Namita Bhandare

There is a clear link between keeping girls in school and delaying marriage. Raising the minimum age of marriage for girls to 21 is not a solution

We are in danger of losing this gain due to the pandemic. As this newspaper reported, 166,000 students, girls and boys, in Delhi government and municipal schools have fallen off the grid as a result of education moving online. One can only speculate on how many will eventually return to school, and whether some have already joined the labour force or been married off. (Santosh Kumar/HT)

Growing up in a village in Rajasthan’s Ajmer district, Kamini (not her real name) dreamed of joining the police. But the daughter of a daily wage labourer had to drop out after completing the eighth grade — the high school was too far away and, moreover, she had to do the household chores.

Growing up in a village in Rajasthan’s Ajmer district, Kamini (not her real name) dreamed of joining the police. But the daughter of a daily-wage labourer had to drop out after completing Class 8 — the high school was too far away and, moreover, she had to do the household chores.

An intervention by Educate Girls, a non-governmental organisation, led her to rejoin school, eventually reaching the 12th grade. Then the pandemic hit. Schools were shut, exams postponed and links with the outside world snapped.

When the dust had cleared, Naresh, a social worker who uses one name, took a headcount. Three girls, including the 17-year-old Kamini, had gone missing. Like many girls in their village, they had been married off as children. But custom dictated that their gauna — when they would join their matrimonial homes — would take place years later. Now, they had been abruptly dispatched.

An unholy trinity of the pandemic, poverty and patriarchy has led to a surge in child marriage, say activists.

India is home to the world’s largest number of child brides with 1.5 billion girls below 18 being married, according to Unicef. Until the pandemic hit, we had been making progress. Thanks largely to rising school enrolment of girls, under-18 marriages had come down from 47% in 2005-06 to 27% in 2015-16. There is a link between keeping girls in school and delaying marriage. “When a girl is sitting at home, the whole village says ‘get her married’,” one girl in her first year of college told me.

We are in danger of losing this gain due to the pandemic. As this newspaper reported, 166,000 students, girls and boys, in Delhi government and municipal schools have fallen off the grid as a result of education moving online. One can only speculate on how many will eventually return to school, and whether some have already joined the labour force or been married off.

Given the unusual disruption, a government proposal to raise the minimum age of marriage for women to 21 is mistimed and misplaced. The priority is not to tinker with a globally acceptable age for marriage and the age of adulthood for most matters, including voting, in this country but to figure out how to keep girls in school.

If the issue is removing gender discrimination, then reduce the minimum age of marriage for men to 18.

Raising the age from 18 to 21 for women, fears lawyer Madhu Mehra, will extend parental control in a country where “love” marriages are frowned upon. “A high number of elopement cases are prosecuted by families. If you increase the age, our courts will be clogged and the harm to young people will be enormous,” she warns.

Child and adolescent marriage is a consequence of girls dropping out of school, not a cause. One way to delay marriage is to get girls to remain in school. Enable dreams and aspirations, and the problem of child marriage will take care of itself.

Namita Bhandare writes on gender

The views expressed are personal

Seldom has the State’s concern to protect one half of its citizens been so high

So many laws, still no solution. Perhaps because there’s a contradiction here. The contradiction in wanting to protect women but within the decorous folds of patriarchy (Hindustan Times)

Seldom has the State’s concern to protect one half of its citizens been so high. In Andhra Pradesh, a Disha law. In Maharashtra, a Shakti Bill. And “love jihad” ordinances in three states. All in the name of protecting women.

We should be so reassured. But even as Madhya Pradesh chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan was launching a “samman” (respect) programme, explaining how employed women can register at the local thana so that they can be tracked for their own safety, came news of nine men raping a 13-year-old multiple times over a span of a couple of days in Umaria.

India’s endemic rape problem is a matter of concern. Laws passed since 2013 have not flatlined the graph. In nine states, the number of young women who faced sexual violence as children has gone up, finds the latest round of the National Family Health Survey.

Now, Maharashtra’s stringent Shakti Bill, based on Andhra Pradesh’s Disha law, expands the death sentence for rape, but also dilutes the standards of consent, making rape more difficult to prove in courts. An outcry by women activists has led to a review.

So many laws, still no solution. Perhaps because there’s a contradiction here. The contradiction in wanting to protect women but within the decorous folds of patriarchy. We will keep women “safe” as long as they are bound by family structures, even though data on domestic violence and sexual abuse tells us the family is not the safest place.

In Uttar Pradesh (UP), the police have announced they will use artificial intelligence to spot women in “distress”. How is distress defined? How this will work is yet to be revealed. What we do know is that UP subscribes to the idea of the helpless Hindu woman duped by the scheming Muslim man. This is the bedrock of its “love jihad” law that robs adult women of autonomy, an autonomy that the Allahabad High Court and some other courts still defend.

Safety means empowering all women — single, divorced, rebellious — to live as equal citizens. It means respecting women’s choices. Rape stems from male entitlement and the idea that a woman’s consent doesn’t count. You cannot solve it with laws that spring from the same patriarchal mindset.

This mindset is not limited to our legislators. The chief justice of our highest court wants women to stay away from protests, as if we have not been an integral part of movements from Independence and Chipko onwards.

The head of the National Commission of Women (NCW) meets the Maharashtra governor to discuss “love jihad”, even though NCW has no evidence of it. One of its members says a rape and murder in Badaun could have been avoided if the 50-year-old anganwadi worker had not ventured out alone in the evening. Clearly, we are looking at the wrong solutions. A good start is a new vocabulary. Reduce words like “protection” and “respect”. Embrace a more affirmative language of empowerment, independence, rights.

Namita Bhandare writes on gender

The views expressed are personal