Sometime back, a new Bill was introduced in Parliament entitled “Prevention of Child Marriages Bill, 2004” to replace the Child Marriage Restraint Act of 1929. As per the census of 2001, 6.4 million to Indians under the age of 18 are already married, although the legal marriageable age is 18 for females and 21 for males. Counting those already widowed or divorced, the total number of under-aged men and women who have been married at least once prior to reaching the legal age is about 12.1 million. The 1901 census had found that the phenomenon was more or less confined to a few upper castes in some regions of India. Now it is more prevalent among groups lower down the social hierarchy.
Instead of trying to understand what compels certain communities to arrange early marriages of their children, activists have tended to adopt the following strategies:
-
- Encourage police action and litigation against offending families, thereby unleashing a virulent backlash from communities who feel outsiders have no right to interfere in their internal affairs;
- Demand that child marriage law be made more and more stringent to frighten people into obedience.
It is noteworthy that, in recent decades, despite such early marriages being illegal, communities in different parts of rural India have taken to organising mass marriage ceremonies that openly defy the legal ban on child marriages. Powerful politicians and MPs come to bless the couples and lend legitimacy to the occasion. For instance, on 22 March 2005, responding to a Public Interest Litigation (PIL) by a social organisation seeking stringent action against officials who failed to prevent child marriages, the Supreme Court directed district collectors and superintendents of police across the country to take steps to prevent child marriages, especially mass marriages organized on special auspicious days such as the Teej festival.
The NGO which filed the PIL demanded stronger punitive provisions against offenders and plugging of loopholes available in Section 3 of the new Bill. This section provides that a child marriage would be rendered void only if the affected children file legal proceedings requesting its annulment. This provision was obviously inserted to avoid upsetting the legitimacy of the marriages where both parties have accepted the arrangement while allowing an exit route mainly for those persons who are unhappy enough to want to walk out of a bond imposed by their families.
The 1929 Child Marriage Restraint Act had provided for a minimal interventionist role. It rendered all child marriages “illegal” but not “void”. In a country where less than a minuscule percentage seek legal recognition for marriage by registering their nuptials in a court of law, where almost all marriages draw their legitimacy from the social sanction provided by their jati biradari, it would be foolish and often harmful to the women and children of such marriages to enact a law which declares all marriages “void” after they have received community sanction. That power would make sense only when people require or demand legal sanction. However, the NGO which filed the PIL reflects the opinion of many zealous reformers in India who would like the State to play an aggressive role in tearing asunder by force millions of well-established marriages where the groom and bride are below the permissible age. Attempts at stopping such marriages in which a whole village was involved have led to terrible backlashes. The famous Bhanwari Devi case is a good example.
Even the best of laws will have only limited use without a sound prescription for dealing with the social compulsions underlying the illegal choice. Merely attacking a social problem without understanding the reasons for the problem can never eradicate social ills. To attribute the phenomenon of child marriage merely to the hold of “patriarchal norms” is to have a very limited and short-sighted view of the situation.
Let me illustrate this by the dramatic changes I witnessed in the lives of a community of “low caste” Tamil migrants in Delhi, among whom there was no tradition of child marriage till a generation ago. My friend Jaya began working as part-time domestic help in half a dozen middle-class houses in south Delhi when her impoverished landless poor family migrated from a village in Tamil Nadu to Delhi in early 1980s. As is commonly the case, her family set up a small “illegal” jhuggi on railway land along with nearly 300 other families of the region from which Jaya hailed. While the women all took to working as domestic maids and got regular work, most of the men got only intermittent daily wage labour or menial jobs such as rickshaw pulling, which they did intermittently. Since the entire basti was illegal, a section of the men had to perforce to learn to cultivate the police and other government agencies whose officials made them conduits for collecting monthly bribes on their behalf. With enforced idleness for many young men, along with contacts with criminal elements in the police came many anti-social activities such as peddling drugs, manufacturing illicit liquor, prostitution, and petty crime.
The increasing hold of anti-social elements in the basti meant greater insecurity for women and girls. Consequently, while many of the little boys were sent to school, almost all the girls were kept at home. Their mothers felt they were safer under their vigilant eye all day. The only way domestic workers could watch over their daughters was to take them along from house to house. Therefore, these little girls then began helping their mothers with cleaning utensils and mopping floors in the houses of their employers – not primarily because their labour was needed but just because, unlike boys, girls could not be left alone in jhuggis.
