The battle against child marriage Premium

Assam cracks down on child marriage, but activists and health workers seek an all-round approach from education of girls to awareness campaigns to stop the practice

Relatives of two persons who were arrested as part of the crackdown against child marriage break down outside a police station in Morigaon district of Assam. | Photo Credit: Ritu Raj Konwar

For the first time in more than two decades, a police team from the Ulukunchi outpost came asking questions at Birsingi, a village in Assam’s West Karbi Anglong district. The visit on February 4 made the hill-dwelling Tiwa tribal people analyse gobhiya thaka, a kind of live-in relationship a few of them still practise.

Birsingi is about 110 km east of Guwahati. “The police came with records of teenage pregnancy and delivery from the Umpanai health sub-centre nearby. It made us think seriously about our practice and when a girl child is old enough to choose to live with her partner,” Dilip Timung, a village elder, said. The police inquiry pertained to a non-local teenage girl who had come to stay with a relative during childbirth.

In adjoining Morigaon district’s Kasakhila village, aerially 60 km northwest of Birsingi, 17-year-old Mamoni Biswas (name changed) wished she had listened to her parents to wait till her Class 12 exams to be with her boyfriend Prasenjit Mandal. About nine months ago, she skipped school near her village and walked 3 km to daily-wager Prasenjit’s house. They were later married at a local temple.

On February 3, the police picked up 23-year-old Prasenjit leaving a pregnant Mamoni distraught and her mother-in-law worried about her son’s future. “I still don’t understand why my son has been arrested for marrying the girl he loves,” she said.

At No. 2 Kosutoli in Morigaon district, almost equidistant from Birsingi and Kasakhila, Hafiz Mujibur Rahman has become the most hated person overnight. The local kazi or civil judge following the Muslim personal law, he has been absconding since the Assam Police launched the crackdown against child marriage on February 3.

“My brother, Badrul Hasan, was arrested five days ago because the kazi erred ... registered his wife’s age wrongly. And he took ₹7,000 for the nikaah to put us in trouble,” Monjul Hasan, a commercial vehicle driver, said.

A woman (face blurred) waits outside a police station. | Photo Credit: Ritu Raj Konwar

The 22-year-old Badrul, also a driver, had eloped with the girl he loved almost a year ago. His family got in touch with the girl’s parents in the neighbouring Samatapathar village, traced the runaway couple and made the girl return home as she was a couple of months shy of turning 18 years old. The two were reunited after she was 15 days past the official age of adulthood. “But the kazi not only got her name wrong, he put a wrong birth date that made her a minor by two days. He has fudged dates of a few others in the village too. If the police don’t get him, we will,” Monjul said.

The police arrested 17 men from No. 2 Kosutoli and Samatapathar. They included the husbands of minor girls and their fathers.

Planned exercise

Announcing the crackdown on February 2, Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma said the police had collected data for three years from 2020 and registered 4,074 cases across the State. He said the drive against child marriages since 2022 was demonstrative, indicating that the offenders could be released on bail soon.

Assam’s Director-General of Police, Gyanendra Pratap Singh, said the exercise was planned after the Chief Minister sought action against large-scale child marriages two months ago. Singh said the shake-up was bound to have some social cost, but the State government has directed the District Magistrates and the Social Welfare Department to take care of girls married off at a young age with some of them already having given birth.

Till February 9, the police had arrested 2,763 persons, 58 of them from within the urban limits of Guwahati. More than 80 of the arrested for abetment were women. The Chief Minister cited the National Family Health Survey-5 report for 2019-21 to justify the drive against child marriage. The report said in India, 23.3% of women aged 20-24 years were married before the age of 18, a drop from 27% in 2015-16. While West Bengal, Bihar and Tripura topped the list with 40% of such cases, Assam clocked 31.8%.

