Kochi: The Democratic Youth Federation of India (DYFI), the youth wing of the CPI(M), lashed out at the Union Cabinet’s decision on Saturday to raise the marriage age for women, accusing that it was an attempt to curtail personal liberty. DYFI national President, A A Rahim, in a series of tweets, said the ruling dispensation has displayed an unhealthy obsession with the marriage choices of people.
‘DYFI disagrees with the Union Cabinet’s decision to raise the age of marriage for girls. There are strong reasons to suspect malfeasance on the part of the Union Govt; their track record, actions & utterances make a case’, Rahim tweeted. ‘We believe that it is one more effort targeting choice marriages. The ruling dispensation has so far displayed an unhealthy obsession with the marriage choices of people. They’ve never hesitated to encroach on personal freedoms & often turned a blind eye towards vigilante groups’, he added.
We should not underestimate the complexity of the issues involved, just because the government has cloaked it as "women empowerment". Their doublespeak needs to be exposed and the move must be criticized for what it is; an attempt to curtail personal liberty.
— A A Rahim (@AARahimdyfi) December 18, 2021
Rahim said that if parity and gender equality were the goals, the Union Government should have reduced the marriage age, as the 18th Law Commission had recommended. He alleged that, instead the government have opted to meet the demands in the petitions filed by BJP leader Ashwini Kumar Upadhyay before the Supreme Court. According to him, the proposed bill may also seek to make consequential changes to various personal laws relating to marriage of different communities to ensure a uniform marriage age. ‘We should not underestimate the complexity of the issues involved, just because the government has cloaked it as ‘women empowerment’. Their doublespeak needs to be exposed and the move must be criticized for what it is; an attempt to curtail personal liberty’, the DYFI national president noted.
As of now, the legal age for women to get married is 18 while that for men is 21 years. The Union Cabinet had on Wednesday cleared a proposal to bring in uniformity in the marriageable age of men and women and is likely to bring a bill in the ongoing Winter Session of Parliament to amend the Prohibition of Child Marriage Act, 2006. The decision was taken, based on the recommendation of a four-member task force led by former Samata Party chief Jaya Jaitly.
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