At a time when Haryana’s women are demanding education, jobs, property and economic independence, the battle over marriage exposes the deeper struggle over who controls a woman’s future.
By Ramphal Kataria
Introduction: The Question Is Bigger Than the Khap
The recent women's Khap Mahapanchayat at Ramrai in Jind district should not be viewed merely as another controversy over love marriage or live-in relationships. It represents something deeper and more consequential: an attempt by an old social order to regain control at precisely the moment when women, particularly young women in rural Haryana, are acquiring the educational, economic and social capabilities necessary to make independent choices about their lives.
The resolutions reportedly opposing love marriages and live-in relationships, along with restrictions based upon village, bhaichara, gohaand and gotra, therefore deserve to be examined against the larger trajectory of social change. The women participating in the meeting endorsed the earlier khap position, while the organisation proposed committees to approach younger women in schools, colleges and villages and engage them on marriage-related social norms.
The central question is consequently not simply whether khaps should be permitted to express an opinion.
They can.
The deeper question is:
Why, at a time when women are demanding better education, meaningful employment, economic independence, equal ownership in ancestral property and freedom to choose their partners, is a parallel social campaign emerging to restrict precisely these spheres of autonomy?
Seen from this perspective, the contemporary khap movement is not merely conservative.
It is potentially counter-emancipatory.
It seeks to preserve a social arrangement in which the family and community retain decisive authority over a woman's sexuality, mobility, marriage, property and economic destiny.
The struggle, therefore, is not between "tradition" and "modernity" in the abstract.
It is between inherited collective control and the emerging individual rights of women.
A Society in Transition
Haryana's social transformation has been extraordinary.
The village that once defined almost the entire social universe of an individual has been opened by schools, colleges, universities, roads, migration, mobile telephony, social media, private employment and urbanisation. A rural young woman can now study with people belonging to different castes, travel outside her village, enter professional institutions, earn an income and maintain social relationships that would have been impossible for her grandmother.
This transformation has changed something fundamental.
It has created individual aspirations independent of inherited community identity.
The young woman increasingly asks not merely, "What will my family permit?" but "What kind of life do I want?"
That is a revolutionary question in any traditionally patriarchal society.
Education changes expectations. Employment changes bargaining power. Income changes dependence. Property ownership changes security. Mobility changes the social circle. Exposure to other communities changes perceptions of caste. And interaction between young men and women creates possibilities of friendship, affection and partnership beyond the traditional matrimonial network.
The resulting emancipation is gradual, uneven and incomplete.
But it is real.
And it threatens any social order whose authority depends upon women remaining economically and socially dependent.
Education: The First Door to Independence
The demand for women's education is not simply a demand for literacy.
It is a demand for the capacity to think independently.
An educated woman is more likely to know her legal rights, understand the outside world, seek employment, question discriminatory customs and evaluate marriage proposals according to criteria beyond caste, family reputation and inherited status.
Education also changes the meaning of marriage.
For a woman who has invested years in higher education, professional training and career development, marriage can no longer be reduced to transfer from her father's household to her husband's household.
She increasingly expects partnership.
She asks whether her prospective husband respects her education, supports her employment, shares domestic responsibilities and recognises her individuality.
This fundamentally alters the traditional patriarchal bargain.
The old model says that the family chooses a suitable husband and provides protection.
The emerging model says that the woman herself must participate decisively in choosing the person with whom she will spend her life.
That transition is one of the most important social developments taking place in contemporary Haryana.
The resistance to self-choice marriage must therefore be understood alongside the expansion of women's education. It is not accidental that the khap proposals reportedly envisage approaching girls in schools and colleges.
The educational institution has become one of the places where inherited social boundaries are weakening.
The response of an emancipatory society should be to improve education.
The response of a threatened hierarchy is often to regulate what educated young people do with the freedom education gives them.
From Education to Employment: The Economic Question
Education without economic independence can produce only partial emancipation.
A woman may be educated yet remain financially dependent upon her father, brother or husband. In such circumstances, the legal right to make a choice may exist while the practical ability to exercise it remains weak.
Employment changes that equation.
A woman who earns can negotiate.
She can postpone marriage.
She can reject an unsuitable proposal.
She can leave an abusive relationship more readily.
She can support her children.
She can contribute to her parents.
She can live independently.
Most importantly, she acquires an identity that is not derived entirely from her marital status.
Economic independence therefore strikes at the deepest foundation of patriarchal authority.
This is why the emancipation of women cannot be reduced to slogans about respecting daughters.
A society that celebrates daughters but denies them education, employment, property and independent decision-making is merely celebrating a controlled form of femininity.
The real test is whether a woman can say:
I will decide the direction of my own life, and I have the economic means to sustain that decision.
The Forgotten Revolution: Women's Right to Ancestral Property
Perhaps the most profound but least publicly discussed dimension of women's emancipation is property.
For generations, rural property was the material foundation of family power. Land determined status, economic security, marriage prospects and political influence. Yet the traditional coparcenary system historically excluded daughters from equal birthrights in joint family property.
The Hindu Succession (Amendment) Act, 2005 changed this structure by making daughters coparceners in the same manner as sons.
The Supreme Court's landmark decision in Vineeta Sharma v. Rakesh Sharma settled the controversy by holding that a daughter acquires coparcenary status by birth and that the right does not depend upon whether the father was alive on 9 September 2005.
This is not a minor legal reform.
It is a direct challenge to the economic foundations of patriarchy.
A daughter who has an equal legal claim in ancestral coparcenary property is no longer merely a temporary member of her parental household waiting to be married away.
She is an economic stakeholder in her natal family.
The significance becomes even greater in rural Haryana, where land continues to have extraordinary economic and social value.
The old social arrangement effectively operated through a sequence:
land remained with sons; daughters married out; property remained within the male line; caste and family networks remained intact.
Equal property rights disrupt that sequence.
A daughter can now legally claim what the old social order treated as belonging naturally to her brothers.
This produces a profound transformation in the meaning of being a daughter.
And it helps explain why women's emancipation cannot be examined separately from property, marriage and caste.
They are interconnected.
Marriage Was Never Merely About Love
The conventional discussion of marriage often presents it as a private relationship between two individuals.
In caste society, however, marriage performs a much larger social function.
It determines who belongs to whom.
It determines the circulation of property.
It determines kinship alliances.
It reproduces caste.
It transfers social status.
It establishes networks of political and economic cooperation.
Most importantly, historically, it has been one of the principal mechanisms through which caste boundaries are reproduced.
B.R. Ambedkar's analysis remains particularly relevant because he identified endogamy — marriage within the caste — as central to the persistence of caste.
Therefore, when an individual chooses a partner outside caste, the decision is not merely romantic.
It crosses a social boundary.
When enough individuals cross that boundary, the caste system becomes less capable of reproducing itself through marriage.
This is why inter-caste marriage has a significance considerably larger than the number of such marriages might suggest.
The Real Threat to Caste Is Choice
The most disruptive word in the entire debate is not "love."
It is choice.
If parents choose, the traditional social structure can be reproduced.
If caste chooses, caste survives.
If the village chooses, village boundaries survive.
If the khap chooses, customary authority survives.
But if the individual chooses, all these institutions lose some control.
That is why the battle over marriage is ultimately a battle over authority.
The young woman who says, "I will decide whom I marry," is making a statement not only about a husband.
She is making a statement about who owns her future.
The young man who chooses a partner outside caste is not necessarily trying to destroy his community.
He may simply be exercising personal freedom.
Yet collectively, millions of such individual decisions can transform society.
Social revolutions often begin not through legislation but through ordinary people making different choices in their private lives.
Gotra, Village and Bhaichara: Custom Versus Biology
The argument surrounding same-gotra or same-village marriage deserves careful examination.
The khap position invokes customary notions that members of the same gotra share ancestry and that residents of the same village or bhaichara villages are socially regarded as siblings. The recent Jind discussion reportedly relied upon precisely these customary distinctions.
There can be legitimate reasons for preventing marriage between people who are actually close biological relatives. Indian marriage law itself recognises defined categories of prohibited relationship and sapinda relationship.
