India’s village councils under scrutiny after rape

NEW DELHI // In the hours after her 6-year-old daughter was kidnapped, Rimaila Awungshi appealed for help from the most powerful authority she knew: the council of elders in her Indian village.
In her anguish, Ms Awungshi told the village leaders what happened. She was a single mother to a beloved little girl named Yinring. Her former boyfriend had refused to marry her or care for their child. But as the years passed and he never found a wife, his family demanded custody.
"But I am poor, and I have no brothers, and the village authority doesn't care," Ms Awungshi said.
Across much of rural India, these deeply conservative councils are the law of the land. They serve as judge and jury, dictating everything from custody cases to how women should dress to whether young lovers deserve to live or die.
These unelected and unregulated courts now are coming under fresh scrutiny after police say a council of elders in West Bengal ordered the gang rape of a 20-year-old woman as punishment for falling in love with the wrong man.
"We are going back to the 16th century," Pradip Bhattacharya, a politician in West Bengal, said after news of the gang rape began to spread in a country already reeling from a string of high-profile cases of sexual violence against women.
Village councils are common in South Asia, serving as the only practical means of delivering justice in areas where local governments are either too far away or too ineffective to mediate disputes. Often, the elders try to halt the march of the modern world, enforcing strict social norms about marriage and gender roles.
In some of the most extreme cases, the councils have sanctioned so-called honour killings. Known as khap panchayats, the councils act with impunity because villagers risk being ostracised if they flout the rulings.
The courts can be especially harsh towards women, enforcing the most conservative aspects a patriarchal system that is deeply entrenched.
India's Supreme Court has lashed out at the khaps, saying they amount to vigilante justice, are "wholly illegal" and should be stamped out. On Friday, the Supreme Court took up the West Bengal case, ordering an investigation on a "suo moto" basis – meaning that the court acted on its own, without a request from either side in the case.
In many ways, the councils show how centuries of patriarchal traditions often clash with the values of a modern world. The growing numbers of financially independent young women who live on their own in cities would balk at even the most innocuous dictates by a village council, such as not wearing jeans or using cell phones.
The West Bengal case has revived long-standing criticisms of the khaps, with critics saying they are nothing more than kangaroo courts delivering medieval rulings.
According to police, at least 13 men attacked the woman in West Bengal – she lost count of exactly how many – on January 20 after the elders in Subalpur village discovered her love affair with a Muslim man from a neighbouring village.
Twelve suspects and the head of the council have been arrested.
Nityananda Hembrom, the chief of West Bengal's 6 million Santhals, said the village council is being unfairly maligned, and that there are not enough details about the case.
"Maybe the girl was assaulted," he acknowledged. But he said the tribal community and lifestyle is under siege, and that he believes the council was acting against some sort of "cultural erosion".
Ms Awungshi, who has not seen her daughter even once, eight years after her ex-boyfriend's family abducted her, says she thinks of the girl every day and sees no recourse to the decision handed down by the village council.
She heard the girl was given a new name, Yarmi, which means "gift."
"She is 14 now," Awungshi said. "I hope and pray she will come back to me on her own one day when she becomes a mother herself."
* Associated Press