In holding that the legal age of marriage is the same for all citizens irrespective of religion and that the Muslim Personal Law, or Shariah, cannot override civil statutes such as the Prohibition of Child Marriage Act and the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act, the Allahabad High Court has done a good turn for young girls in Uttar Pradesh.
The HC underscored this while dismissing a writ petition by 19 people seeking to quash an FIR that named them in a case of assaulting the police and Childline rescue officials when they sought to stop the marriage of a 16-year-old Muslim girl in Bulandshahr. The case points to all that is wide of the mark about child marriages—specifically child brides—in India.
Child Marriage Still A Concern
India not only has the world's largest number of child brides but is also home to one in every three of the world's child brides. Uttar Pradesh, unsurprisingly, has the largest number, across religions. The state, along with Bihar, West Bengal, Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh, has over half of India's girls and women who married in childhood, according to UNICEF.
While the overall rate of child marriages has been falling over the past few decades, child marriage is still a cause for grave concern. It adversely impacts the health and well-being of young women as mothers and their babies and denies them educational and work opportunities that facilitate their autonomy.
It must be noted that religion has less of a role to play in the detestable phenomenon than the socio-economic standing of the family and other factors, according to India's own National Family Health Survey-5. It showed that while rates are declining across all communities, the incidence of marriage under the age of 14 is more prevalent among Hindus, while the incidence of marriage between the ages of 15 and 18 is more prevalent among Muslims.
There is no room here for exultation or self-congratulation by Hindutva fanatics that the Allahabad HC showed Muslims their place. The judges underscored the point, applicable to all, that personal law cannot supersede the country's civil law.
Debate On Personal Law
In a sense, the HC circled back to a debate that had ignited Indians, largely Hindus, when, in 1891, the British administration introduced the Age of Consent Bill, which raised the age of consent for sexual intercourse (read marriage) from the prevailing age of 10 to 12 for girls. The crux of the controversy was that no civil administration, that too a foreign one, could interfere with age-old traditions, such as child marriage.
Nearly 115 years later, in 2006, India passed the Prohibition of Child Marriage Act, raising the legal age of marriage to 18 years for girls and 21 years for boys, regardless of religion. This case may reignite the debate on the Uniform Civil Code; that is another debate altogether.