But a crucial distinction must be maintained.
Socially calling someone a brother or sister does not create biological kinship.
Geographical proximity is not biological relationship.
A customary clan label is not equivalent to a scientifically established genealogical relationship.
If the concern is genetic, genealogy and demonstrable biological relationship should be the basis of the discussion.
If the concern is cultural, then it must be recognised as cultural.
The danger arises when a cultural convention is presented as though it were an immutable biological law and then imposed through coercion.
The Women's Khap: The Most Disturbing Development
The emergence of a women's khap gives this entire development a new dimension.
Women entering public decision-making is unquestionably positive.
But participation by women does not automatically make the institution emancipatory.
The question is what women are being mobilised to demand.
If women organise to demand better schools, safer transport, employment, equal wages, property rights, political representation, protection from domestic violence and freedom from dowry, they are expanding women's autonomy.
If women are mobilised to tell other women whom they may marry, which relationships they may enter and how they must conform to inherited matrimonial boundaries, then female participation can paradoxically become an instrument for reproducing patriarchy.
The gender of the spokesperson does not necessarily change the nature of the rule.
This is particularly important because patriarchal societies often preserve themselves not only through male authority but through women's participation in enforcing social norms upon other women.
Mothers may police daughters.
Sisters may police sisters.
Older women may police younger women.
The system can therefore reproduce itself through generations.
The recent meeting makes this contradiction visible. The women’s khap endorsed the earlier decisions and proposed a committee structure for taking its message to younger women in educational institutions.
The crucial question is therefore not whether women have entered the khap.
It is whether their participation is being used to expand women's freedom or discipline it.
The Counter-Revolution Against Women's Emancipation
Seen together, these developments reveal a pattern.
Women are demanding better education.
They are entering colleges.
They are seeking employment.
They are becoming economically independent.
They are claiming equal property rights.
They are travelling beyond the village.
They are interacting with people from other castes and communities.
They are increasingly aware of constitutional rights.
They are questioning marriages arranged solely according to caste, gotra and family status.
They are beginning to ask whether marriage should be a family contract or an individual partnership.
And, most importantly, some are asserting the right to choose their own partners.
At precisely this point, the social response should logically be to facilitate responsible freedom.
Instead, there is an attempt to strengthen restrictions.
The trajectory is therefore being contested.
One movement is pushing women outward — toward education, employment, property, mobility and individual choice.
The other is attempting to pull them back — toward surveillance, conformity, caste boundaries and community-controlled marriage.
This is why the present moment deserves to be called a counter-revolution against women's emancipation.
It may not present itself in those words.
It may speak of culture.
It may speak of family honour.
It may speak of protecting girls.
It may speak of social harmony.
It may speak of saving the family.
But the practical question is:
Who ultimately gets to decide what a woman does with her life?
"Protection" Can Become Control
There is a subtle danger in the language of protection.
A society may say that girls must be protected from exploitation.
That is legitimate.
It may say that children should not be sexually exploited.
That is legitimate.
It may say that young people need education about consent, contraception, reproductive health and emotional responsibility.
That is legitimate.
But "protection" becomes paternalism when it means that competent adult women must be protected from their own choices.
A woman does not become incapable of making decisions merely because her decision displeases her family.
A woman does not become vulnerable simply because she chooses a partner whom her community dislikes.
And a woman does not lose constitutional protection because her relationship crosses a caste or village boundary.
Protection from violence is a legitimate function of society.
Protection from one's own lawful choices is not.
The Live-In Relationship Debate
The demand to criminalise live-in relationships is particularly revealing.
Society has every right to debate whether marriage is preferable to cohabitation. It can discuss responsibilities toward children, financial obligations, inheritance, maintenance and emotional stability.
But criminal law is a very different instrument.
The Supreme Court has repeatedly recognised decisional autonomy in intimate matters and has rejected the idea that social morality automatically determines criminality.
The constitutional position is especially important because intimate choice lies close to personal liberty and dignity.
A community may believe that marriage is morally preferable.
