Bhainsi (Uttar Pradesh), June 28: Raju Ahlawat is sick of the city people's brouhaha over the decapitation that the local Ahlawat Khap has decreed for the filmmaker who mocked all khaps.

"We aren't the Talibanis you city folk think we are," grumbles the Muzaffarnagar district president of the most powerful farmers' organisation in western Uttar Pradesh, the Bharatiya Kisan Union.

"Our girls use mobile phones and wear jeans," he adds, quickly sizing up the socio-political dimensions of the issue. "We only object to 'get up' and girls constantly sending text messages."

"Get up," he explains, refers to low rise or tight jeans.

Ahlawat attended the June 12 meeting of the elders of the Ahlawat Jat gotra (clan) in Bhainsi village, 111km from Delhi, which announced a bounty of 51 buffaloes for anyone who would behead Vinod Kapri.

It also "banned" Kapri's Miss Tanakpur Haazir Ho, in which a young electrician (Rahul Bagga), caught in bed with the young wife (Hrishitaa Bhatt) of an ageing sarpanch (Annu Kapoor), is falsely accused of raping a buffalo and ordered by a khap to marry the animal.

"No khap would do such a thing. You've shown us as a rapist society," complains Ahlawat Khap boss Gajendra Choudhry, sitting in the shade of Alstonia (chhatim) trees with Ahlawat elders in his village, Raipur Nangli.

"Kapri's film looks real merely because he has observed panchayats. The way he has destroyed our reputation is more disturbing than his beheading that we have called for."

Free to speak

No women can be seen on the streets of Bhainsi - where most upper caste homes have cars - on Saturday afternoon, when The Telegraph arrives at the village.

Cousins Shivani and Divya, BCom students at a college in Muzaffarnagar town, 18km away, speak to this newspaper in the presence of their families at Bhainsi. Both girls are poker-faced.

Shivani is wearing a T-shirt with pyjamas and Divya is in churidar-kurta.

"We aren't permitted to watch such films," Shivani says sharply, asked about Miss Tanakpur. "We only watch family films, like those of Akshay Kumar, with our families."

She says the cousins are allowed mobile phones but have to deposit them with their mothers when they are at home.

Both girls want public sector jobs, in a bank or a school. Shivani gives an angry stare when her father asks her to drape a chunri over her T-shirt. She finally lets it settle only over her left arm.

"Our families give us freedom of speech... umm... to say the right things," she adds. Divya shoots a quick glance at her mother and smirks at this reporter.

People's choice Tanakpur, which released on June 26, is showing in neighbouring districts but not in Ahlawat stronghold Muzaffarnagar, where several other khaps have backed the "ban".

The titles of the films running "house full" in Muzaffarnagar town tell their own tale - Hot Teri Deewangi, Kama Sutra, Kama Kala....

Shivam Gupta, a cloth trader near Meenakshi Cineplex, says these are the only films that sell.

"Everyone's talking about the ban. Good films rarely run here and when they do it's only a single show a day. Yahaan public ko maal chahiye (The people here want hot stuff)," he says.

Would a satire like Tanakpur, made by an award-winning director, have released in these parts even if it weren't banned? It would have, Gupta says, because of its rural backdrop.

Meenakshi had planned to screen the movie until the khap diktat. "Now we are stuck with this," Gupta points to a Hot Teri Deewangi poster and grins. "After all, the khaps worry about vulgarity."

Saving innocence

Choudhry claims the diktat wasn't pre-planned. "I went to Bhainsi on June 12 to visit a family where someone had died. Children there were whispering about this film where a man rapes a buffalo," he says.

"If someone polluted the minds of Kapri's kids, he would have done exactly what we have done."

Ahlawat mocks the media's interest. "We have regularly protested the annual decrease in the real value of sugarcane (because of rising input costs) and the import of sugar. No journalist ever came (to cover the protests)," he says.

"But when we call a panchayat against a perverse film, TV channels swarm our village like bees."

The powerful khap panchayats of Haryana, Delhi, Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan have in the past punished "transgressions" ranging from inter-caste and intra-gotra marriages to Dalit grooms riding on horses. The "sentences" have included rape, murder and force-feeding of excreta.

Most of the khaps belong to the dominant Jat and Gujjar castes but their writ runs over all the communities living in their areas.

Elders at the Ahlawat Khap admit to expelling a Jat-Brahmin couple five years ago in defiance of media and police pressure.

No action

The Mumbai-based Kapri had written to the Union information and broadcasting ministry and the Uttar Pradesh government on June 25 seeking protection for himself and his family - who live in Noida, 108km from Bhainsi -and the theatres that show his films.

He didn't lodge an FIR, and neither government has taken any action. Muzaffarnagar police say they can't act without a complaint from the theatre owners or others.

Kapri says he hasn't approached the khap, nor has the khap contacted him.

Most upper caste homes in Bhainsi have at least one family member in government service, especially in the uniformed services. Groups of young men running along the highways, training for armed forces recruitment, are a common sight in this part of the country.

Sugarcane cultivation is the main occupation but it is increasingly an option only for those who don't make it to the services.

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The literacy rate in 2011 was 75.59 per cent, higher than the national average of 74.04 per cent, but the sex ratio was just 870 women for every 1,000 men, lower than the national average of 919.

Of Bhainsi's population of 7,925, almost 16 per cent are Dalits - who are mainly Jatav, the leather worker caste that former chief minister Mayawati belongs to.

The Jats of Bhainsi say the village's name is a British corruption of "Bhim Singh", who is believed to have established the settlement in the 13th century.

Fault lines

None of the Jat youths in Bhainsi, many of whom study in Meerut and Delhi, own up to a taste for the Hot Teris and Kama Kalas.

"We mainly watch Hollywood movies or dubbed South Indian films, online. Cities are unsafe because there are no rules of conduct like we have here," says Hardik, a polytechnic student who plans to find a job in Delhi.

"In Delhi, too, I will stick to our rules and culture," he insists.

Others in the village are nervous when asked about the khap.

"There's no point talking about this as the khap has decided we won't watch the movie," says a Muslim betel vendor who doesn't want to be named.

The Jatav elders too are guarded, but their youth are not. "The Jats banned the film Khap in 2011 and PK in 2014," says Anuj, an aspiring freestyle dancer.

Khap, the film, was about an honour killing while some groups had accused PK of being "anti-Hindu".

Schoolteacher Kamaljeet quickly interjects: "Because PK was bad and Aamir Khan was shown taking liquor into temples."

Anuj retorts: "It was a good film. Here there's no government, there's only the khap where we Jatavs have no say. But they solve problems unlike courts where you will go broke fighting cases."

Kamaljeet cuts in again. "Dalits are poor and we try to get jobs and get out. Those who have money watch films, ban films and riot," he says pointing at a place of worship that was vandalised during the September 2013 clashes.

KFC women

A KFC outlet on the Ghaziabad-Badrinath highway functions as a signpost to Choudhry's village.

The khap head insists on introducing his wife. "Please write down that she is a double MA and a BEd."

Seema Choudhry, who teaches at a private school, shares her husband's discomfort with the way khaps are portrayed.

"My students feel ashamed and ask me about these misdeeds with animals in the film ( Tanakpur doesn't contain any scenes of sex with a buffalo and makes it clear the accusation is false). We want to ape the West where gay marriages are now legal," she says.

"Here too the media supports brothers marrying sisters (intra-gotra marriages). You talk about bans but never explain why we village folk are worried."

Seema says the village supported the establishment of the KFC and McDonald's outlets on the highway. But the Choudhrys don't go there because they don't like the food, which they find too expensive anyway.

There's another reason too.

Asked about city tourists visiting the outlets, including women who stop there to smoke, Choudhry replies: "We don't go there. We are concerned about our women, not yours."