In June, in a village in Begusarai district, Bihar, a 30-year-old mother of three was allegedly raped by her neighbour twice, while her husband was working as a labourer in Tamil Nadu. She had no way to reach the police on her own. When her husband finally came home and she was able to file a complaint, the case had already been silently rerouted through something older and quicker than the law: a panchayat.
Instead of forwarding her complaint to the police, the village elders had their own hearing. According to reports and a video that surfaced weeks later, the woman was made to hold her ears and do sit-ups in front of the gathering, a common posture of public contrition in rural North India, and then forced to spit on the ground and lick it up. The man she had accused was reportedly subjected to similar humiliation before he slipped away from the village and disappeared. He is still on the run. One person involved in organising the "trial" has since been arrested.
None of this would have become known outside the village if no one had filmed it. The footage circulated quietly at first, then went viral in July, more than a month after the incident itself. Only then, under public pressure, was an FIR registered on August 1, and only then did police in Begusarai open a formal investigation into both the original assault and the panchayat's conduct. The local DSP, Nikhil Kumar, has said officers are also trying to verify the video's authenticity, since some residents now dispute the woman's account altogether, claiming what actually happened was a consensual relationship that the village discovered and punished on those terms instead. That part of the story is still unclear.
What makes this hard to acknowledge as an exception is that it isn't one. Five days before a similar case in Khagaria district, a 25-year-old woman had taken shelter from the rain in a house belonging to a local well-known landlord. His son, she told police, raped her there. When she went to the father to complain, he didn't call anyone or make any attempt to intervene through the proper channels. He locked her in a room, assaulted her, and forced her to lick her own spit for complaining, then made her drink urine. The case is being investigated by the women's police station in Khagaria.
Bihar has seen this exact punishment before, and not just once. A village official in Samastipur made a man lick his spit over an unpaid fine. A man in Muzaffarpur was beaten and made to lick spit off the ground after an argument near a bank. In Nalanda, the home district of Bihar's chief minister, a low-caste villager was beaten with slippers and forced to do the same just because he entered the house of a local
court chief. The disputes are different every time—money, caste, land—but the punishment is always the same, and it's always filmed. It's a way of making someone's submission public. So when that same punishment is used on a woman who just reported a rape. She isn't being protected. She's being punished for speaking up.
This is where the informal panchayat system runs directly against the law it is supposed to answer to. Village councils were told to settle disputes outside the courts; also called khap panchayats in other states, have no legal authority to punish anyone for anything, not even for reporting a crime. Yet they persist because they are faster than the police, caste networks that villagers depend on for everything, and largely hidden from any outside authority unless a phone camera happens to be running. Here, one thing is common to both the Begusarai and Khagaria cases, along with most of the "lick spit" incidents surfacing out of Bihar in recent years: they only reached the police because someone filmed the humiliation, and the footage later was allegedly leaked out of the village.
Some people in the village are now saying the relationship was consensual and that she was the one who broke the rules. Whether that's true or not, it shows something common: when a woman reports sexual violence, people often question her instead of questioning the man she's accusing. Her decision to speak up becomes the real problem, not the assault, and that’s the biggest problem.
None of this is unique to Bihar or to panchayats. Victims all over India describe police who talk them out of filing a complaint, ask why they didn't fight back harder, or push them to "settle" with the accused's family instead of registering a case. Families stay quiet too, just to avoid being known as the house where "that" happened. What makes Begusarai different is that there's video proof of how far this can go: a woman on her knees, licking the ground, in front of the same neighbours she still has to live next to.
The FIR filed on August 1 is something, sure. But let’s be honest: it only happened because the video made it impossible to ignore. For every case that goes viral, there are probably more cases that stay hidden. Someone gets shamed, and someone gets away. The story ends silently, long before anyone in power even knows.
References:
- Bihar Shocker: Rape Survivor Blamed, Allegedly Forced to Lick Spit by Village Panchayat https://newsable.asianetnews.com
- Bihar Woman Humiliated by Panchayat After Rape Allegation: Viral Video Leads to FIR, Police Probe https://www.stackumbrella.com
- A woman was forced to lick spit in front of a panchayat in Bihar's Begusarai https://x.com
- Woman made to lick spit in Bihar https://gulfnews.com
- Indian villager forced to lick official's spit over petty issue https://gulfnews.com
- Forced to lick spit off the ground after thrashing, man's ordeal sparks manhunt in Bihar https://www.deccanherald.com
- Youth assaulted, forced to lick spit in UP's Deoria; 1 detained https://www.tribuneindia.com