Vows and laws that trap

Every year, around this time when Hindus celebrate Akshay Tritiya, the government gets active trying to stop child marriages. Every year, hundreds of children are married off on this auspicious day, their parents thumbing their noes at the law of the land that bars minors from getting married. Every year there are volunteers, activists and occasional administrative officials running around trying to prevent the nifty nuptials. Then we see photographs of wide-eyed children in wedding garb in the papers the next day.
But this year, the government has reason to be pleased. In several states they have had some success, preventing scores of child marriages, and getting parents and even grandparents to sign bonds promising not to marry off their kids as long as they are minors. In the process, officials have been chased out by angry villagers, beaten up, their cars have been smashed, police stations ransacked and much protest registered. But vigilant volunteers, activists, the police and government officers have dodged the stones and sticks, picked their way through the shattered glass and steaming pots of wedding feasts, and stopped several illegal weddings.
Activists also helped Laxmi, 16, in Rajasthan, who was married at one, to get her marriage annulled on that auspicious day. Happily, her “husband” and in-laws (whom she had never lived with) respected her choice. Elsewhere in Rajasthan, officials stopped the wedding of a sarpanch’s son in Pushkar. Which is great, because powerful village chiefs usually get away, happily flouting laws with the help of local politicians who need to keep their votebanks happy. Not many politicians have the courage of conviction to stand up to customs and tradition.
Unfortunately, just stopping weddings and lecturing the angry poor about laws and the dangers of underage pregnancy cannot be enough. We need to give the underprivileged bound by blind tradition feasible alternatives. As long as girls are seen as a burden, poverty-stricken parents will try to marry them off early, to fulfil their social responsibilities while they can, to give their daughters acceptable male protection and shelter them from social stigma. Pretty often our well-meaning efforts are at best ineffectual, if not counter-productive.
Take the case of Ratnarashi Pandey from Madhya Pradesh, who was married at 14. After eight years of an abusive marriage, she picked up her two children and returned to her parents. Fortunately, she had supportive parents, unlike most girls trapped in an unhappy marriage, and they helped her get an education, and a divorce. After her masters, she took up a job at a local school. It didn’t pay enough, and she dreamt of a bright future for her kids. So she tried for the state civil services examination.
But the state would not allow her. She was disqualified, they said, because she was married as a child. The state that had failed to protect her childhood was now blaming her and punishing her for it. Ratnarashi went to court. She could sit for the exams, ruled the court, but she could not take up the job. Because Rule 6(5), added in 2005 to the MP Civil Services (General Condition of Service) Rules states that one who had married as a minor was not eligible. She challenged the curious law that punishes the victim. The MP high court
dismissed her petition with the lofty declaration that the rule had been inserted to provide an effective deterrent to child marriage, and must remain. Ratnarashi is now challenging this bizarre rule in the Supreme Court.
Well-meaning but mindless rules and laws often end up punishing the victim. Like our dowry laws, where filing a case against dowry harassment could put you in jail for paying dowry in the first place. Which forces victims to avoid going to the police till it is too late — and they go to report the unnatural death of their daughter.
Our laws of suicide are another strange attempt at being cruel hoping to be kind. So if people do manage to save a desperate soul after a suicide attempt, the poor chap is likely to find himself, broken bones and all, in jail for the crime of trying to kill himself. So instead of rehabilitation and support to one who is so depressed that he wishes to die, we punish him further.
And to stop bribery, our laws treat both the bribe-giver and bribe-taker even-handedly as criminals. Even though it is well documented that almost 80 per cent of all reported bribes in India are paid out of compulsion, not real choice. More than half the bribes paid are just to access the delivery of a service we are entitled to. Then there is the bribe as protection fee, and bribing to receive your legitimate payments. A bribe-giver is never on par with a bribe-taker. A bribe-taker can withhold services or endanger lives to force you to bribe him.
A flagrant example of punishing the victim lies in our laws dealing with prostitution. For years the Immoral Traffic (Prevention) Act has been used to exploit and harass prostitutes, further victimising girls who are often forced into the trade. Instead of being treated as victims of trafficking, kidnapping or child rape, they are treated as criminals.
But there is good news. The higher judiciary is not always willing to treat victims of crime as criminals.
Last year, the Supreme Court made two significant rulings that refused to punish victims. In one case, it ruled in favour of decriminalising suicide, pointing out that one who attempts suicide was in desperate need of help, and punishing him/her would be unfair. In another case, it ruled that a woman and her family cannot be treated as an accused under the Dowry Prohibition Act for giving dowry. The woman is a victim and not culpable.
Hopefully, in Ratnarashi’s case, too, the Supreme Court will protect the interest of the victim and help rebuild the brutalised lives of child brides. For child marriage cannot be fought just by spoiling weddings. It needs to be countered by education and a workable promise of a better life for daughters that will convince parents to scramble out of deep-rooted customs. Across northern India, from Rajasthan to Bengal, there has been a new awakening among young girls, both Hindu and Muslim, who are fighting all odds to refuse child marriage and choose education, hoping for dignity and economic independence. We need to think of ways of strengthening their options.

The writer is editor of The Little Magazine. She can be contacted at: sen@littlemag.com [2]