Hitlerian Mindset of Assam CM

Relatives of people arrested amid the Assam government’s statewide crackdown on child marriage gather outside a police station in Morigaon district. Pic/PTI

Few can match Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma's delight in inflicting misery on the downtrodden. On February 2, he tweeted about his government's resolve to "end the menace of child marriage," citing as evidence the 4,404 cases the police had registered against those who married women below 18 years old. Even men with children, and individuals, including women, who facilitated child marriages. Action on the cases will begin on February 3, Sarma said.

As the police began to pick up people, Sarma excitedly provided the count - 1,800-plus have been arrested, his tweet declared on February 3. Next day, he tweeted - 2,211 arrested; 2,528, his February 8 tweet announced; 2,789, he gushed on February 10. Across Assam, women howled, fearing a future without their husbands.

Sarma did not hear their wails. Or he did not care, as Indira Gandhi and her son Sanjay never did during operations to clear out slums or sterilise men during the Emergency. Those with a Hitlerian mindset lay down their own rules, as has Sarma, who decreed that those who married girls below 14 years old would be booked under the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act, 2012, and those who wedded girls in the 14-18 age group would be punished under the Prohibition of Child Marriage Act, 2006 (PCMA).

PCMA was designed to bring down women's mortality rate, and enhance the possibility of girls acquiring an education. Men who marry girls below 18, the age of consent in India, or family elders who facilitate their weddings can be punished for a maximum two years under it. POCSO's objective was to protect girls from sexual abuse. The punishment under this Act can range from seven years to life imprisonment. It is relatively more difficult to secure bail under POCSO than PCMA.

Ask not for the logic behind creating two groups of offenders. Whether or not consensual, sex with girls below 18 is deemed rape in India. Both groups of men are guilty of the same offence, yet the severity of punishment meted out to them would vary dramatically. Whimsical leaders twisting laws is an aspect of authoritarianism.

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Consensual relationships with minor girls have prompted several high courts to take a lenient view of POCSO to provide relief to the men booked under it. For instance, in Teiborlang Kurkalang vs State of Meghalaya, the high court ruled, "Though, the POCSO Act has been rightly enacted to safeguard children from sexual exploitation, but…the rigours of the said Act…would only result in the breakdown of a happy family relationship and the possible consequence of the wife having to take care of a baby with no support, physically or financially from her husband who may be languishing in jail."

This is precisely the lament of women whose husbands have been arrested in Assam. In the January 2021 case of Vijayalakshmi, the Madras High Court said this about POCSO: "What came to be a law to protect and render justice to victims and survivors of child abuse, can become a tool in the hands of certain sections of the society to abuse the process of law." Think Sarma's Assam.

Academic Mary E John, in a piece in The Indian Express, explored data to try to figure out Sarma's obsession with child marriage. Using the National Family Health Surveys, she showed that in 2005-06 in Assam, 38.6 per cent of those between 20 and 24 years were married before they turned 18. This came down to 31.8 per cent in 2019-20, still quite high but lower than in states like Bihar, West Bengal, Andhra Pradesh, etc. This happened without the state taking draconian measures.

She said statistics by religion "may explain the sudden adoption" by Sarma of the policy of "zero tolerance" towards child marriage. "While the proportion of underage marriages among Hindus in Assam at 23.5 per cent is close to the national average (23.8 per cent), the figures for Muslims (45.8) and Christians (23.8 per cent) are much higher than their respective national averages of 26.4 per cent and 15.2 per cent," John wrote. Poverty and early marriage are linked in India, more so in Assam, with "42 per cent underage marriages in the poorest 20 per cent poverty class."

It is far easier to imprison people than to improve their economic conditions. Sarma has said the crackdown on child marriage will continue until 2026, when the next state Assembly election will be due. Inflicting misery on the poor to garner votes of the classes is Sarma's strategy.

I asked Raijor Dal president and MLA Akhil Gogoi what he thought of the crackdown. Since Sarma became chief minister in 2021, Gogoi said 59 lives had been lost in "172 fake encounters." He said the crackdown is yet another method of targeting Muslims, in addition to evicting them from their habitats and bulldozing their houses.

"No thought goes into Sarma's policies. He is Assam's version of Mohammad bin Tughlaq; he is Adityanath II," Gogoi said. Intellectuals advocating to Sarma that he can achieve his mission of eradicating child marriage by pursuing the prime minister's policy of Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao instead of terrorising the poor are barking up the wrong tree.

The writer is a senior journalist.
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