“When two adult people want to live together, what is the offence? Does it amount to an offence? Living together is not an offence. It cannot be an offence.” Thus observed a three-judge Supreme Court bench in 2010.
Fifteen years on, turns out, it is an offence that would invite a six-month jail term — at least in one Indian state.
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On January 27, the government of Uttarakhand, as part of its Uniform Civil Code (UCC), listed out the conditions you would need to fulfil before you can even think of sharing the same address with your “pasandida mard/aurat”. And it is quite a list: A 16-page form, Aadhaar-linked OTP, registration fee, a certificate from a religious leader, and details of previous relationships, to name a few.
Many people who don’t want to marry often say: “I don’t want to get the government involved.” Looks like, you need to get not just the government but a bunch of other entities involved. “I have lost count of my exes,” did you say? Well, time to jog your memory.
“From this moment, every woman of all religions will have the same rights,” Chief Minister Pushkar Singh Dhami stated while rolling out the UCC. And then, the clincher: “We aim to ensure that an Aaftab never commits brutality against our daughters or sisters like Shraddha Walkar.” He was referring to the 2022 case where a man in Delhi allegedly hacked his partner to death, chopped her body into pieces and stored it in a refrigerator before disposing of it.
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In invoking the case, undoubtedly a horrid one, the CM seems to have forgotten about an incident that happened in the capital of his state not too long ago. In 2017, a techie in Dehradun, Uttarakhand’s capital, was sentenced to life imprisonment for murdering a woman, chopping her body into 70 pieces, and storing them in a freezer in 2010. Every now and then, he would dispose of a few body parts in the jungles in the outskirts of Dehradun. The woman was the techie’s wife.
Thus, Dhami’s logic, that registering live-in relationships is in the interest of women, does not hold water — at least if statistics are anything to go by. According to NCRB data, more than 6,000 dowry deaths were reported in India in 2022. All of these took place inside the so-called cocoon of a marriage. Many of these were likely socially approved “arranged marriages”.
What does this data say? Domestic violence is all-pervasive — the nature of the relationship notwithstanding. And, on the face of it, there is little in the UCC that hits at the root cause of intimate-partner violence. In fact, it seems like a veiled exercise at policing consenting partners. Particularly interfaith and inter-caste unions: Which religious leader would approve of “living in sin”?
The assumption that everyone who is living together wants to end up married is outdated. What if one has had a sour marriage in the past and is now looking for a plain and simple, more importantly uncomplicated, lifelong partnership?
All the talk about protecting women is fine but what about protecting their agency? Their choice? This might come as a surprise, but not all women are kicked about getting married. And live-in relationships are not always a ploy devised by “commitment-phobic” men who want to “get what they want” without the responsibility of marriage.
And how will one define what constitutes a live-in relationship? How will platonic friends who are flatmates convince you that their arrangement is not, in fact, a live-in situation? What about couples who have lived together for decades, have had children, built a home together — all without the trappings of a marriage?
The need of the hour is not to police love, infantalise consenting adults, and give sanctimonious religious leaders and pesky landlords more power. Instead, we need to make cohabitation – marriage or live-in – safer for women.
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Instead of trying to look for live-in couples, we need to focus on abuse in marriages — something we usually ignore, calling it “miyan-biwi ke aapas ka maamla” (“a couple’s private matter”). We need to start sensitising boys from a young age, many of whom see their mothers beaten up by their fathers, about domestic violence and how they can break the pattern. How they can grow up and not be like their fathers. How the fact that their mothers brought in dowry does not make it okay for them to expect it too.
We need to work towards building a society where women complaining about abuse in marriages and relationships are not dismissed with a “oh, but we don’t know the whole story.” Where police personnel don’t send a woman, who has mustered the courage to report her abusive husband, back to endure more abuse. Where parents, instead of abandoning them for choosing to fall in love, assure their children that they would be there for them if things ever go south.
Maybe then we can avert a situation where an “Aaftab commits brutality against a Shraddha”. Not by making living together an offence. Like the 2010 top court judgement had stated, it is not an offence. It cannot be an offence.
deepika.singh@expressindia.com
