Unelected Councils in India Run Villages With Stern Hand

“We do not know what the law is,” he said on a recent boiling afternoon. “We only know what is decided by the khap panchayat. Here it is not the Supreme Court that decides. It is the khap panchayat that decides.”

For generations, these unelected councils of male elders have dominated life in many villages, mostly across northern India, exerting social control through edicts that govern everything from marriage to property disputes. But the councils are coming under growing national scrutiny as their extrajudicial rulings — especially those blamed for the spread of so-called honor killings — are challenging the concept of the national rule of law.

In recent months, an assertive Supreme Court has issued opinions condemning the councils as illegal bodies, and the controversy is expected to spill into this summer’s “monsoon” session of Parliament. Legal advocates are pushing for a comprehensive law establishing criminal penalties to deter the khaps from issuing their edicts.

Meanwhile, khap leaders are unrepentant and pushing their own agenda in Parliament by demanding alterations to make Indian marriage laws reflect their conservative traditions.

“They are mobilizing for protests,” said Ranjana Kumari, a women’s rights advocate. “And they are capable of organizing a very huge protest.”

The legal battle is another example of the growing pains in Indian society as the rippling influences of modernity collide with ancient beliefs and practices. Khap panchayats often seem to be trying to stop the advance of the modern world: some khaps have ordered bans on women wearing tight clothing and have even tried to ban the use of mobile phones by people in college or younger, since the devices are tools that couples can use for furtive contact.

Khap leaders contend that their councils create social cohesion and order, while providing speedier justice, in the absence of effective local government. They justify their strict edicts on marriage as being rooted in religious belief and say that their practices have prevented inbreeding and other health issues — claims disputed by their critics as wrongheaded and outdated because village populations are far larger today.

Here in the state of Haryana, khap panchayats dominate many villages and exert heavy influence on the political system. Much of Haryana is populated by Jats, a north Indian caste divided into subgroups known as gotras.

Traditionally, villages are run by a particular gotra with its own khap panchayat, which adjudicates local disputes and upholds marriage customs, including the belief that men and women within the same gotra, and the same village, are considered brothers and sisters and are prohibited from marrying.

It is the khaps’ unyielding position on marriage, which they say derives from ancient Hindu texts, that has thrust them into the heart of a national controversy. Critics blame their edicts for directly or indirectly provoking honor killings of couples who marry within the same gotra or village. In other cases, social pressure has driven young women to commit suicide.

Khap panchayats often order residents of a village to boycott, whether socially or economically, families whose children defy the marriage custom. In some cases, khaps have even ordered that couples be killed, though more often the social pressure they create is the issue; many times, a killing is actually carried out by family members seeking to escape social shame and ostracism within their village.

At a time when a younger generation of women is becoming more independent, many critics believe that the khaps are desperate to maintain traditional controls over women and property, which is intertwined with marriage.

“It’s all about social control and control of the girl,” said Kirti Singh, a lawyer who argues cases before the Supreme Court.

Hari Kumar contributed reporting.

 

India Sees New Reason to Distrust Pakistan

Many Indian officials, who have long accused Pakistan of providing shelter to terrorist groups, felt vindicated by the discovery of Bin Laden in the town of Abbottabad, an hour’s drive north of the capital and home to a large military base.

Now these officials are repeating their demands that the Pakistani government arrest and prosecute all the perpetrators of the November 2008 terrorist attack in Mumbai, an assault carried out by militants trained in Pakistan who killed more than 160 people.

“We believe that the perpetrators of the Mumbai terror attack, including the controllers and handlers of the terrorists who actually carried out the attack, continue to be sheltered in Pakistan,” Home Minister Palaniappan Chidambaram said in a statement on Monday.

In recent months, India and Pakistan have made modest progress in reviving a relationship that has been largely frozen since the Mumbai attacks. In February, the foreign secretaries of both nations met on the sidelines of a regional conference in Bhutan.

Last month, Mr. Singh sat with Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani of Pakistan during a cricket match between the countries. Mr. Singh had also been considering a possible visit to Pakistan later this year.

“Whether he will go now remains to be seen,” said Salman Haidar, a former Indian foreign secretary. “Certainly, this doesn’t help him.”

