Procedures will make young lovers fully dependent on parents for decision
By T N Ashok
Last Friday, in the Gujarat Legislative Assembly, Deputy Chief Minister and Home Minister Harsh Sanghavi rose to announce what the BJP government described as a measured administrative reform. Couples who elope and wish to register their marriage, Sanghavi explained, would henceforth be required to submit an undertaking confirming whether they had informed their parents.
The assistant registrar would then notify the parents of both the bride and groom — electronically, including over WhatsApp, or through physical communication — and registration would be granted within 30 days after verification of all submitted details, which would be uploaded to a government portal.
The minister was at pains to clarify that the government had nothing against love marriages. What it could not allow, he said, was deception. “Salim masquerading as Suresh will not be allowed,” Sanghavi told the assembly, invoking the phantom Muslim man behind a Hindu woman’s ruin — the central character of India’s most durable communal conspiracy theory.
He cited instances from Panchmahal district, where nikah certificates were allegedly issued in villages with no mosque and no Muslim family, a claim that, if true, described fraud by village revenue officials, not a conspiracy by lovers in hiding.
The proposed rules are now out for 30 days of public comment. But their meaning was already clear to anyone who has watched the systematic legal architecture that BJP governments across India’s northern and central states have quietly assembled over the past five years, brick by brick, to police the most intimate choices that free adults can make.
To understand what Gujarat is proposing, one must first understand how the same instrument — the mandatory notice period — already functions in practice under the Special Marriage Act of 1954, India’s primary legislation for civil and interfaith unions.
The Special Marriage Act provides a secular framework for people of any religion to marry, requiring couples to file a notice of intended marriage, observe a 30-day waiting period, and then complete registration before a marriage officer. That waiting period was designed to allow objections to be raised on legitimate grounds — bigamy, underage marriage, prohibited degrees of relation. In theory, it is administrative. In practice, it has become a targeting mechanism.
Right-wing organisations have established systematic networks to track and disrupt interfaith marriages. In Bhopal, such groups tracked down an interfaith couple after their marriage notice was flagged, with right-wing lawyers and activists alleging “love jihad.” In Uttarakhand, a couple’s details went viral after being uploaded to a government portal, forcing them into hiding.
Gujarat’s proposed rules are more granular and more dangerous. They do not merely post a notice. They require the registrar to personally contact the parents of both parties — by WhatsApp if necessary — before registration proceeds.
This is not a bureaucratic safeguard. It is a 30-day notification window in which a bride’s family, upon receiving a government-forwarded WhatsApp message informing them that their daughter intends to marry a man of whom they disapprove, can mobilise every instrument of coercion available to them: community pressure, khap panchayat intervention, and, in the worst cases, violence.
Legal experts flagged the constitutional problem immediately. Advocate Mahesh Baria said the proposal infringes upon the fundamental rights guaranteed under Article 21 of the Constitution — the right to life and personal liberty, which the Supreme Court has repeatedly interpreted to include the right to marry a person of one’s choosing.
Advocate Nilesh Bhavsar went further: while the government had described the measure as mere “intimation,” he noted that parental objections could practically influence registration decisions, leading to prolonged litigation and, before it concludes, sustained vulnerability for the couple involved. AAP legislator Hemant Ahir, who had moved a near-identical private member’s bill earlier in the week, congratulated the government. Congress, the principal opposition, stayed silent.
Gujarat’s proposed amendment does not exist in isolation. As of February 2025, twelve states in India had enacted anti-conversion laws: Arunachal Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Gujarat, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Jharkhand, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Odisha, Uttarakhand, Uttar Pradesh, and Rajasthan, which passed its Prohibition of Unlawful Conversion of Religion Bill in February 2025.
The architecture of these laws varies in detail but converges in purpose. The Uttar Pradesh Prohibition of Unlawful Conversion of Religion Ordinance, introduced in November 2020 and enacted as law in February 2021, mandates prior government approval for religious conversions and prescribes penalties of up to ten years’ imprisonment for “forced” or “fraudulent” conversions, including those related to marriage.
Uttarakhand had already passed a similar Freedom of Religion Act in 2018. Both states have been at the forefront of enforcing these laws, often targeting interfaith couples under the pretext of preventing “Love Jihad.”
The language of these statutes is invariably elastic. Terms like “allurement,” “force,” and “misrepresentation” are broadly defined, enabling subjective interpretations that could target even voluntary conversions or interfaith marriages.
Some laws modify the definition of a “victim” to include not just the individual allegedly coerced but also their guardians and legal heirs — effectively allowing third parties, including disapproving parents, to file complaints.
In Uttarakhand, the law criminalises concealing one’s religion before marriage, punishable by three to ten years in prison. This provision alone makes it a criminal offence for a man called Mohammed who goes by a common name in his workplace to not disclose his religion before his partner agrees to marry him — a condition with no parallel in any democratic legal system.
What distinguishes Gujarat’s proposed amendment from the anti-conversion statutes of Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh is its mechanism. Rather than criminalising conversion or mandating prior approval, Gujarat outsources coercion to the family. The state does not itself prevent the marriage. It informs the parents and waits. The violence — if it comes — will not be the state’s responsibility. It will be a “family matter.”
The consequences of exactly this dynamic are documented across northern and central India in detail sufficient to remove any ambiguity about what parental notification of an elopement produces.
Then Chief Justice D.Y. Chandrachud observed in 2022 that “hundreds of young people die because they love someone or marry outside caste.” Official statistics recorded 25 honour killing cases in 2020, 33 in 2021, and 18 in 2022 — but these figures are widely understood to represent only a fraction of actual killings, which are routinely classified as suicides, accidents, or undisclosed murders.