It cannot therefore follow that the State should imprison consenting adults merely because their relationship does not conform to community expectations.
As the Supreme Court has put it:
"Morality and criminality are not coextensive."
That principle should be remembered whenever social movements demand criminalisation merely because a practice offends traditional morality.
Honour Is Often the Name Given to Control
The language of honour is particularly dangerous when attached to women's choices.
A family's honour is said to depend upon a daughter's behaviour.
A caste's honour is said to depend upon its women marrying within caste.
A village's honour is said to depend upon whom its young people marry.
Eventually the individual's life becomes the property of the collective.
This logic has historically provided fertile ground for honour-based violence.
Official crime statistics must be interpreted carefully. NCRB records registered and classified cases rather than every instance of social coercion. Government data based on NCRB records show that Haryana recorded four murders with the recorded motive of honour killing in 2020, four in 2021 and none in 2022. The absence of a recorded case in a particular year cannot logically establish the absence of honour-based violence, because classification, reporting and registration affect the data.
The important point is not the numerical size of the dataset.
It is that the State has recognised honour killing as a distinct social concern and the Supreme Court has specifically addressed the danger of community interference in matrimonial choices.
The constitutional lesson is unmistakable:
No family, caste or khap possesses a right to punish an adult for exercising a lawful choice of partner.
The Haryana Paradox
Haryana's social history makes the present contradiction especially striking.
The State has experienced rapid economic development while simultaneously carrying the legacy of gender discrimination, skewed sex ratios, caste hierarchy and honour-based restrictions.
The same society that has sent daughters into universities and professional institutions can still tell those daughters that they cannot decide whom to marry.
The same family that spends heavily on a daughter's education may hesitate to recognise her equal claim in ancestral land.
The same society that wants daughters to become doctors, engineers, administrators and entrepreneurs may become uncomfortable when those educated women begin to exercise independent choices in their personal lives.
This exposes the central contradiction:
Education is welcomed when it increases family prestige but resisted when it increases individual autonomy.
Economic independence is welcomed when a daughter contributes to household income but becomes uncomfortable when she acquires the power to leave an oppressive household.
A daughter's success is celebrated until her success gives her the confidence to disagree.
This is not genuine emancipation.
It is conditional empowerment.
Property, Marriage and Caste Are One Connected Question
The debates over property, employment, caste and marriage are often treated as separate issues.
They are not.
Suppose a daughter receives higher education.
She obtains employment.
She earns her own income.
She possesses an enforceable share in ancestral property.
She chooses her own husband.
She marries outside caste.
She establishes a household independently.
At each stage, the traditional family structure loses a portion of its exclusive control.
This does not mean the family disappears.
It means the relationship between family and individual changes.
The daughter is no longer simply someone over whom the family exercises authority.
She becomes a negotiating member of the family.
That transformation is precisely what modern constitutional citizenship is intended to achieve.
The Rural Woman Is Not the Same Woman Her Grandmother Was
It is tempting to speak about "rural women" as though they constitute one unchanging category.
They do not.
The rural woman of today may be a university graduate, a government employee, a private-sector worker, a teacher, a nurse, an entrepreneur, a competitive-examination aspirant or a digital entrepreneur.
She may have friends outside her caste.
She may know the law.
She may have her own bank account.
She may travel independently.
She may communicate with people across the country.
Her aspirations are no longer determined entirely by the village.
The old social order therefore faces a structural problem:
The woman it seeks to regulate is no longer socially confined to the space in which the regulation was created.
The village remains physically present.
But the woman's social world has expanded beyond it.
The Answer Is Not to Destroy Tradition
A serious critique must avoid the opposite extreme.
Not every tradition is oppressive.
Not every elder is authoritarian.
Not every family-arranged marriage is forced.
Not every love marriage is successful.
Not every live-in relationship is healthy.
Not every young person's decision is wise.
Modernity does not make human beings infallible.
The question is not whether the old or the new is automatically correct.
The question is who should bear the consequences of a personal decision and therefore who should possess the primary authority to make it.
If two competent adults marry, they bear the principal consequences.
Their families may be affected emotionally and economically.