India and Pakistan are nuclear-armed neighbors that have fought three wars and continue to have a litany of disputes, including deep disagreement over the fate of Kashmir. India’s political establishment is deeply distrustful of Pakistan, especially the Pakistani military, and Mr. Singh has been criticized at home for his persistent efforts to engage Pakistan.

Gopalapuram Parthasarathy, a former Indian high commissioner to Pakistan, said Bin Laden’s location inside Pakistan vindicated the Indian belief that Pakistani military and intelligence officials are knowingly sheltering terrorists.

“It is now obvious that at least from 2005, he has been living comfortably in the middle of a Pakistani garrison town, surrounded by the Pakistani military,” said Mr. Parthasarathy, who has been critical of Mr. Singh. “Nobody would believe that the Pakistan military would not have known he was there.”

Similar sentiments were common in India’s news media on Tuesday, and some analysts speculated that domestic pressure would mount on the prime minister to take a harder line on Pakistan.

In his own short statement, Mr. Singh refrained from taking the same tough stance against Pakistan as that of his home minister. He welcomed Bin Laden’s death as “a significant step forward” and called on Pakistan to take steps against groups that harmed innocent civilians.

Mr. Haidar, who has supported the efforts at dialogue, said of Mr. Singh, “He hasn’t really rubbed this in their faces, the fact that they have been caught with their pants down.”

Further, Mr. Haidar said: “My own personal view is we are going too slow and we needed a jolt. Unfortunately, the jolt has come in the opposite direction. It makes life more difficult for Dr. Manmohan Singh.”

He added, “But I don’t think we’re at a full stop.”

 

India Puts Tight Leash on Internet Free Speech

 

MUMBAI, India — Free speech advocates and Internet users are protesting new Indian regulations restricting Web content that, among other things, can be considered “disparaging,” “harassing,” “blasphemous” or “hateful.”

The new rules, quietly issued by the country’s Department of Information Technology earlier this month and only now attracting attention, allow officials and private citizens to demand that Internet sites and service providers remove content they consider objectionable on the basis of a long list of criteria.

Critics of the new rules say the restrictions could severely curtail debate and discussion on the Internet, whose use has been growing fast in India.

The list of objectionable content is sweeping and includes anything that “threatens the unity, integrity, defense, security or sovereignty of India, friendly relations with foreign states or public order.”

The rules highlight the ambivalence with which Indian officials have long treated freedom of expression. The country’s constitution allows “reasonable restrictions” on free speech but lawmakers have periodically stretched that definition to ban books, movies and other material about sensitive subjects like sex, politics and religion.

An Indian state, for example, recently banned an American author’s new biography of the Indian freedom fighter Mohandas Gandhi that critics have argued disparages Mr. Gandhi by talking about his relationship with another man.

Although fewer than 10 percent of Indians have access to the Internet, that number has been growing fast — especially on mobile devices. There are more than 700 million cellphone accounts in India.

The country has also established a thriving technology industry that writes software and creates Web services primarily for Western clients.

Even before the new rules — known as the Information Technology (Intermediaries guidelines) Rules, 2011 — India has periodically tried to restrict speech on the Internet. In 2009, the government banned a popular and graphic online comic strip, Savita Bhabhi, about a housewife with an active sex life. Indian officials have also required social networking sites like Orkut to take down posts deemed offensive to ethnic and religious groups.

Using a freedom of information law, the Center for Internet and Society, a Bangalore-based research and advocacy group, recently obtained and published a list of 11 Web sites banned by the Department of Information Technology. Other government agencies have probably blocked more sites, the group said.

The new Internet rules go further than existing Indian laws and restrictions, said Sunil Abraham, the executive director for the Center for Internet and Society. The rules require Internet “intermediaries” — an all-encompassing group that includes sites like YouTube and Facebook and companies that host Web sites or provide Internet connections — to respond to any demand to take down offensive content within 36 hours. The rules do not provide a way for content producers to defend their work or appeal a decision to take content down.

“These rules overly favor those who want to clamp down on freedom of expression,” Mr. Abraham said. “Whenever there are limits of freedom of expression, in order for those limits to be considered constitutionally valid, those limits have to be clear and not be very vague. Many of these rules that seek to place limits are very, very vague.”

An official for the People’s Union for Civil Liberties, an advocacy group based in New Delhi, said on Wednesday that it was considering a legal challenge to the constitutionality of the new rules.

