Violence on interfaith couple in Bhopal court calls into question provisions of Special Marriage Act (original) (raw)

According to police officials, right-wing groups descended on the court premises after being tipped off by “sources” about the couple deciding to register their marriage. (Video screengrab)

Feb 12, 2025 10:16 IST First published on: Feb 12, 2025 at 10:16 IST

February, often seen as the month of love, commenced on a sad note this year. A law-abiding couple had to pay a big cost at a seat of justice for trying to legally solemnise their love. While gift arcades are overflowing with material manifestations of love, two adult citizens had their lives in jeopardy merely because they chose to follow the legal prescription — registering their marriage. This couple from Bhopal had approached a local court in the city to notify their intention to marry as per the requirements of the Special Marriage Act, 1954. But their stepping stone to a life of togetherness was ruthlessly interrupted by a group of vigilantes who stormed into the court complex and beat the male partner up. The visuals of the incident were captured on a CCTV camera and became viral through social media.

All this, because this was an interfaith couple — a Muslim man and a Hindu woman. The irony of the situation is that the law which brought them to the court on that fateful day was enacted to enable interfaith couples to marry lawfully. Unfortunately, seven decades since it came into force, instead of safeguarding the rights of interfaith couples, the requisites of this law have emerged as the cause of harm.

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The clampdown on interfaith couples is no longer novel in the contemporary context. Mired in the blanket term, “love jihad”, almost every Muslim-Hindu marriage is assumed to be an act of religious coercion or indoctrination. Self-declared vanguards of religion, routinely infantilise consenting adults. While violence often accompanies such interventions, the visuals from Bhopal tragically remind us that neither the bounds of the court nor the law of the land offer any shelter from the wrath of the moral police. It also calls to question the provisions of the Special Marriage Act.

The Statement of Objects and Reason of the Act lays down that the core principle behind the enactment of the law was to decolonise the old law on marriage and enable couples who may have married under varied customs of India to receive legal certification under a secular law. In the aftermath of Partition, this was indeed an enabling act which empowered love to transcend religious barriers. The Act facilitated any man above the age of 21 years and any woman above the age of 18 years, who don’t have any other living spouses and are capable of consenting to marriage, to legally solemnise their marriage. But, this Act demands a peculiar formality: The intending couples must give notice to their relevant marriage registrar a month before their desired date of marriage and within this period, anyone can raise objections to the marriage. While the caveats to such notice must be grounded on either partner’s ineligibility to marry, the danger this publicly accessible notice brews is that the couple’s privacy gets severely compromised. As in the current case, whoever wishes to cause backlash need not even raise a lawful objection. They may choose any mode of disruption, as in the current case, violence, to hinder the marriage. The Act licenses any objection – it could even be personal vendetta, vested interest or as in this case, social bias.

In the current case, a “tip” – effectively a leak of the couple’s personal data from the marriage registrar’s office to the vigilante group — led to the horrific incident. In the landmark judgment of Justice K.S Puttaswamy vs. Union of India, the Supreme Court had ordained the right to privacy as inalienable to human existence. It stated, “Privacy recognises the ability of individuals to control vital aspects of their lives and safeguards the autonomy exercised by them in decisions of personal intimacies, matters of home and marriage, the sanctity of family life and sexual orientation, all of which are at the core of privacy.”

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Authorities have reportedly said that the woman claimed she was being forced to convert to Islam. That is a breach of her autonomy. And, if conversion was, in fact, a condition of the marriage, then hers was not a qualified consent in the first place. That could also have been a ground of objection. But when both parties willfully notify the intention to marry, other parties have no business to intervene.

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It seems that Section 7 of the Special Marriage Act, which invites objections to a marriage from one and all, is being weaponised in times of religious disharmony among a section of the country.

The writer is outreach lead at Nyaaya, an initiative of Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy