Gurugram: The Sarva Jatiye Kandela Khap Panchayat in Jind, the Jat heartland of Haryana, has rallied behind RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat’s call for Indian couples to produce three children.
The support, declared at a meeting in Kandela village, in Jind district 4 September, was also for Bhagwat’s stance on raising the retirement age.
The panchayat, organised by the national convener of the Sarva Jatiye Khap, highlighted the “dangers” of single-child households, saying that the premature death of an only child deprives parents of support and plunges them into a lifetime of grief.
The khap also cautioned against a looming “society of old people” with fewer young earners to take care of families, mirroring sociological concerns on population imbalance.
“Couples must ideally produce three or a minimum of two children, but they must never go for one at any cost,” the khap said in its resolution.
This is exactly in line with Bhagwat’s recent comments at an RSS event in Vigyan Bhawan, New Delhi, where he encouraged each Indian couple to produce three children to offset declining birth rates.
Referring to a replacement-level fertility rate of 2.1 children per woman, Bhagwat contended that societies with rates of less than three face slow extinction, as has been the case worldwide.
India’s total fertility rate (TFR) has fallen below this level, reporting 1.9 children per woman in the most recent Sample Registration System report for 2023 and the UN Population Fund’s 2025 projections. This fall, from about 2.0 of recent years, has triggered warnings of population aging, and rural areas are at or below replacement levels for the first time.
Talking to ThePrint, Tekram Kandela, national convener of the Sarva Jatiye Khap, said the khap panchayat that met at Kandela village on 4 September agreed with Bhagwat that Indian couples need to produce three children.
“People have started opting for one child these days. If, unfortunately, the child dies in his or her young age, the parents are left with no one to support them, and they spend the rest of their lives in grief and sorrow. Also, as sociologists fear, if the population growth remains like this, we will soon be a society of old-age people with fewer people to earn a living for the family,” Kandela said.
The panchayat also supported Bhagwat’s assertion on the duration of leadership. On the same Delhi platform, the RSS chief, who will turn 75 this month, scoffed at suggestions of retirement, saying, “I never said I will retire or somebody should retire at 75. We are swayamsevaks; we can’t say no to the job given.”
Kandela welcomed this flexibility, insisting that age must not exclude capable persons from public life: “If they can perform their duties at 80 or 90, why impose retirement?” Kandela asked.
In another resolution, the panchayat called for prohibition of live-in relationships and held that marriages must be blessed with the consent of parents, reiterating its conservative philosophy.
The khap panchayats, ad hoc caste-based committees common in Haryana and western Uttar Pradesh, have all along espoused traditional values, usually coming into conflict with modern legal norms on such matters as inter-caste marriages.
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RSS’s inroads in Jat territory
The khap panchayat’s support for Mohan Bhagwat is interesting since it suggests inroads by the RSS in the Jat heartland.
While the RSS hardly had any presence in the villages before 2014, even the BJP was considered a party of urbanites and traders in Haryana.
Jyoti Mishra, an assistant professor of Political Science at Amity University, Mohali, however, said that the BJP had already made inroads into the Jat heartland in Haryana, pointing to the results of 2024 Assembly polls in Haryana.
“A look at the 2024 Assembly elections in Haryana shows that in the Jat heartland, the BJP won four out of six seats in Sonipat district, four out of five seats in Jind district where the Kandela Khap is based, three out of four seats in Bhiwani, both the seats in Charkhi Dadri, and the Jat-dominated Panipat Rural seat in Panipat district. The Congress could win Jat-dominated seats only in Hooda’s Rohtak and Jhajjar districts and Selja’s Sirsa and Fatehabad districts,” said Mishra.
She, however, said that the BJP’s inroads in the rural heartland of Haryana were so far being considered the effect of the Modi factor alone, as this started only after 2014.
“A khap panchayat in a Jat heartland supporting RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat’s comment shows that even the RSS has made inroads there,” Mishra added.
(Edited by Viny Mishra)
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