Is India's Assam using child marriage crackdown to 'target Muslims'?
A small group of critics have accused the Hindu-nationalist government in India's Assam state of "weaponising" child protection laws to target Muslim communities, as it continues a major crackdown on men marrying underage girls.
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.
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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.
He said in a tweet that he had asked police "to act with a spirit of zero tolerance against the unpardonable and heinous crime on women".
But opponents accuse the state's ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, which also heads the national government, of using the issue of underage brides as another way of attacking Muslim minorities, while others said the campaign left families broken and with no breadwinners. About one-third of the state's population is Muslim.
On Saturday, a group of angry women, many with children, protested against the arrests outside a police station in Dhubri district. "We were struggling and somehow making ends meet. But we were happy together. Who will provide for our livelihood now that my husband has been arrested?" asked a young woman.
Police used tear gas to disperse the crowd. Protesters were mostly Muslim, according to local journalists.
In Assam's South Salmara-Mankachar district a 27-year-old woman was said to have taken her own life, scared her parents might be arrested for marrying her off when she was 17.
Muslim political leader Asaduddin Owaisi, who lives in Telangana state in India's south, questioned the timing of the crackdown, which comes as the BJP is increasingly targeting Muslims across the country to fulfil a Hindu-nationalist agenda.
An example is the demolishing homes and shops owned by Muslims without due process. Muslim protesters are often beaten up by police in India, with officers largely turning a blind eye to attacks on Muslims.
Such moves occur against the backdrop of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government introducing the Citizenship Amendment Act in December 2019, offering amnesty to non-Muslim illegal immigrants from neighbouring Muslim countries Bangladesh, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.
The act sparked violent conflict, with critics claiming it was part of a BJP agenda to marginalise Muslims.
Asaduddin noted that Sarma had been in power for six years but had not done anything to educate the people of Assam on the evils of child marriage, which remained a widespread practice despite being illegal.
"This is your failure for the past six years. Now you are sending these men to jail. Who will take care of those girls now?" he asked.
Assam opposition MP Ripun Bora said the BJP's move was akin to "setting fire to thousands of families". With their husbands behind bars, the women, overwhelmingly from poor backgrounds, were left with no means to feed themselves or their children, he said.
In a tweet, he also accused the state government of "grossly misusing" the Child Marriage Act to "target a particular community".
Of those arrested, men who married girls below 14 would be charged under Indian laws protecting children against sex crimes, while those who wed girls aged 14 to 18 would be charged under anti-child marriage laws.
Lawyer and human rights activist Vrinda Grover said she believed many of the arrested men were being charged under the law to protect children against sexual crimes because the punishments were harsher, with longer jail sentences, than they would be under the law banning child marriage.
"Basically, the government has weaponised the law intended to protect children to target the Muslim community," she said.
"It's not about child marriage. If you want to be serious about child marriage, you need social reform to make people aware and to empower girls."
Assam's campaign aims to not only tackle the high incidence of child marriage, but its related consequences of early pregnancies and maternal and infant mortality. Government data shows that 31 per cent of girls in Assam are married off before 18, compared to the national average of 23 per cent.
However, child marriage has been falling in India - dropping from more than 47 per cent of marriage in 2005-2006 to around 27 per cent in 2016 - thanks to new laws, more girls being enrolled in schools and greater awareness.
Dr Ravi Kannan, an oncologist and director of the state's Cachar Cancer Hospital and Research Centre, expressed his support for the government's policy. "With child marriage, a girl's education and health suffer very badly. It's a cruel thing to do to a girl," he said.
Kannan added that he was not aware of whether Muslims were being targeted, saying only: "If it's wrong, it's wrong, no matter what the religion, Muslim or Hindu."
India is considering legislation to raise the marriage age for women to 21, to bring it in line with men and promote gender equality.
Additional reporting by Associated Press
This article originally appeared on the South China Morning Post (SCMP).
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