Dadri: Jayvendra is 48 hours away from his wedding. His bridegroom jitters have little to do with fear of commitment.
"I heard they have issued a death threat against me," he says.
"They" refers to the khap panchayat or caste council in his village in Dadri. Like other khaps, this one has a strong opinion on who's marrying who. And it doesn't want Jayvendra to marry Manisha, his fiancée.
Unlike recent cases that have provoked the wrath of khap panchayats in Haryana and Punjab, Manisha and Jayavendra are not from the same gotra or sub-caste - which is tantamount to incest for caste councils.
But because Jayavendra and Manisha come from gotras that co-exist in the same village, the khap panchayat here has ruled that the bride and groom are related.
Executions in such cases, ordered by the khap panchayat and carried out by the bride's family, have been occurring with blatant regularity, pushing India to discuss the worrying prevalence of caste and of khap panchayats functioning as kangaroo courts. Recently, US-educated MP, Navin Jindal, shocked many by expressing his support for khap panchayats who want same-gotra marriages to be declared illegal.
What is an ideological debate for many is a worrying reality for Jayavendra. "The panchayat has told us that we won't be allowed to do Ghorchari in the village, and we will also not be allowed to bring the bride to the village," he states, adding that he will live with his new bride outside their village.
For his wedding on Saturday, he has asked for police protection. But he knows the real test could lie in the weeks after that, as Manisha and he try to fade into desperate anonymity to begin their married life.