But the family does not acquire ownership over their lives.
That is the distinction between social influence and coercive authority.
What Rural Society Should Be Demanding Instead
The energy currently spent regulating marriage could be directed toward the problems that actually threaten Haryana's young people.
The demand should be for better government schools and colleges, higher-quality teachers, vocational education, safe transport for girls, hostels for rural students, affordable higher education, employment opportunities, industrialisation that generates decent jobs, skill development, sports facilities, drug prevention, mental-health support, protection from domestic violence and effective implementation of women's property rights.
A community genuinely concerned about the future of its daughters should ask whether every girl can complete school.
It should ask whether she can safely reach college.
It should ask whether she can obtain a job.
It should ask whether she receives equal pay.
It should ask whether her name appears on property records where she has a legal share.
It should ask whether she can open and control her own bank account.
It should ask whether she can leave an abusive marriage safely.
It should ask whether the police will protect her if her family threatens her.
And finally it should ask whether she can choose a husband without fearing violence.
That is what a genuinely protective society would look like.
Constitutional Morality and the Future of Haryana
India's Constitution represents a deliberate departure from the idea that inherited social status should determine individual rights.
Birth does not determine citizenship.
Caste does not determine legal worth.
Gender does not determine fundamental dignity.
Family honour does not determine personal liberty.
The Supreme Court has repeatedly protected the right of adults to choose their partners and has rejected the authority of khap panchayats and caste groups to interfere coercively in such choices.
This constitutional principle is not anti-Haryana.
It is precisely what makes every citizen of Haryana equal to every other citizen.
The village elder and the young woman possess the same citizenship.
The landowner and the landless worker possess the same constitutional dignity.
The son and the daughter are entitled to equality under law.
The majority caste and minority caste do not possess different grades of citizenship.
And the khap, regardless of its social prestige, does not possess sovereign authority.
The Future Cannot Be Governed by the Fear of Choice
The fundamental fear behind many restrictions is not necessarily that young people will make disastrous decisions.
It is that they will make different decisions.
A young woman may choose a man her family would never have selected.
She may choose another caste.
She may choose a poorer but educated partner.
She may choose someone from another village.
She may reject a wealthy family.
She may choose to continue working after marriage.
She may refuse dowry.
She may demand her share of ancestral property.
She may choose not to marry immediately.
She may leave an abusive marriage.
She may decide to live independently.
Each decision chips away at the assumption that the collective knows the individual's life better than the individual herself.
This is the real transformation taking place.
Conclusion: From Control of Women to Citizenship of Women
The recent women's Khap Mahapanchayat should therefore be seen as a warning, but not merely because it opposes love marriages or live-in relationships.
The warning is broader.
It suggests that as women acquire education, employment, property rights, mobility and awareness of constitutional freedoms, sections of the traditional social order are attempting to reconstruct the boundaries of control around them.
The trajectory of emancipation is being challenged.
The answer cannot be another counter-command.
It must be a deeper commitment to women's substantive freedom.
Education must not merely produce educated daughters who remain socially obedient.
Employment must not merely produce earning daughters who remain economically controlled.
Property law must not merely declare equal rights while families socially pressure daughters to surrender them.
Political participation must not merely place women on public platforms while asking them to enforce restrictions upon other women.
And empowerment must not stop at the moment a woman begins to exercise her choice.
The real test of women's emancipation begins precisely there.
A woman is not fully free merely because she can read.
She is freer when she can earn.
She is freer when she owns property.
She is freer when she knows the law.
She is freer when she can leave violence.
She is freer when her economic survival does not depend upon obedience.
And she is truly free when she can say whom she wishes to marry — and the State protects her rather than the social authority that threatens her.
The khap cannot stop education.
It cannot stop urbanisation.
It cannot stop communication.
It cannot stop women entering universities.
It cannot permanently stop women earning.
It cannot erase their legal property rights.
And it cannot permanently prevent human beings from forming emotional bonds.
It can only attempt to delay the consequences of social transformation.
The deeper historical movement, however, is difficult to reverse.
The young woman who has discovered education will not easily surrender her mind.