Seeking the cooperation of the people in “controlling this harmful trend”, the Chief Minister said the fight against the “social crime” of child marriage would continue till the 2026 Assembly election. “Teenage pregnancy accounted for 16.8% of more than 6.2 lakh pregnancies in Assam in 2022. We have to continue the drive until the objective is fulfilled,” he said.

In Kamrup district’s Pub Naitor village, about 115 km west of No. 2 Kosutoli, village defence party (VDP) member Taijuddin Sheikh had his second brush with the law when the police arrested his elder brother, Tajmohal Hoque, after not finding the latter’s son, Jubbar, at home. Jubbar was arrested on February 3 under Sections 6 (sexual assault) and 17 (punishment for abetment) of the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act, 2012, read with relevant sections of the Prevention of Child Marriage (PCMA) Act, 2006 for marrying a 17-year-old girl four months ago.

“We erred in not checking documents when the girl’s parents said she was a praptabayashka (adult). We should have learnt a lesson when a neighbour dragged me to court in 2021 for marrying off our allegedly minor niece, whose documents convinced the judge that she was not a minor,” Taijuddin, a farmer, said.

Many in Pub Naitor protested when the police arrested Tajmohal and two others in separate cases. The murmurs began dying down when the villagers learned “we were not the only ones at the receiving end”. The situation has been similar further west in Dhubri, a district often equated with alleged “illegal immigration” from adjoining Bangladesh because of a Muslim population of 79.67% (Census 2011). “We arrested 182 people from February 3-9, and there has been no law and order issue after the initial outburst. In fact, the people are now informing us about child marriages in their areas and cases are being registered accordingly,” Dhubri’s Superintendent of Police, Aparna Natarajan, said.

Detained in transit camps

All those arrested in Dhubri and elsewhere in the Brahmaputra Valley have been sent to judicial custody at the Matia transit camp in Goalpara which was set up for housing up to 3,000 people declared foreigners by designated courts. In southern Assam’s Barak Valley, the premises of the National Automotive Testing and R&D Infrastructure Project have been turned into a temporary prison for child marriage offenders.

The Chief Minister slammed leaders such as All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen (AIMIM) chief Asaduddin Owaisi for “looking at the drive through religious lens” and calling it anti-Muslim. He cited the arrests of Hindu priests to drive home his point.

“Truth should be told; you cannot help it when such cases are more among Muslims. Since January 2017, when we took a resolution to make awareness against child marriage at all meetings, we have stopped 3,631 child marriages with the help of the local authorities. We have also put kazis behind bars and taken action against one of our leaders accused of indulging in child marriage,” Minnatul Islam, general secretary of the All Assam Minority Students’ Union, said.

‘Execution should have been better’

Rejaul Karim Sarkar, the union’s president, said members of the organisation have endured attacks and abuses for trying to campaign against child marriages and stop them. “This is a much-needed drive but the execution could have been better with a plan in place, ensuring girls under 18 years are not considered a burden for the poor. Many are clueless about laws of any kind,” he said. He also said the move would have been more effective had action been taken against police and other departmental officials in areas where child marriages are reported. “Otherwise, the exercise may boomerang and be prone to politicisation,” he said.

Aminul Islam, general secretary of the minority-based All India United Democratic Front, insisted they have not been politicising or communalising the drive. “We want child marriages to stop, but the action with retrospective effect is affecting lives. One also has to remember rules to implement the PCMA have not been framed in Assam,” he said.

Questions have also been raised over categorising the girls married off into two groups — below 14 years and from 14-18 years for booking the people involved under the POCSO Act and the PCMA respectively. “As we understand, no such categorisation is possible under POCSO, especially after the Supreme Court’s judgment of October 2017 upholding every girl’s right to bodily dignity and ruling that sexual intercourse by a man with his wife, who is below 18 years, is rape,” Rafiqul Islam of the Barpeta-based Campaign Against Child Marriage said. The court read down Exception 2 to Section 375 (rape) of the Indian Penal Code, which allowed the husband of a girl child between 15 and 18 years of age to have non-consensual sex with her.