In Uttar Pradesh, data from the NCRB reveals that 45% of murders in the state are linked to “honour,” driven by inter-caste marriages. Haryana reported three honour killings in just the first half of 2024 alone, in Jind, Sirsa, and Hisar districts.
The geography of this violence follows the geography of the new marriage laws with uncomfortable precision. Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Madhya Pradesh, Haryana — these are the states where interfaith and inter-caste couples are most vulnerable, where khap panchayat authority remains strongest, and where the new legal architecture has provided patriarchal families with state legitimacy for their coercive interventions.
A documented case from Hardoi, Uttar Pradesh, in November 2020, illustrates the mechanism. The Hindutva vigilante group Bajrang Dal intercepted an 18-year-old Hindu woman and her 25-year-old Muslim partner at a district court where the couple were about to register their marriage under the Special Marriage Act.
Armed with UP’s new anti-conversion law, the Bajrang Dal prevented the marriage and had the woman “picked up” by her father, who had been informed of her presence at the courthouse. A week later, the police registered an unlawful conversion case against the Muslim man at the behest of the woman who, while in her father’s custody, complained that her Muslim partner had forced her to convert.
The couple’s choice had been consensual. The process by which that choice was reversed was entirely predictable. Gujarat’s WhatsApp notification would replicate exactly this chain of events — but at industrial scale, through the machinery of the state itself.
The constitutional framework governing marriage in India is unambiguous in its intent, even where political will to enforce it wavers. The Special Marriage Act of 1954 allows marriage between people of different religions or castes without conversion to a common religion, providing a secular context in which individuals can register their marriages irrespective of their religious affiliations. The Hindu Marriage Act of 1955 governs marriages between Hindus including Buddhists, Jains, and Sikhs, but does not cover interfaith unions.
The Supreme Court, across multiple decisions, has affirmed the constitutional right of adults to marry persons of their own choosing. In Latha Singh v. State of Uttar Pradesh (2006), Justice Markandey Katju was direct: honour killings are “nothing more than cold-blooded murder,” and inter-caste marriages should be encouraged to build social fabric.
The Shakti Vahini judgment of 2018 directed states to establish safe houses for runaway couples and explicitly held that the right to choose a life partner is a fundamental right emanating from Articles 19 and 21 of the Constitution.
Against this judicial backdrop, the Gujarat proposal faces clear legal risk. But constitutional illegality has not historically deterred BJP-ruled states from enacting laws that courts may eventually strike down.
Citizens for Justice and Peace has challenged the anti-conversion laws of Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Madhya Pradesh, Himachal Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Gujarat, Haryana, Jharkhand, and Karnataka before the Supreme Court on grounds of violating rights to personal liberty, autonomy, freedom of speech and expression, privacy, freedom of faith, and the right against discrimination. The constitutional hearing, described by observers as proceeding at a snail’s pace, remains unresolved. In the interim, the laws remain operative. Couples remain vulnerable.
The BJP’s legislative energies around marriage have been directed almost exclusively at the religious dimension — at preventing Hindu-Muslim unions under the banner of “love jihad.” This framing conveniently obscures the far more statistically significant source of honour-based violence in India: the enforcement of caste endogamy.
The vast majority of couples killed by their families in UP, Bihar, Haryana, and Rajasthan are not Hindu-Muslim couples. They are inter-caste Hindu couples, including Dalit-Savarna unions, in which caste hierarchy has been violated and a family’s standing in the social order threatened.
In India, to marry across caste and religious difference is often life-threatening. When interfaith and inter-caste marriages occur, family members of the higher caste frequently see themselves as ritually polluted. The perpetrators of these crimes, in most cases close family members of the victims, see the killings not as murder but as a necessary restoration of caste purity.
The Central government’s own Dr. Ambedkar Scheme for Social Integration Through Inter-Caste Marriage, which provided financial assistance to inter-caste couples, has been quietly wound down — with no new allocations in the 2025-26 Budget.
In the five years from 2015 to 2019, a total of only 377 couples received assistance under the scheme. The state simultaneously funds programmes that incentivise caste endogamy through community organisations and withdraws the small financial lifeline it had extended to those who defied it.
Gujarat, meanwhile, has the Dr. Savitaben Ambedkar Inter Caste Marriage Assistance Scheme on its books, providing financial assistance for scheduled-caste inter-caste marriages. The same state government that promises ₹2.5 lakh to some inter-caste couples is now proposing to notify parents before any couple that has eloped can register their marriage.
The contradiction is not accidental. It reflects the BJP’s dual-track approach: performative inclusion within Hindu castes on terms the party controls, and aggressive surveillance of marriages that cross religious boundaries.
India’s marriage laws, seen in aggregate, now constitute a landscape in which the freedom of adults to choose their partners is systematically subordinated to family authority, community veto, and state surveillance — with the most punitive outcomes reserved for those who cross religious lines and the most lethal outcomes reserved for those who cross caste lines.
The Special Marriage Act, the Constitution’s protection of personal liberty, and seventy years of Supreme Court jurisprudence affirming the right to marry freely all point in one direction. The legislative programmes of twelve state governments, the WhatsApp notifications proposed by Gujarat, and the documented body count of honour killings point in another.
Deputy Chief Minister Harsh Sanghavi told the Gujarat assembly that “innocent girls are being trapped” and that “Salim masquerading as Suresh will not be allowed.” What the state’s own data — and the records of its courts, safe houses, and mortuary registers — shows is that it is the state’s own notification mechanisms, and not Salim, that most reliably trap young women: in their parental homes, in shelter houses awaiting safety clearances, and in the ground.
The 30-day notice is not a cooling-off period. For a couple that has eloped in Panchmahal or Purola or Moradabad, it is a 30-day countdown. (IPA Service)
