How come no one ever asks the women

Illustration/Uday Mohite

Our crackdown against child marriage has entered its second week with 3,015 arrests made so far. The drive against this social evil will continue. The positive side is that now people are coming out and surrendering before the police" tweeted the Chief Minister of Assam in February, as his administration began to arrest huge numbers of men under the Prevention of Child Marriage Act and POCSO.

Women are coming before the police, not to surrender but to protest, to plead, in helplessness and anguish. The crackdown is a retrospective one - targeting marriages which took place some years ago.

Today these people are adults with children. POCSO can mean 20 years in prison. Reports say many of the men arrested are daily wage labourers and sole earners in their families. The arrests leave women, children and old people dependent on them utterly vulnerable. Two women have taken their lives. We can hardly ignore that many of Assam's poorest are Muslim, currently also persecuted under citizenship law regimes.

What is a social evil? Is rendering poor families helpless, pushing them into greater poverty and misery, a social evil? No one will ask this. Elites stigmatise the poor for certain practices with great alacrity. How often have you heard someone say "these uneducated people are a disgrace to society" as if it is the fault of the poor that they are not educated, rather than of a disgraceful system.

The poor and the privileged "marry off" their daughters for some common reasons - "security", "future" "tradition". The poor marry them younger, primarily because of poverty. Elites can comfortably access the advantages of education, nutrition and social mobility to enable that thing called agency, which helps women marry later. It is easy for elites to act like they are not implicated in gendered practices and blame others for being backward. This helps them feel they are ‘better' when in fact they are simply better off. What colonial rulers once did to ‘primitive Indians', elites now do to poorer Indians - control through manufactured moral superiority.

As researchers, such as Mary John, have shown, early marriage is linked to poverty, underdevelopment, hard times like famines and pandemics, or wars and communal violence. Research also demonstrates that where girls are able to access schooling and public health, the age of marriage goes up organically. As per the latest statistics, about 74 per cent of rural women in Assam have not completed even 10 years of schooling. And yet the Assam government has announced the shutting down of almost 1,700 state-run schools as recommended by the NITI Ayog's school rationalisation plan (fancy term for no public education). The state creates the conditions for early marriage and then punishes people for it. After all, who has time to address systemic issues, when elections need to be fought baba. The CM has announced plans to continue the drive till the 2026 state elections.

If men in power care so much for the welfare of women, why don't they ask women what they want or need, instead of deciding on their behalf? That would mean recognising the consent of both, women and the poor. Masculine power works by domination, not care and consent, and to serve its own image, not the lives of others. No wonder it always leaves the women who are being "saved" worse off than before.

Paromita Vohra is an award-winning Mumbai-based filmmaker, writer and curator working with fiction and non-fiction. Reach her at paromita.vohra@mid-day.com