Why Maharashtra’s decision to form a panel to track interfaith marriages is worrisome

From privacy issues that might potentially infringe on fundamental rights to not being sensitive to the complicated role that conservative families play in interfaith love; the concerns are many

When Zainab, a 31-year-old doctor from Nashik, woke up to the news of a new panel being set up by the Maharashtra government “to track interfaith marriages,” she had one more thing to worry about. The message was simple: Toe the line or we will make you pay for it. The crime? Love. She has been in a happy, consensual and thriving relationship with a privileged-caste Hindu man for the past decade. 

“The government is basically telling couples in interfaith love to think twice, thrice and a thousand times before they even think of marrying their partners,” says the doctor, who prefers being addressed with a pseudonym. “How did I feel? I felt like I’m being watched and policed for doing whatever I want to do with my life.”

The world of privacy and dignity 

The special committee was previously named the ‘Intercaste/Interfaith Marriage Family Coordination Committee (state level).’ However, after drawing flak from the opposition for its casteist approach towards marriage, the government amended the Government Resolution (GR) and restricted the role of the panel to only “gathering information” about interfaith marriages. The new GR has been accordingly renamed as the ‘Interfaith Marriage-Family Coordination Committee (state level)’.

In a landmark judgement delivered by a nine-judge bench of the Supreme Court in the Justice K.S. Puttaswamy vs Union of India case in August 2017, the Right to Privacy was unanimously held as a fundamental right. According to technology and privacy lawyer Siddharth Sonkar, whose recent book What Privacy Means: Why It Matters and How We Can Protect It has a foreword by Justice B.N. Srikrishna (author of the draft privacy bill) that states the privacy judgement had ruled that the right may be restricted only by state action that passes each of the three tests:

First, such state action must have a legislative mandate, that is, it must be a law. 

Second, it must be pursuing a legitimate state purpose, and

Third, it must be proportionate i.e., such state action—both in its nature and extent, must be necessary for a democratic society and the action ought to be the least intrusive of the available alternatives to accomplish the ends.

In the case of the proposed interfaith marriage panel, this privacy test is hardly met. There is, of course, no law, so there goes the first criterion. “Here, there’s surveillance over the exercise of your decisional autonomy. If I end up marrying someone from another religion, it seems that the state will act as an indirect deterrent for me to even make that decision in the first place,” he says. “The government's notification is ignorant of the fact that many couples are not willing to share [their decision] with their families. You’re creating a mechanism where the panel will collect data and share it with their families.”

Lost freedom

Sonkar points out the privacy judgement laid great emphasis on the idea of decisional autonomy—an individual is free to make their own decisions without any institutional- or state-sponsored intrusions. As far as the interfaith panel is concerned, Sonkar explains that the issue here is more nuanced; it’s not as blatant as the Uttar Pradesh ordinance which is an obvious form of intrusion. 

Earlier, there was no network mechanism where information about the marriage of two consenting adults could be shared with their families. You’d have to do a lot of digging to find out about your children’s marriages. Now, the mechanism will be institutionalised and can be generally misused. 

“The police can blame any couple for interfaith marriage but that will happen only if you marry in the first place, because here, on a very fundamental level, the decision to exercise that freedom is lost,” says Sonkar.

Loving against all odds 

The UN-Laadli Media award-winning journalist Ismat Ara, who was previously reporting for The Wire where she has written extensively about interfaith marriages, Love Jihad, and the state of madrasas, among other issues, tells The Established that the implication of this law is chilling, even as similar legislations and committees have already been formed in other BJP-ruled states. In this regard, if the panel informs the partners of the partners, it will clearly be a huge threat. 

“In my reporting, I have come across many such cases where the consent of both partners is involved but the parents are disapproving. The Kanpur SIT set up to probe cases of Love Jihad in Uttar Pradesh failed to find any conspiracy or concerted effort to engage in these duplicitous conversions. Anti-conversion laws have proved to be failures with no or very low conviction rates. Instead of being an urgent problem, Love Jihad (the conspiracy theory that Muslim men convert Hindu women under the garb of love) is a narrative that is used to polarise Indian society,” she says. 

Zainab, for her part, acknowledges that she, fortunately, has the privilege of not worrying about honour killing. She clarifies that the couple will be informing their respective parents about their marriage anyway, but now, the freedom to make that decision has been taken away from them.  

“He is more optimistic and tells me that it’s just a panel and hasn’t been encoded into a law yet,” she says. “For me, it’s a concern because it’s not some random YouTuber saying this but the state. Why can’t they make life easier for me for all the taxes I’m paying?” 

According to Sonkar, if the state is really worried about the safety of women, it must, instead, focus on strengthening the existing institutional mechanisms. “The police didn’t really do that in the Shraddha Walkar case where she had approached the cops well in advance,” he says. “They are targeting interfaith couples to make it seem like they’re solving the problem. Any way you look at it, this panel makes no sense.”

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