As I was perusing the net for news I came across this article on NDTV about a 14 year old girl, Ansu Kanwar. Ansu lives in the state of Rajasthan, one of the many traditionally conservative states in India. She was to be married off to a 54 year old man (of course without her consent). Coming under intense pressure from her father and the village elders to marry, Ansu and her mother approached the state authorities for help. The marriage was then called off followed by another 8 proposed child marriages in the same village. Ansu is now being awarded the annual bravery award from the Government of India.
Well first, a fact check. Ansu's story is one of the very few where the outcome of such a proposed marriage has ended in the girl child not getting married. UNICEF reports that 47% of India's women aged 20-24 years were married before the legal age of 18. The more shocking statistic is that 40% of the world's child marriages take place in India. Pakistan and Bangladesh, the two other countries in the sub-continent make up for another huge chunk of the statistic.
A few years ago there was another shameful incident where a 7 or 8 year old boy in northern India was married off to his recently widowed sister-in-law who was in her forties. The reason was the in-laws were afraid their widowed daughter-in-law would break away from the household and thus take a major share in the family property with her.
It seems even after 60 years of India's independence we have not been able to wean out such terrible social vices from our fabric. Of course illiteracy and poverty have a lot to do with this. Many villagers in rural India are not even aware of the legal marriage limit of 18 years for the girl child. Many sell away their daughters so that the money can be used to provide sustenance for the rest of the family.
To top it all off, there is the issue of female infanticide. Such is the skewed sex ratio in certain parts of the country that young girls have become 'hot commodity'. There have been reports of young girls being kidnapped from far away states and brought back to marry (and live forcibly). In one case four brothers ended up marrying a single woman because they couldn't find four brides!
In all these despairing facts and thoughts, I can only find one reason to be cheerful. It is because of Ansu. Truly, three cheers to that brave little girl for having confronted this thousand year old tradition stubbornly and deciding not to be part of another unfortunate statistic.
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