation or connivance of the victim’s own family, leaving little proof and few willing witnesses. For this reason, AIDWA prepared a draft bill seeking a specific law to address honour crimes, pressing successive governments to act.

This gap between law on paper and justice in practice explains why a sustained social movement was necessary. Changing the law was one battle; changing the social attitudes and administrative complicity that allowed Khaps to operate was another, and far longer, one.

The significance of the movement

The Haryana women’s movement against Khap Panchayats holds a distinct place in the history of women’s struggles in the country. It confronted patriarchy not in the abstract but in its most entrenched and violent local form. It did so within communities that the activists themselves came from, making the confrontation personal and risky.

The movement also reframed issues like female foeticide and honour killings as questions of women’s rights and constitutional equality rather than matters of community custom. By mobilising 50,000 women and pursuing landmark legal cases, it demonstrated that organised collective action could challenge even the most powerful informal authorities. Slowly, the space for women in public life widened. By 2010, women were for the first time allowed to participate in a Khap Panchayat, a shift that would have been unthinkable when the movement began.

The fight is far from over. Khaps continue to issue regressive diktats, and honour crimes have not disappeared. But the movement established that women in Haryana would no longer accept these councils as the final word on their lives.

What do you think? Can social movements succeed in changing deeply rooted patriarchal attitudes faster than laws and court judgments alone? And what role should constitutionally elected local bodies play in countering the influence of informal caste councils?

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Table of Contents

What are Khap Panchayats? 🔗

How Khaps exercise power 🔗

The 1995 spark in Jind district 🔗

Who is Jagmati Sangwan? 🔗

Building a movement: the Janwadi Mahila Samiti 🔗

The campaign against female foeticide 🔗

The fight against honour killings 🔗

Manoj-Babli case: a landmark conviction 🔗

The constitutional argument 🔗

Why the law alone was not enough 🔗

The significance of the movement 🔗