Legal experts are raising questions about how the court would interpret the implementation, particularly in the case of Muslims who follow the Muslim Personal Law (Shariat) Application Act of 1937 and the Assam Moslem Marriages and Divorces Registration Act of 1935, which do not bar girls under 18 years from getting married.

“There may be no complications for Hindus, Christians and people of other faiths as far as PCMA is concerned. The PCMA is not a settled law and is subject to interpretation by the court in the case of Muslims for whom the personal law is applicable. What if a boy arrested under PCMA goes to court saying as a Muslim, he is an adult under the Shariat law to marry? The court’s view would be interesting since we do not have a uniform civil code,” Fazluzzaman Mazumder, a Gauhati High Court lawyer, said. He suggested high-level discussions involving legal experts for a feasible solution. The Supreme Court is slated to examine whether girls as young as 15 can enter into wedlock if their personal law allows it but is an offence in statutory law. In India, the legal age for marriage is 18 years for women and 21 years for men. A parliamentary standing committee is also deliberating on the Prohibition of Child Marriage (Amendment) Bill, 2021 which sought to amend the PCMA to increase the minimum age of marriage for women from 18 to 21 years.

Stopping child marriage

Rafiqul Islam said child marriage is prevalent among many communities in Assam but is higher among the predominantly Muslim dwellers of the chars (shifting sandbars in the Brahmaputra) and the Adivasi tea plantation workers divided into Hindus and Christians.

“Our sustained efforts to advise people against child marriage for more than a decade may have stopped social ceremonies, but led to formalities indoors, often disguised as family get-togethers. What we wanted for years found a shortcut through the Chief Minister but the hard approach should go alongside softer measures such as ensuring livelihood and the Right to Education from Class 8 to Class 12 so that girls are not forced to drop out of schools,” he said.

Binod Deka, a social worker based in Morigaon district’s Mayong, agreed. “I think people will take us more seriously now,” he said.

Convincing tea plantation workers has been an uphill task, admitted Mansuk Sankharika, publicity secretary of the Baksa district unit of the All-Adivasi Students Association of Assam. “Earlier, the police did not act upon complaints. Things seem to have changed after a 16-year-old pregnant girl was taken to a shelter home and the parents of her absconding husband, living in the Fatehabad Tea Estate, were jailed. Hopefully, the fear factor would help us do our awareness programmes with more authority,” he said.

Child rights activists said the crackdown did not happen in a day although the initial mass outrage could not have been avoided given the scale of the social malaise and the sudden impact on lives. They point to the Arundhati scheme the Assam government had launched in 2020 entailing 1 tola (11.66 grams) of gold to brides belonging to all communities provided they have attained the legal age of 18 years through verification of birth certificate and medical examination, and their marriage is registered. The scheme was for people with an annual income of below ₹5 lakh.

“The drive has without doubt set accountability to the law but child marriage does not happen only because the law does not respond to you. There have been cases of 70-year-old men marrying minors but it is important to note that the reason behind child marriage in most cases is romantic relationships that families often do not accept for fear of earning social shame. There should be conversations around the causes of child marriage and effects of the action against it with communities, which can go a long way in minimising public outcry,” Miguel Das Queah, child rights activist and founder of Universal Team for Social Action and Help, said.

Sunita Changkakati, Chairperson of the Assam State Commission for Protection of Child Rights, blamed most of the recent cases on access to mobile phones for online learning during the COVID-19 lockdown. Child marriage cases increased with boys and girls first meeting on social media platforms.

“A strong message needed to be sent but the scenario is worse than the data the police are armed with because many cases of child marriage go unreported and there is also the issue of teenage abortions. The crackdown would not have been necessary had the stakeholders – the district child protection officer under the Social Welfare Department, police, doctors, health workers, panchayat leaders, village headmen and public representatives – worked in coordination. A system taken for granted has been jolted; we need to sustain it through coordination,” she said.