The first uniform civil code in independent India could have been an opportunity to showcase a progressive template for other states. It ought to have restricted itself to marriage, divorce, maintenance, adoption and inheritance—areas governed by personal laws that create discrepancy among citizens. Instead, the state of Uttarakhand has taken on the role of Morality Police by inserting a clause that requires couples cohabitating together to register on an online portal.
There’s a 16-page form, liability on landlords and certification by a religious leader that the couple is eligible to marry should they so desire. It’s an odd requirement for a law that is supposedly secular. Interfaith couples who already find it tough to marry because of existing so-called anti conversion laws in eight states will now find it tough to even live together.
Invoking the 2022 murder of Shradha Walker allegedly by her live-in boyfriend Aaftab Poonawala, chief minister Pushkar Singh Dhami said the live-in clause was to prevent such a crime from taking place again.
Umm, how exactly? Recalling a gruesome murder makes for a strong emotional pitch but the argument about protection is weak, to put it mildly, for several reasons.
Data from around the world, tells us that every 10 minutes a woman or girl is killed not by a stranger but by an intimate partner or male family relative. The biggest threat to our lives comes from within the family.
If the protection of women is the intention of the live-in clause, then Dhami must reveal his plans to protect the 14% of married women in Uttarakhand who reported physical and sexual violence to the National Family Health Survey. Surely they are deserving of protection too.
If the state cannot protect wives from their husbands despite laws against domestic violence and despite the much maligned section 498A, then what powers are they planning to invoke for relationships outside of marriage?
Then there’s this: How are we to define a “live-in relationship”? A second ‘marriage’ without legal annulment of the first is bigamy under law. But it’s a practice that exists across the country. In villages, for instance, it is not uncommon for panchayats to grant a ‘divorce’ that has no legal standing but full social acceptance.
Finally, how will this clause be enforced? Will government officials go door to door to demand proof of marriage? Will neighbours be encouraged to report on live-in couples?
I have argued elsewhere that a uniform civil code is a desirable goal that can bring in far greater gender equity than personal laws allow. For instance, Hindu women won a slew of rights from divorce to a share in parental property that had been denied to them under Hindu law. Similarly, the obnoxious practice of instant triple talaq was brought to an end, first by the Supreme Court and then through legislation. And lest we forget, it was Muslim women through organisations such as the Bhartiya Muslim Mahila Andolan that began the agitation to ban it.
It seems obvious that the true intent of the live-in clause is for the State to control the sexual autonomy of adult women; to make their privacy and their choices very much the business of the State and to criminalise certain categories of love. It take us back to the 2017 Kerala high court judgement that ruled that a 23-year-old Muslim convert woman was incapable of choosing her own spouse. It took a Supreme Court intervention for her to go back to her husband.
In the intervening years, the apex court has stood for privacy and autonomy through landmark judgments from Puttuswamy to Joseph Shine and Navtej Johar.
That era of rights-based judgements is now under threat. On Wednesday, the Rajasthan high court—yes, the same one which has a statue of Manu the Hindu law-giver on its premises—advised the government to frame laws to govern live-in relationships. Surely the hon’ble high court is aware of the slew of judgements that have reiterated that all children, even those born outside marriage, are entitled to rights and that the domestic violence law covers women in live-in relationships.
I’m not aware of any data on the number of live-in relationships, but in a country where 93% of urban respondents said they had had an arranged marriage, I would be surprised if the number of live-in couples is very high.
The spectre of interfaith relationships between men and women is so horrifying that the Maharashtra government in 2022 set up a 13-member committee to collect details of couples in interfaith marriages ostensibly to ensure that “Shraddha Walker case” does not happen again. Three months later, Hindustan Times reported, the committee had not received a single complaint.
Few things scare the status quo in patriarchy as much as the exercise of independent thought and action from women. As girls surge ahead in sport, in education, in aspiration, we are seeing the backlash all over the world from Afghanistan to Iraq and from USA to India.
Uttarakhand’s live-in clause must be challenged in the courts. It sets a dangerous precedent where the State takes on Big Brother powers of over women’s right to dignity and privacy. Who I choose to live with or marry must remain my choice alone.
Namita Bhandare writes on gender.The views expressed are personal
