Attested Lunacy: Child marriages ‘fixed’ with notarised documents in India's Assam

New Delhi: Sakina is no different from children her age. Innocent smile on her lips, she plays with other kids near her house in Gossaigaon, a developing town of Kokrajhar district of India’s north-eastern state of Assam. Sakina is oblivious to a reality that will decide the course of her life: she has already been promised in marriage by her father. Sakina’s to-be-husband too is a boy from the same district. They have two things in common: they are both Muslim and minor. Usual in India, sure, but when did you last hear of such an arrangement in the form of a notarised ‘legal’ agreement between the two families? These two children have been irretrievably and illegally bound in a future marriage—they will formally exchange vows when they attain the the marriageable age of 12, as per the Sharia. Is this even legal? Is it even possible? In Assam it is, and Sakina isn’t a one-case case. Muslims all across the state are fixing marriages of their minor children by means of a notarised document. The government of Assam is seized of the matter and the chief secretary, the highest ranking administrative services officer of the state, has taken the matter up. The issue was raised with the state government by the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights (NCPCR). “Any and all attempts to abuse kids sexually must be thwarted. Laws pertaining to children and their protection are secular, and must be implemented in a secular way,” NCPCR chief Priyank Kanoongo told Firstpost. Recently, a letter was shot off, citing two earlier ones, one by the chief secretary and the other by NCPCR, by a deputy secretary to the Inspector General of Registration—the highest authority that deals with stamps and registrations—asking the latter to launch an inquiry into the matter and report back to the state government. “Regarding entering into notarised marriage agreements for minor children,” is what this letter mentions as the matter at hand.

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