As Thailand becomes the third Asian nation to legalise same-sex marriage – pending senate and royal endorsement – it’s an occasion to examine the lengthening distance India has to cover. Basic individual freedoms to love and marry as we like are now being begrudged by political and legal establishments. Family law is being weaponised, to curb rather than guarantee liberty. Homosexuality was decriminalised six years ago. But last year, SC refused to extend the Special Marriage Act to all citizens, irrespective of their sexual orientation. GOI invoked ‘the Indian family unit’. But marriage equality petitioners were not seeking religious or social validation – only recognition of legal coupledom.That’s not all. India remains a shameful exception among democracies for refusing to criminalise marital rape, unless spouses are separated or the wife is a minor. We have civil remedies, but refuse to see the crime for what it is. All women, whatever their circumstances or personalities, are sole owners of their own bodies, and are rights-bearing citizens.
Marriage does not make consent irrelevant. The stubborn patriarchal reflex is that a man is entitled to his wife’s body, that marriage can be a torture chamber but remains his private dominion, and that the harm of rape is ‘shame’ and ‘dishonour’ rather than assault. And this gut-feeling in our institutions is the only reason that situation persists.
This refusal to see women as humans with wills and desires of their own, but as the property of family and community, has taken on frightening new forms. Even abortion is now being cast differently by our courts, with arguments about the ‘right of the foetus’ making their way into the discourse. The Special Marriage Act, our civil family law that allows “any two persons” to marry independent of religious personal laws, has been made onerous with public notifications and procedural roadblocks that allow families and vigilantes to raise a ruckus. Interfaith marriage has been made practically impossible in states like UP, cast as ‘unlawful conversion’. Basic questions of fairness in marriage and divorce are being distorted to single out and criminalise Muslim men.
The right over one’s own body, romantic partnerships, and family arrangements is the most basic of rights. The state’s looming shadow on the intimate lives of Indians is one of India’s great, and continuing, tragedies.
This piece appeared as an editorial opinion in the print edition of The Times of India.
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