Is India’s Assam using child marriage crackdown to ‘target Muslims’?
- Hindu-nationalist BJP has arrested around 2,400 men for marriages involving children, but critics say Muslim minorities targeted, breadwinners removed
- A lawyer and activist said the crackdown in Assam state was not really about child marriage: ‘to be serious about that, you need social reform’
Police had arrested some 2,400 people as of Monday, after a review of marriage registration records over the past few years threw up the names of 8,000 men believed to have married minors. The authorities did not say how many of the arrested men were Muslim.
Those arrested included more than 50 Hindu priests and Muslim clerics for allegedly performing marriages for underage girls in Assam, state police chief Gyanendra Pratap Singh said.
The legal age of marriage in India is 18 for women and 21 for men. Many cases of child marriage in Assam, a state of 35 million people, are said to go unreported.
Assam’s chief minister Himanta Sarma has vowed that everyone involved in underage marriages, from the groom and his parents to officiating priests, would be arrested. “When a man marries a girl child, it amounts to rape,” he said.
