The three wings of the government — executive, legislature and the judiciary — have failed to prevent forced marriages, a major cause of the “honour killings” and there is urgent need to put in place a legal framework to curb all forms of forced liaisons.
These are the findings based on court decisions in several marital disputes arising out of the forced marriages, listed in a research paper on the issue. Chandigarh-based lawyer brothers carried out the study in the wake of Karnal’s Manoj-Babli honour killing trial, in which a leader of a khap panchayat and four members of the girl’s family were awarded death sentence. “The existing legal framework in India is in desperate need of a coherent legislation on forced marriages. Courts and the government have to take stringent action against the rule of the extra-legal khap panchayats, which have so far been shielded from the state intrusion due to political reasons,” says the paper, to be presented to an international conference on the crime against women in London next week.
“It is pertinent to mention that in India, we do not have any exclusive consolidated legislation on the issue of forced marriages, barring forced marriages and providing consequential relief to aggrieved parties,” says the research paper, prepared by advocate brothers Anil Malhotra and Ranjit Malhotra during their six-month-long study. The brothers, handling hundreds of inter-continental marital dispute cases in India and abroad, arising out of “forced marriages” of Indian girls with NRI boys, have referred to the legislative and administrative measures taken by several European countries to curb “forced marriages.”