Gujarat has decided to take a giant step backwards. In spite of the Constitution and Supreme Court judgments to the contrary, the Gujarat government is planning amendments to the Gujarat Registration of Marriages Act 2006 so that the permission of parents becomes central to registration. Applications are to be submitted to the assistant registrar with accompanying declarations from the bride and the groom that they have informed their parents, together with their parents’ contact details and Aadhaar. Witness statements with respective Aadhaar numbers, photographs and wedding invitation cards, if available, must be submitted. The assistant registrar will then inform the parents. Instead of being an act of choice between two consenting adults, marriage would become subject to State and parental authority as well as social scrutiny. The proposals are an expression of an authoritarian society that cannot brook the freedom of individuals, especially if they are young. Even though the government has claimed that it has nothing against love, such a society fears that personal choice can unsettle traditional social hierarchies. The immediate source of the new rules is the excuse that women, even if over 18, must be protected, for they can be deceived or coerced into marriages. This is supposed to increase the danger of ‘love jihad’, a term coined by right-wing forces for marriages between Hindu women and Muslim men. There it is taken for granted that the woman was deceived or coerced. In this almost frank attempt to prevent interfaith marriage, what remains less obvious is that the primacy given to State surveillance and familial intervention would also work against inter-caste marriages. Similar intervention in marriage and even live-in relationships was introduced in the Uttarakhand Uniform Civil Code of 2024.

It would seem that the Gujarat government judges itself to be a better protector of women than the Constitution and the Supreme Court. Article 21 of the Constitution guarantees the right to life and liberty, which implies agency and autonomy. The Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that two consenting adults do not need the permission of parents, family or community to marry. The choice of religion, too, is part of personal autonomy. Disrupting these is also disrupting the fundamental right to privacy. Clearly, the Gujarat government is willing to violate rights on all levels to intervene in independent choice in marriage.