The anxiety about female safety is so high that, even in the boiling hot summer months, women and girls sleep inside ill-ventilated jhuggis with the doors firmly shut while men sleep out in the open – all because there had been cases of some young girls and women being abducted or attacked at night when they slept out. The police did not even register a proper case when the bodies of two such females were found in a badly mutilated condition. The popular perception is that the local police was behind the crime. As a consequence of living under conditions of such insecurity, one witnessed a dramatic fall in the age of marriage within this community. For example, Jaya herself was married at age 21 in her village and her mother at about the same age. However, her daughter Laxmi was married off between 15-16 years of age, not long after she reached puberty, which was celebrated through a beautiful public ritual characteristic of many south Indian communities.
When I protested with Jaya that she was being unfair to her daughter, this is how she explained her decision. “In our basti, infested as it is with criminals and touts who carry influence with the local police, my daughter is not safe and can’t be left alone for a minute. What if she is seduced by someone and ends up pregnant? Where will I go then? Or what if she is raped at night? How will I get her married off then?”
“But can’t these mishaps happen even after marriage?” I asked, “Sure they can” she replied, “but then the responsibility for protecting her falls on her husband. Moreover, a mishap of that kind leading to pregnancy can be easily covered up if the girl is married. But for an unmarried girl, even a small slip will ruin her forever.”
| “One in five women aged 20-24 in India was married before age 15” |
Therefore, when Lakshmi got married at fifteen and a half, I undoubtedly felt sorry for her but I had no urge to report the marriage to the police and get it stopped by getting Jaya and her husband arrested for the crime of child marriage, given their experience of the police who in their eyes are more dangerous than ordinary criminals. In all likelihood, the police would have locked them up for a few days, then released them on bail after taking a hefty bribe. Jaya’s family would have then spent years and all their savings on bribes fighting the slow-moving legal case against them.
These are telling examples of how increasing violence and insecurity is making the lives of women more vulnerable and, therefore, making families feel that bringing up daughters is a high-risk job. This is in large part due to the increasing lawlessness of the police and other arms of the government as well as the large-scale criminalisation of politics.
Remote villages where the police rarely, if ever, make its presence felt have much lower crime rates. But the closer a village to a police station and other institutions of government as, for example, a zilla parishad office or a district court, the higher the level of insecurity and crime. Just as it is often difficult for Jaya’s family and community to exercise restraint over anti-social elements because of the criminals’ frequent connections with and patronage of the police, so also in villages families with one or more sons in politics or government jobs, especially in the police, come to acquire tyrannical hold over the lives of others. This power is often reflected in increased sexual assaults against women.
What are the other factors rural communities cite for marrying their children young?
- Since the village economy does not provide year-round subsistence for those working in the farm sector, a good proportion of young men have to leave the village to find work outside at a very early age. If they are sent out without marriage, there is no saying who they will end up living with and marrying within the city. If such a marriage is not within jati and biradari, there is far less chance of sons taking care of their parents in old age.
- As boys get more educated, their chances of getting better-paying jobs increases. Such grooms command heavy dowries because they are scarce. Therefore, it is better to catch them young with smaller dowries.
-
“Only one out of a hundred girls in rural India reaches grade 12” In most villages, educational opportunities for girls are far more limited beyond primary classes while more boys continue with education even if the school is far away. Sending girls to distant schools is risky. Employment opportunities for girls are even more limited. Therefore, there is very little for them to do except wait for marriage. The sooner she reaches her ultimate destination in her husband’s family the better.
- It is almost impossible to set young people to abstain from sex once they attain puberty. Sexual activity before marriage is even riskier for women as it may result in pregnancy. If the man who got her pregnant disowns responsibility, she will find it much harder to gain acceptance in another family.
- We also need to understand the difference between a betrothal ceremony and a consummated marriage. In what are called child marriages whereby small children are married off all that takes place is an engagement type ceremony. The girl child thereafter usually returns to her parental home. She is sent to her husband’s house in most communities only when she is around 15 in a ceremony called gauna. The strategy for putting an end to child marriage has to be different from that dealing with marriages of girls between 14-18 years. Unfortunately, campaigners against child marriage seldom distinguish between the two age groups, or between betrothal and marriage.
