Opinion: Opinion | Bihar Assault, Hisar Marriage Ban: Who'll Stop The Guardians Of Indian 'Culture'?

This week, a social panchayat in Hisar in Haryana decided that there would be a ban on love marriage in their village. They also declared that people who defy the ban, together with their families, would face a boycott. Apparently, the decision was taken after a few recent instances of young men and women in the village falling in love and getting married. Those who participated in this outrageous move to stifle the civil liberty of young folks said that it was done to “preserve the social fabric” of the village. 

Evidently, the fury against young love not sanctioned by family and society continues unabated. This despite the fact that multiple judgments in the Supreme Court have held all such pronouncements by “khap” gatherings illegal, ruling that they violate Articles 19 and 21 of the Constitution which protect the fundamental rights of individuals, including the right to marry a partner of their choice. 

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In the Haryana village, a person was quoted as saying, “We consider every girl in the village our own daughter.” In other words, the noxious effort to prohibit love marriages is really all about the community's visceral need to control the lives of girls and to ensure that they conform to the standards of purity and morality laid down by its antiquated social customs. Indeed, nothing enrages patriarchy more than to see women and girls exercise a choice, especially a sexual choice, without its express consent. And it usually hits back by punishing them and their bodies, sometimes with murderous consequences.

Coincidentally, this despicable instinct was on full display in two cases of sexual violence against young girls in Bihar and Delhi that took place around the time when the Haryana village issued its vengeful diktat against love marriage. In Bihar's Jamui, a girl and her male friend, both students of Class X, were returning from their coaching class when they were accosted by a group of men. The girl was groped, lifted and dragged and the boy was beaten up. A video of the incident quickly went viral on social media and sparked a tremendous outcry. In the second incident, a 17-year-old girl was gang-raped in a Delhi park earlier this week by three men who separated her from her male companion, threatened her with a gun and a knife, and took turns at sexually assaulting her.

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In both incidents, the assaulters and rapists targeted a young girl who was out with a boy. They seemed to have operated from the belief that the possibility of her being intimately associated with a member of the opposite sex was evidence of her promiscuity, her “bad character”, as it were, and that this automatically gave them the licence to sexually violate her.

This is not to say that women and girls in other situations are not sexually assaulted. They are, and the mind-numbing number of rapes in the country is a testament to that. However, the sight of a young couple seeking a bit of alone time somewhere tends to particularly provoke a certain kind of Indian men - those who are incensed at the idea of a girl making a romantic choice without reference to her family and society. In their twisted, violent little minds, assaulting such a girl probably feels like a double bonanza - they get to slake their own depravity in addition to having the satisfaction of “teaching her a lesson” for daring to be in the company of a male friend.

Interestingly, the video of the Jamui incident appears to have been shot and circulated by one of the assaulters. Did he think that he and his gang would be applauded for what they had done? That they would be praised for upholding morality in public spaces? Garlanded perhaps? After all, politicians in this country are known to have done precisely that to welcome rapists out on bail or those accused of lynching and murder.

A Bihar minister did, in fact, dismiss the Jamui assault as a “chhutput” (insignificant and stray) incident. Though the state government is scrambling to do damage control now, and most of the culprits have been apprehended, the point is that the enabling culture of impunity, the insidious suggestion that society has the right to surveil the private lives of couples, and men have the right to police women's bodies and their morals, continue to embolden would-be aggressors.

And it is not just a dangerously regressive khap pronouncement from the country's hinterland that fuels and sustains such authoritarian sentiments. Witness the provisions of the Uniform Civil Code legislation implemented by states such as Uttarakhand and Madhya Pradesh. They make it mandatory for live-in couples to register themselves with the police, failing which they face imprisonment. It is as if the state is of the view that the status of live-in couples is so dubious, so close to being unlawful, that they need to be watched and tracked at all times.

Love is not a crime. It can manifest in myriad forms - traditional, non-traditional, binary, non-binary, within the bounds of wedlock or without, inter-faith, intra-caste … It can bloom in the young, and it can light up the old. No society or state should arrogate to itself the power to decide what sort of love is kosher and what is not. Let us stop trying to legislate love in the name of custom and tradition and morality. It is a recipe for more hate-filled crimes against women, and no modern, forward-looking society should want to go down that path.

(Shuma Raha writes on gender and culture and is the author most recently of the novel, ‘The Sea Has the Answers')