“What are we, Saudi Arabia?” said Pushkar Raj, the group’s general secretary. “We don’t expect this from India. This is something very serious.”

An official at the Department of Information Technology, Gulshan Rai, did not return calls and messages.

The rules are based on a 2008 information technology law that India’s Parliament passed shortly after a three-day siege on Mumbai by Pakistan-based terrorists that killed more than 163 people. That law, among other things, granted authorities more expansive powers to monitor electronic communications for reasons of national security. It also granted privacy protections to consumers.

While advocates for free speech and civil liberties have complained that the 2008 law goes too far in violating the rights of Indians, Internet firms have expressed support for it. The law removed liability from Internet intermediaries as long as they were not active participants in creating content that was later deemed to be offensive.

Subho Ray, the president of the Internet and Mobile Association of India, which represents companies like Google and eBay, said the liability waiver was a big improvement over a previous law that had been used to hold intermediaries liable for hosting content created by others. In 2004, for instance, the police arrested eBay’s top India executive because a user of the company’s Indian auction site had offered to sell a video clip of a teenage couple having sex.

“The new I.T. Act (2008) is, in fact, a large improvement on the old one,” Mr. Ray said in an e-mail response to questions.

Mr. Ray said his association had not taken a stand on the new regulations. An India-based spokeswoman for Google declined to comment on the new rules, saying the company needed more time to respond.

Along with the new content regulations, the government also issued rules governing data security, Internet cafes and the electronic provision of government services.

 

U.S. Loses Bids to Supply Jets to India

The decision was a blow for President Obama, who had pushed hard for this and other defense deals during his visit to India in November as part of his agenda to deepen and broaden the United States’ relationship with India. The American ambassador to India, Timothy J. Roemer, who separately announced on Thursday that he would resign from his post for personal reasons, said the United States was “deeply disappointed by this news.”

While political and economic relations between India and the United States have been warming for years, American arms makers have struggled to win big contracts here. After decades of frosty relations during the cold war, which pushed India to rely extensively on the Soviet Union for military hardware, many in the Indian defense establishment are still wary of American intentions and United States military aid to Pakistan, India’s main adversary.

The American bid to build the fighters came from Boeing and Lockheed Martin. Boeing had offered its F/A -18 jets, and Lockheed Martin pitched its F-16 planes. But India instead narrowed the list to the Rafale fighter from Dassault and the Eurofighter Typhoon jet made by a consortium of European companies. Russian and Swedish bids were also turned down.

The 126 planes are meant to replace aging Russian jets. A spokesman for the Indian Defense Ministry said the country hoped to make a final decision by the end of March 2012.

Both American companies are also looking to sell other military hardware to India, which unlike much of the Western world has been sharply increasing its defense spending. Some analysts say India could spend $50 billion to $80 billion on equipment in the next five years.

One Indian international affairs analyst, C. Raja Mohan, played down the significance of the American companies’ loss of this deal. He said that the Indian government was buying more from United States contractors than ever before.

“One deal doesn’t make everything,” said Mr. Mohan, a senior fellow at the Center for Policy Research in New Delhi. “There has been a lot of hype about this deal. We are doing things with the U.S. that we never did before.”

But another analyst, Nitin Pai, argued that India’s decision would hurt relations with the United States, at a time when the country needed stronger ties with America to advance its interests in Afghanistan and Pakistan and the United Nations Security Council, on which India is seeking a permanent seat.

“This move will most certainly reduce India’s geopolitical leverage with the U.S. military-industrial complex, at a time when India needs it most,” Mr. Pai wrote on his blog, The Acorn. He added, “Is the United States more likely to be sympathetic to India’s interests after an $11 billion contract — which means much needed jobs for the U.S. economy — is awarded to someone else?”

Dinesh Keskar, president of Boeing’s Indian operation, said that while the company was “obviously disappointed” about not making the cut for the fighter jets, it was “quite excited about the opportunities in India.” He added that the company was seeking a meeting with Indian officials to find out why its planes were not selected.

Boeing said the company and the Indian Air Force were in the final stages of negotiating a contract for C-17 cargo planes that was announced by Mr. Obama and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in November. And it is hoping to win orders for attack and heavy-lift helicopters.

“We are quite engaged with and will continue our partnership with India,” Mr. Keskar said in a telephone interview.