In India marriage age has risen dramatically among communities which have easy access to educational opportunities for boys and girls, and in those who can provide secure homes, a relatively safe social and educational environment, and have access to skills that lead to well-paying jobs for their daughters. People in such communities have opted to marry their children late without the use of punitive laws. Moreover, Child marriage campaigners seldom distinguish between betrothal and marriage. Today, mainly those vulnerable rural communities who live in poverty practice child marriages. The moment a section of that jati rises in income and educational level and acquires a middle-class status and the social security that goes with it, anxiety level about the safety of girls is not so acute. That is when child marriages cease to take place without sermonising and without recourse to coercive measures.
The speed with which marriage age rose among families in my own community indicates how greater security is the primary instrument for achieving this end. Before the Partition, my mother’s family lived in Peshawar, which is a frontier zone in the turbulent North-Western Provinces of what is now Pakistan. So unsafe was the atmosphere at that time that city gates used to be shut in the evening and even men rarely ventured out at night. The tonga in which my mother went to school used to be covered with a thick sheet so that no one could see the girls inside. This despite the fact that my grandparents were very liberal and believed in women’s freedom. Had they stayed in Peshawar my mother and aunts would have lived very restricted lives and married relatively early. Partition undoubtedly brought about great dangers, economic hardship and the trauma associated with violent uprootment. After reaching Delhi as refugees, they were at first allotted a refugee accommodation in a conservative Muslim dominated area of old Delhi. Despite this, the lives of all the women changed within months. My aunts began going to school and college on bicycles. They would go for shopping sprees and evening film shows without any male escort. The thick chador like dupatta gave way to fashionable and lacy chunris. All of them got an education and married in their mid or late 20’s and one of them in her 30’s. All this because the Delhi of those days was a much safer city.
We would also do well to realize that the notion of marriage below the age of 18 is wrong and illegal is a fairly new one in the history of humanity. The world over young people being married off in their teens was fairly common. While we don’t hesitate to let the police crack its whip on families that marry off their teenaged daughters, we would be amazed at any aggressive intervention by the police to control pre-marital teenage sex in America or Europe where early marriages may not be common but pre-marital teenage sex is fairly rampant. From the point of view of many in India, if teenage sex is okay, why not teenage marriage?
For many Indians marriage at 16 is far preferable to premarital sex at 16, just as for most Americans or Europeans, premarital teenage sex has today become a normal expectation but marriage at 16 is seen as a sign of “cultural backwardness”, especially if it happens in a third world country. We think nothing of passing a law giving the police the right to arrest those who marry their daughter at 16 but would never dare suggest that police lock up all those parents whose teenage daughters indulge in sex.
Personally, I am strongly opposed to child or early marriages even if it could be shown that a large number of them result in happy conjugality. The reason is simple. Such arrangements rob all agencies from the persons concerned and foreclose all options for the future. We would also do well to remember that child and early marriages don’t just go against the interests of females. They also affect the lives of men adversely because by getting chained to domestic burdens and responsibilities at such an early age, they too lose out on many opportunities and freedoms. No doubt the impact on women’s lives is far more severe. But if we don’t also take account of their negative impact on men’s lives we turn it into a simple case of gender conflict. More is actually at stake. Healthy societies are those that provide ever-expanding horizons of freedom for both men and women. The point of viewing through the eyes of the community that practices it, child marriage is not to offer a justification for early marriages but to underscore the need to view with empathy the problems and dilemmas of those whose social more and customs we wish to “reform” so that we can make them partners in finding effective solutions and viable alternatives.
Authoritarian measures and draconian laws produce results far different from those intended and create new and bizarre problems if people are not convinced of their intrinsic worth. China’s one-child policy is a good example of that. Unlike the Indian state, the Chinese state means business when it enacts laws. Therefore, it enforces them with an iron hand. The strict and brutal enforcement of the “one-child norm” in a culture where son-preference is deep-rooted led to large-scale female infanticide and consequently an even more skewed sex ratio.