The Indian State Wants to Regulate Whom You Love, Marry or Live With and Also What You Eat, Say, Sing, Protest or Praise

There was a time when you could fall in love with somebody and, subject to the ordinary complications of family, society and your own foolishness, that was largely your business. 

Apparently, that was too simple. Now there are rules. There are categories. There are laws. There are people watching. Fall in love with the wrong person and the phrase “love jihad” can be summoned into the conversation, as though two adults deciding whom to marry is a matter of national security. 

Interfaith relationships have been turned into a political category, and in several states laws ostensibly dealing with unlawful conversion have become part of a much wider public suspicion surrounding such marriages. The presumption seems to have shifted from two adults exercising a private choice to two adults who must first establish that their choice is legitimate.

Even marriage itself is no longer allowed to remain entirely a private social institution. Courts have found themselves discussing the requirements of Hindu marriage, including the significance of saptapadi, in disputes over whether a marriage legally took place. 

Governments have increasingly concerned themselves with registration, verification and the documentation of relationships. In some places, the regulatory imagination has gone further, with proposals and laws requiring couples living together outside marriage to notify or register their relationship with the state. 

Uttarakhand’s Uniform Civil Code, for example, requires live-in relationships to be registered and provides for verification and other administrative requirements. A man and a woman who decide to live together without marrying are thus no longer merely making a personal decision; they may acquire a small administrative relationship with the government as well.

Uttarakhand’s Uniform Civil Code, for example, requires live-in relationships to be registered and provides for verification and other administrative requirements.

One begins to wonder where the boundary is supposed to be.

The State tells you what is permissible to eat, what is permissible to display, what is permissible to say, whether you may protest and under what conditions, which relationships may attract suspicion, and now, in some jurisdictions, whether you have properly informed the administration that you are living with another adult. 

We have somehow moved from the old-fashioned idea that the government should concern itself with what citizens do to the idea that the government should concern itself with whether citizens are doing the right things.

And the definition of “right” keeps expanding. It is not enough to obey the law. Increasingly, one is expected to conform to a political and cultural idea of the good citizen. The good citizen eats the right food, wears the right clothes, loves the right symbols, sings the right songs in the right order, avoids the wrong slogans, marries in the right circumstances, obtains the appropriate paperwork and, preferably, does not make the authorities uncomfortable by protesting too loudly.

This is where the absurdity becomes serious. 

None of these things, taken individually, is necessarily the end of democracy. A government can regulate marriage registration. A state can have laws against fraudulent conversion. A university can impose reasonable rules for demonstrations. A government can prescribe ceremonial protocols for national symbols. The danger lies in the cumulative instinct behind them: the steady expansion of the area in which the State feels entitled to tell the citizen how to live.

The result is a peculiar inversion of the relationship between citizen and government. Instead of the government having to justify its interference in private life, the citizens increasingly find themselves having to justify their private choices to the government. Why are you living together? Why are you marrying this person? What are you eating? What are you saying? Why are you protesting? Why are you carrying this poster? Why are you singing this song? Why are you not singing that one?

Somewhere along the way we stop asking the obvious question: why is the government asking? Are we forgetting that freedom also means having an area of life in which the State has no business telling you what to do? 

And then there is the small matter of what happens when all this concern for rules, procedure and the proper conduct of citizens meets an actual human being. Stan Swamy died in jail without bail and was denied even a sipper, while this same justice system did not think twice about allowing a permanent helper to a convicted rapist, Asaram Bapu. One does not have to choose between law and compassion here. One merely has to wonder how a system so particular about rules can be so remarkably flexible about them when it chooses to be. The rules, it seems, are very important. They just do not appear to be equally applicable to everyone.

Perhaps that is also why Gen Z turning up at Jantar Mantar ought to make the rest of us a little uncomfortable. We are too comfortable in our armchairs, dishing out theories to explain our inertia, discussing democracy and constitutional rights as though they were subjects for a seminar rather than things that occasionally require one to get up and stand somewhere. The students showed us the way forward. The least we can do is not impede them with our pulpit preachings about democracy and rights. They are already doing something about it.

We could, at the very least, spare them another lecture.

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V.V.P. Sharma is a senior journalist and commentator based in New Delhi. This opinion was first published on the author’s Facebook.