From the desk of your friendly neighbourhood Khap Panchayat
We have been under the scrutiny of #paidmedia for the past few years.
All of this escalated when Aamir Khan, an actor known for several immoral films like Love-Love-Love did an unrealistic portrayal of us in his show.
Misconceptions about us spread like wildfire. People began thinking that we were the Taliban of India, which is highly incorrect actually. The Talibs crush the balls of rapists while we just ask them to marry the victim and do it again.
But this irrefutable fact didn’t stop the propaganda from spreading.
Before we could do or ban anything about it, we were branded the enemies of love. Some people even claimed that we were the inspiration behind Rihanna’s “We found love in a hopeless place”.
So, we met last week, and decided that this cowshit had to stop!
We arrived at the decision of writing a mea culpa after the options of shutting down the Internet or flogging Aamir Khan in public were deemed implausible.
So, here it goes:
We may have been critical of love marriages in the past. But the thing is, we ourselves are in love. We are in love with something that isn’t from our own caste. It doesn’t even belong to the same physical paradigm.
We are in love… with Madhu Kishwar and her tweets.
It happened at first sight. At first, we were as clueless about it as a girl from our village trying to read a newspaper. The guilt that followed was even harder to cope with. Till then, our idea of “hitting rock bottom” was tying a huge rock to a lover’s body so that it stayed at the river bottom. But falling in love taught us the actual meaning.
But we soon realised that it was meant to happen. We had an inseparable chemistry with Madhuji because both of us were the same kind of people. While going through her tweets, we figured that she was actually complementing our statements with her own.
While we released an exceptional theory that blamed chowmein for rapes, she claimed that a park in Gujarat was better than Disneyland.
She recently said that Indira and Rajiv Gandhi weren’t martyrs because their disastrous policies led to their assassinations. You don’t need to be a male to understand that she just twisted and tweaked our Nobel-worthy theory of victims not being victims because they “asked for it” to make that analogy.
But these tweets aren’t the only reason why we fell for Madhuji. We have other similarities with her too.
- Silly people disagree with anything we say.
- Baba Ramdev agrees with everything we say.
- When Madhuji or we issue statements people annoy both of us with the same query: what we have been smoking. (We don’t know about Madhuji, but we smoke a lot of hukka with occasional charas before issuing a statement.)
- Her “politically neutral” is synonymous with our “feminist”. In other words, our gotras are compatible
- Most importantly: in an ideal world, nobody would have opposed either of our opinions.
So, here’s the deal, people.
Firstly, stop writing false stories about khaps committing honour killings. We don’t commit them, we just order them. Geez!
Second, stop going after pyari-cum-aadharniya Madhuji and her 1-n tweets all the time. It’s because of her that our prestigious institution wasn’t banned by the Supreme Court. People thought that her supporting us didn’t make any sense because she actually edits a ‘feminist journal’. But hey, whatever marinates her chowmein.
We would’ve thanked her for saving our asses. But alas, she is a woman.
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@khappanchayat is run by an engineering student from Jaipur who has a lot of free time on his hands
(Image credit: Kshitij Garg)
October 30, 2013 at 4:42 am
I somehow think that the article is obnoxious. It is whoever has the might of the pen can ridicule anybody. Firstly I don’t agree with Madhu Kishtwar’s politics. But if we believe in human dignity, equality and democracy there is a better way to deal with people and to reason with them. Their being unreasonable does not give us the right to treat the other as sub human and taking own positions as more than humans (maybe God because we know the punishment to be given). This public shaming is harassment.
Secondly the Khap panchayat, we can ridicule and laugh at them – because they don’t rule our life. The same logic applies to them – even if they don’t think they are humans, they violate and cause inexplicable suffering, by ridiculing and laughing at them we cannot engage with them and the people who fall in the grey area, who do not know which side to take.
Consciousness in this world is also a merit of education – it is better to not forget our own privileges (most of the time it is applicable – i might be wrong – but for me I think I have become less biased with experience and education). It is our duty to share it with others. It is also a privilege to be biased and stereptypical when our necks are not immediately on the line.
I don’t think the positions we have taken we leave any room for reform – not for Madhu Kishtwar and the hidden Khap supporters who fall in the grey area. I can bet that most people fall on those grey areas just falling short of serious physical violence and causing death – it is the dark depths of our minds that we don’t see. Rather than trying to deliberate and being respectful we corner people. This way nobody will engage with us and we can sit in out ivory towers while people burn outside.
It is appalling and immature. Just because due to technology some have access to write does not mean that we will humiliate others – even if they are criminals.