Herald View: laws against ‘love’ are silly and a step closer towards an ethnic state 

There is a thin line between laws which regulate and laws which are used for oppression. Both are enforced in ‘public interest’ and ‘public morality’ and now increasingly in the interest of ‘national security’ and ‘social cohesion’. Everywhere Governments have used laws to empower the state and increasingly to disempower the citizen. The draft ordinance cleared by the Uttar Pradesh Government and similar legislations threatened by several BJP-ruled states against so-called ‘Love Jihad’ is a case in point. Not satisfied with existing provisions against forced religious conversion, cheating etc., which arguably have worked as well as any other law, the Governments now want to arm themselves with an additional weapon to encroach upon civil and individual liberty. Under the draft ordinance in Uttar Pradesh, an adult who wants to convert in order to marry, has to give an advance notice to a magistrate. The draft also expressly prohibits women from converting.

Not surprisingly, the UP Government and other BJP-ruled states have shown little inclination to find out empirical evidence, consult experts and conduct independent surveys about the urgency and indeed the number of such conversions. The draft also assumes that the state and society know what is best for individuals and that adult citizens have no mind of their own. No evidence has been cited to prove that forced conversions for marriage are more than a handful or is becoming the norm than the exception. Nor has the Government taken into account the report of the National Investigation Agency (NIA), which was infamously tasked by the Supreme Court to enquire into a possible Islamist conspiracy into the Hadiya case. The young woman from Kerala, it is worth recalling, had converted to Islam and married a man of her choice. But the Kerala High Court and then the Supreme Court accepted the plea of her parents and handed her back to her parents. The NIA, which submitted its report in 2018 to the Supreme Court, failed to unearth any Islamist conspiracy and the Supreme Court was forced to declare the marriage to be valid. Interfaith marriages have been frowned upon by patriarchal societies which traditionally accept aberrations like adultery, philandering or even marital rape by men. Nor do such societies have a problem with the men marrying women from other faiths. What the proposed legislations plan to do is to make India an ethnic state like Israel, a Hindu Rashtra, where mixed marriages would be impossible.

No other country in the world enacts laws with such casual abandon as India. A handful of ‘men’ decide, draft and approve legislations without any public debate, discussion or indeed consultation. Increasingly, Parliament and state legislatures have abdicated, or have been forced to abdicate, their responsibility to scrutinize legislations, suggest improvement or raise objections. They have allowed the executive branch in its wisdom to make laws for the country. The judiciary has colluded with the executive in turning India into a maze of laws which are incomprehensible to the common man. Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who had solemnly asserted in 2014 that India had too many laws and that antiquated laws would be thrown out, has allowed a proliferation of new laws, which are as little understood as the old ones.

We have far too many laws still in the statute books, which were first enacted in colonial times and are a century old. Almost nobody understands the laws and legal illiteracy is high. There is little wonder that in this black hole, laws should become weapons.