The woman who has acquired employment will not easily surrender her economic independence.
The daughter who knows she has an equal legal share in ancestral property will not easily accept that tradition makes her a lesser heir.
And the individual who has discovered the constitutional idea that her life belongs to her will not easily accept that a village council owns her choices.
No khap can command the human heart.
No caste can permanently imprison human association.
No village boundary can contain a generation that has already entered a larger world.
The future of Haryana will therefore not be decided by whether tradition survives.
It will be decided by what kind of tradition survives.
A tradition that provides community, solidarity, responsibility and belonging can enrich society.
A tradition that demands obedience at the cost of dignity becomes domination.
The challenge before Haryana is consequently not to destroy its social institutions but to transform them.
Let the khap discuss education.
Let it demand employment.
Let it campaign against drugs.
Let it fight dowry.
Let it oppose domestic violence.
Let it support girls' education.
Let it encourage skill development.
Let it demand better schools, hospitals and employment.
Let it protect the vulnerable.
But let the adult woman decide whom she will marry.
Let the daughter claim the property the law gives her.
Let the educated girl choose her future.
Let the earning woman control the fruits of her labour.
Let the young couple decide whether marriage is right for them.
And let the Constitution remain the final boundary beyond which custom cannot travel.
Because the ultimate emancipation of women is not achieved when society gives women permission to exercise freedom.
It is achieved when society finally understands that their freedom was never society's property to grant in the first place.
The present resurgence of khap authority should be understood as part of a larger contest between two trajectories. One trajectory seeks to expand women's capabilities through education, employment, property ownership, economic independence, mobility and freedom of partner choice. The other seeks to preserve inherited structures of caste endogamy, patriarchal authority and community control by regulating the very choices through which women acquire independence.
The second trajectory cannot ultimately succeed without confronting the constitutional order, modern education, economic change and the basic human capacity to form relationships.
The appropriate response is therefore neither contempt for tradition nor blind celebration of modernity. It is a principled distinction between custom that enriches life and custom that controls life.
The future belongs not to the institution that dictates whom people may love, but to the society capable of allowing its citizens — especially its women — to become educated, economically independent, property-owning, socially mobile and free to make responsible decisions about their own lives.
That is not the destruction of society.
That is the maturation of society.
References
The article draws upon the supplied material and the following legal, governmental and scholarly sources.
1. The Tribune, report on the August 2026 women's khap meeting at Ramrai, Jind, including the khap's position on live-in relationships, love marriages, village/gotra restrictions and proposed outreach to younger women.
2. Hindu Succession Act, 1956, as amended by the Hindu Succession (Amendment) Act, 2005, particularly Section 6 concerning daughters' coparcenary rights.
3. Supreme Court of India, Vineeta Sharma v. Rakesh Sharma, (2020) 9 SCC 1 — establishing that daughters are coparceners by birth with the same rights and liabilities as sons and that the right does not depend upon the father being alive on 9 September 2005.
4. Supreme Court of India, Shakti Vahini v. Union of India, (2018) — concerning honour crimes, khap panchayats and the State's obligation to protect adults exercising their choice of partner.
5. B.R. Ambedkar, Castes in India: Their Mechanism, Genesis and Development — particularly the analysis of endogamy as a mechanism for maintaining caste.
6. Suraj Bhan Bharadwaj, "Myth and Reality of the Khap Panchayats: A Historical Analysis of the Panchayat and Khap Panchayat", Studies in History, Vol. 28.
7. Madhu Nagla, "Khap Panchayat, Honour Killings and Gender Relations in Western India", in Subalternity, Exclusion and Social Change in India, Cambridge University Press.
8. Durba Mitra, scholarship on female sexuality, endogamy and the reproduction of caste through marriage.
9. National Crime Records Bureau, Crime in India, Government of India — data on crime against women, Scheduled Castes and registered honour-related murders.
10. Ministry of Home Affairs, Government of India, parliamentary data concerning murders registered with the motive of honour killing.
11. National Family Health Survey and Periodic Labour Force Survey, Government of India — demographic and labour-market sources relevant to women's education, employment and economic participation.
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