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Dispensing Justice Through Kangaroo Courts

Gaavkis in Maharashtra

In awarding brutal punishment to people who defy social norms based on superstitions, patriarchy
and casteism in villages, gaavkis or caste panchayats in Maharashtra openly subvert the law of the
land with the tacit support of the police and politicians. The Tanta Mukti Gaav Yojna, a village dispute
resolution scheme, initiated by the state government to curb the growing menace of these
unconstitutional bodies lacks teeth and perpetuates the established structures of hierarchy and
dominance.

Anagha Ingole (recontreanagha@gmail.com) is with the Department of Social Justice and Special
Assistance, Babasaheb Ambedkar Reserach and Training Institute, Pune, Maharashtra.

As yet another Republic Day goes by, the faltering voice of Pramodini Konde, narrating the death of
her three-year old girl child who could not get medical care because her family has been boycotted
in a small coastal village in Raigad district of western Maharashtra, raises questions about the extent
to which the Constitution has been implemented in the country. Her daughter was the third
generation member of an ostracised family from the Koli caste which had been accused of giving up
its caste-based occupation by the gaav (village) panchayat.

Her family, like hundreds of other families in western Maharashtra who participated in the Jaat
Panchayat Moothmaati Abhiyan (JMA) (Caste Pancahayat Eradication Mission)[i], has been wronged
by the diktat of the caste panchayat or the “gaavki”, as it is called in the local dialect. The JMA,
launched in 2013 by Narendra Dabholkar’s organisation Andhashraddha Nirmoolan Samiti (ANS), is a
movement to question the parallel authority of these caste panchayats, which advocate conformity
to social norms based on superstitions, patriarchy and casteism.

On 8 February 2015, the JMA held a conference at Mahad in collaboration with the Babasaheb
Ambedkar Research and Training Institute (BARTI), where it invited the victimised families from the
region to register their complaints, to record their testimonies, to fight for their return to normal
village life and to argue for the need of a comprehensive law against these neo-feudal systems of
justice dispensation.

This piece tries to give a sense of the nature of oppression that the victims of caste panchayats in
Maharashtra go through, the legal and administrative paralysis of the system when it comes to
dealing with this issue and finally raises the bigger political question of the limits of radical
articulation against caste-based discrimination. It argues that the present village dispute resolution
mechanism adopted by the government does nothing to alter status quo, and the caste group/village
as a sacred whole must be reformed to create empowered village citizens. This requires rejection of
the imagination of a village as an idyllic place with familial bonds between its members and
acceptance of the presence and dominance of vested interests—economic and social—articulated by
caste panchayats. Finally, one cannot insist enough on the need for a comprehensive law for
abolishing jaat panchayats.

Nature of Cases

All cases reported at the conference were of intra-caste panchayats ostracising families for various
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“crimes”. These alleged crimes can be divided into two sets; those which arise from challenging
social norms/collective practices that a caste group must abide by and those that arise from trying to
protect one’s economic/material interests and may or may not be given a cloak of defying a social
norm. The former range from inter-caste/intra-caste love marriages, women not being able to prove
their virginity on being married (where couples have been asked to produce blood stained clothes
after their first intercourse), women talking to men and visiting houses of relatives, not observing the
required rituals after death of a family member, of taking up work other than caste-based
occupations etc. The latter cases range from not allowing passage to a member of the gaavki
through one’s private property to not campaigning in an election for the member of a gaavki and
also not contributing to funds collected by the gaavki or paying the fine imposed by it etc.

Dilip, a farmer, narrated that despite the court ruling in his favour regarding his right to not allow the
pudharipanch (headman) a passage through his farm, the village turned against him. He had to
depend on the neighbouring village for everything he needed, as even the village shopkeeper
refused to sell the daily provisions to him for the fear of pollution. The caste panchayats also levy a
fine on the persons seen talking or eating with the ostracised. It might also lead to their
ostracisation. . The ostracised subject though a part of the village, remains invisible for the villagers.
He/she becomes visible only as a subject of ridicule, an outlier, an example of what happens when
the authority of the gaavki is challenged. The rules are unwritten, undefined and are recreated or
discovered at the will of the gaavki members at every meeting, which in most cases is held in the
village temple.

Another case worth mentioning is that of a Sunni Muslim family from Mahabaleshwar, who have
been ostracised for mixing with members of the other faiths and for asking the right to offer namaaz
at the Minari mosque, which now requires changing over to the Tablighi strain of Islam to offer
prayers. The 55-year old head of the family has been denied the right to seek wedding proposals for
his daughter from within his village and nine other villages where the jamaat (Islamic Council or
assembly) panchayat holds sway. When he sought a proposal from a village outside this circle, the
family of the prospective groom was physically restricted from entering the village.

Ugly stories of children inheriting an ostracised childhood, segregated in schools and playgrounds,
women being hounded and demanded to prove their virginity at each step etc, abound in these
villages dotting the picturesque landscape of western Maharashtra and the small caste-segregated
paadas (small group of villages on the hilly terrain). Panchayats for all castes such as Marathas,
Kumbhars etc, and for people from different faiths such as Buddhists etc, can be found in these
villages under different names. The number of judges or panchpudharis varies between 5 and 12,
and the leadership positions circulate within a group of influential families.

Tanta Mukti Gaav Yojna: An Indequate Scheme

Challenging Gandhi’s idyllic conception of a village, Ambedkar called villages cesspools of cruelty,
caste prejudice and communalism, with no possibility of a dignified life in the oppressive structures
perpetuated by the dominant groups. The stories from these villages seem to prove the accuracy of
his analysis, and also point to the central loophole in the government policy adopted to address
these issues.

To address the increasing number of disputes arising from villages, the state government adopted
the alternative dispute resolution route as advocated by the central government directives post the
2005 Supreme Court verdict in the Salem Advocate Bar Association vs The Union of India case. It
announced the Mahatma Gandhi Tanta Mukti Gaav Yojna scheme (TMGY) (MG Dispute Free Village
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Scheme) (Document in Marathi -http://www.solapurpolice.gov.in/Tantamukti%20Yojana.pdf) by a

state home department government resolution dated 19 July 2007.

The department later consolidated all the subsequent resolutions on the issue and came out with a
comprehensive resolution on 14 August 2008. This resolution laid down both the philosophy and
structure of the TMGY. It states that its objective is to establish a samiti (committee) of dispute
resolution on the lines of the traditional panchpaddhati—a group of village headmen—resolving
disputes through their wisdom. The objective of the committee is to make people reach a
compromise in writing. The committee has no enforcement or punitive power. It can only refer the
non-compoundable cases to the higher structures of dispute resolution.

There are certain obvious problems with this approach and implementation of the scheme. Firstly, it
keeps silent on the disputes arising out of caste-based discrimination and oppression. For example,
in a case reported to the JMA, a person was not allowed to enter his own village on the diktat of the
gaavki. This is because his younger brother is a caste leader and member of the gaavki. The nature
of the dispute registered with the TMGY, however, was classified as a property dispute, as the kind of
cases that can be addressed by the TMGY are limited.

Another major problem is that within a village it is the same set of people who constitute the gram
panchayat, the TMGY samiti and the gaavki. For the complainant thus, it is a vicious circle where one
finds that the offender himself is in a position of authority. The complainants who seek dispute
resolution outside the village face intimidation and physical violence accompanied by daily
humiliation that comes with a collective social boycott. There are extreme cases such as the one
where a 19-year old boy was allegedly beaten to death by people who were sent by the gaavki for
accompanying his cousin for a hearing against the absconding gaavki members.

Thirdly, the dispute resolution mechanism does not necessarily involve women. They are neither a
necessary constituent of the TMGY committee nor are they involved in resolving cases which involve
crime against women.

These parallel structures rule these villages with either the compliance or indifference of the police
and almost always with the support of the political class. Even in cases where the police files a case,
a comprehensive law against such parallel structures of power remains conspicuous by its absence.

In the wake of the demand for such a law, the state home department released a government order
on 30 September 2013, where it laid down that the Indian Penal Code (IPC) Sections 283 to 289,
Sections 34, 153 A (Disruption of Social Harmony), 383 (Extortion) and 503 (Criminal Intimidation) to
be applied in cases of gaavki kangaroo courts. These sections are clearly not sufficient and do not
comprehensively deal with crimes committed by gaavkis. The police themselves often find the
present articles insufficient to cover the whole range of crimes perpetrated by gaavkis.

The Indian Constitution which gives all its citizens a right to a life of dignity and right to get justice
seem to be non-existent for generations of these villagers, and the administrative responses both at
the policy and at the ground level are possessed by the imagination of the village as a family where
no punishments but compromises and adjustments can resolve matters. Such an approach makes
the victims all the more vulnerable in the absence of any enforcement agency at the village level.

Conclusions

While speaking at the event, the spokesperson from the ANS themselves identified the central
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question—why eradicate caste panchayats and not caste? Their analysis is that the resistance
against caste panchayats is derived from the fact that these are parallel structures without legal
sanction. Though not incorrect, this analysis is incomplete. Even if one goes on to argue for the
abolishment of caste panchayats, the approach of the overburdened state towards the dispute
resolution machinery for the villages is limited to the likes of the schemes such as the TMGY. It does
not take into account the fact that the TMGY too has to operate within the dominant structures of
caste and class prevailing in villages. If it is not necessary that a magistrate looking at cases arising
in the city of Mumbai must be from Mumbai, then why should people who have strong interests and
stakes in the conventional social relations and maintenance of the hierarchy in a village be given the
right to dispense justice under the TGMY.

The need of the hour is not just a comprehensive law against caste panchayats but also the
recognition of caste and gender-based discrimination that forms the backbone of life in our villages.
Firstly, the TMGY cannot be a substitute for caste panchayats. Caste panchayats in themselves must
be recognised as a problem—the root of almost all disputes. Secondly, no dispute resolution
mechanism that does not take the factors of caste and gender into account can dispense justice. The
status quoist philosophy underlying the imagination of justice must be replaced with a reformist one.
This will ensure that caste panchayats do not reappear in the form of legal kangaroo courts. Without
this, villages in western Maharashtra would continue to suffer the scourge of caste exploitation and
patriarchy.

Notes

[i] Caste Panchayat Eradication Mission is a rough translation. Moothmati is a Marathi word used to
denote the last fist of earth given to the dying.