“Many things…can wait. The child cannot…
To him (her) we cannot answer ‘Tomorrow’,
His (her) name is Today”
– Gabriela Mistral

We live through trying times. The hapless poor in India have been bearing the brunt of the lockdown – undernourished, unemployed, impoverished, debt-ridden – languishing in penury and despair. The rich and the influential merrily commit irresponsible social, economic and political offences, accelerating the pace of the spread of the virus.

Worse still, our households are being infected with an even more lethal virus. It has been permeating our fragile society, that has fast been losing its moorings, sapping its vitals. Thanks to the plummeting of our value system, and the consequential tenuous support mechanism, suicides (homicides?) in the name of dowry have become a daily event, too many, as the real Covid-19 deaths.

Charged media discussions skip the fundamental issue of all-pervading degeneration of our age-old values. They focus only on the illegality of the hydra-headed dowry that assumes ingenious forms to penetrate through invisible routes, like the virus that mutates its features to infect protected humans.

Desperately, we go on enacting more stringent laws, even as we lose battles, and the war, beating funeral marches to the grave. An inverse correlation between the stringency of our laws, and their efficacy! Despite our frustrations, the fight should continue relentlessly.

First and foremost, we need to restore the sanctity of the institution of marriage – in fact, a union of two families – deeply ingrained in Indian culture. Unless the Lord builds the house, those who build it labour in vain.

Decriminalisation of same sex marriage (Section 377, IPC), that created an euphoria of liberty among the youth and activists of sorts, was indeed a collateral assault on our time-treasured family culture.

We miss the wood for the trees. Unlike in the West, where the individual is the unit of society, family is the unit of our society. It is a sacred institution, and the ceremony of marriage is a holy sacrament, not a contract. Licentious lifestyle in western societies is, ipso facto, taboo here.

Our laws take time, giving a chance to the parties concerned, to explore all possible solutions. And, only as the last resort, the question of separation is considered. Judges like Justice Kurian Joseph, sensitised to a fault, personally walked an extra mile, and greatly succeeded in bringing back many a disparate, warring couple to reason, and continue their family life. Gratefully, it dawns on them how they had fallen into a precipice of misunderstandings and misjudgments over issues, too trivial to break off the divine sacrament.

In a district where I was Collector, my wife used to actively participate in the Legal Aid Clinic (as ex-officio President of the District Women’s Council). The Clinic would call husbands who abandoned their wives and try its best to unite them. If it failed, the next effort was reasonable compensation for the wife and children. In one case, a man was thus pressured for compensation. He pleaded inability to pay, and confided ingenuously that his only option would be to marry again, get dowry, and meet the commitment. The Women’s Council, in folded hands, surrendered.

When couples separate, remarry and live rather happily, do we bother about what happens to the children, who are orphaned – physically, emotionally and socially?

In most cases, being minors, children are left to the care of the mother, relegating paternity to an opinion. Their child development amidst the new husband of their mother, and their children, is unlikely to be normal. The stigma, for no fault of theirs – at school, in the society and at work – haunts them.

Who can deny these children their natural rights to be loved by, and brought up with the continued emotional support of, their living father and mother together? A settlement between the father and the mother, at a time when they were either unborn or minors, and so not parties, cannot deprive them of their God-given rights.

I know a kind-hearted man, settled in Australia, whose only marriage is with a divorcee. She has two children from her first marriage, whom he truly considers his own, and vice versa. And, they now have a happy kindergarten home of four children – all their own.

The above is too ideal a scenario. Elsewhere, children’s inalienable rights vis-à-vis their parents get trampled.
We have Conventions and Commissions for Women, and for Child Rights. What do they do?

Kuruvilla John
A former IAS officer