Inter-caste marriages on the rise despite odds

COIMBATORE, March 16, 2016

M.K. Ananth

'The number of inter-caste marriages has gone up over the last two decades with more girls getting educated and getting better exposure.'

Not long after the reported ‘honour killing’ in Udumalpet, a couple approached the Thanthai Periyar Dravida Kazhagam (TPDK) in Coimbatore on Monday asking for help to have an inter-caste wedding.

The Kazhagam, authorised to enable registration of inter-caste marriages, has organised more than 3,000 inter-caste marriages since 2000. “We performed 50 marriages a year initially. It is steadily increasing every year. Last year, we performed 385 such marriages,” state general secretary of the organisation, Ku. Ramakrishnan, said.

He said that the number of inter-caste marriages had actually gone up over the last two decades with more girls getting educated and getting better exposure. Around 15 per cent of the couples were students.

“Fifteen per cent are from the IT sector, of them one or both are from other districts or nearby States,” he said. Twenty per cent are inter-faith marriages.

A third of the marriages involved one of them from the southern and central districts, who were getting married here due to fear of attack by the Caste Hindus.

‘Parents rarely attend inter-caste marriages’

Parents of either the groom or bride attended the marriage in only 10 per cent of the cases and in only two per cent of the cases did both the father and mother attend. “Though they were not against the marriage they preferred keeping it a low-key affair, over fear of being sidelined by their community,” he added.

President of Social Justice Movement N. Paneerselvam who has organised 150 inter-caste marriages from January 2015 said that there were very few marriages that take place without a problem. “We have even been threatened by the Caste Hindu families on many occasions,” he said.

“After performing such marriages we take the couple to the police station,” he said. He said that doing so gives a strong message to the families of the bride and groom as the police warn the families not to harm or disturb the young couple. “Down the line some of the families accept the couple setting aside casteist sentiments,” he added.

Source: thehindu

Why the attempt to deny Dalit status to Rohith Vemula is a shocking ignorance of the law

Opinion

Or a deliberate misrepresentation. Apart from being extremely undignified, it is indicative of the high stakes involved.

Anup Surendranath  · Today · 07:30 pm

The political pressure arising out of Rohith Vemula’s suicide is evident from the wide range of unsavoury responses we have seen over the last few days. Amongst the worst of those responses has been the attempt to deny Rohith Vemula his Scheduled Caste status after his death.

One of the arguments being put forth to not treat Rohith Vemula’s suicide as a Dalit issue is that he cannot be considered a Dalit in the first place.

Apart from being extremely undignified, it is a response that demonstrates a shocking ignorance of the law.

The argument is that since his father belonged to the Vaddera caste (Other Backward Classes or OBC in Andhra Pradesh) and his mother to the Mala caste (Scheduled Caste or SC in Andhra Pradesh), Rohith Vemula takes on the caste of his father and not his mother.

That argument reflects an extremely problematic position in Hindu personal law that has long been abandoned by the constitutional jurisprudence developed by the Supreme Court in the context of determining social disadvantage.

Judicial discourse

The judicial discourse on determining caste status arising out of inter-caste marriages is now well-settled but has followed two trajectories in the past. However, for the purposes of establishing social disadvantage, neither of those two trajectories endorsed the position in Hindu personal law that a child born out of an inter-caste marriage assumed the caste of the father.

These questions have come to the Supreme Court in circumstances where an individual’s membership in a beneficiary group has been under challenge under a variety of circumstances relating to reservations in representative bodies, education and public employment.

In adjudicating these disputed claims about caste status arising out of inter-caste marriages, the Supreme Court early on in cases like Chatturbhuj Jasani (1954) and Jahan Ara Jaipal Singh (1972) adopted an approach that focused on the assimilation of the concerned person within the beneficiary group and her acceptance by other members of the beneficiary group.

It will be noted that even within this approach the Supreme Court refused to adhere to the rule that the person assumes the caste of her father.

The Supreme Court started doubting the above approach in Valsamma Paul (1996) while still upholding the position that the father/ husband’s caste in an inter-caste marriage could not automatically determine caste status of the child/ wife.

The disagreement with the approach developed in Jasani and Jahan Ara was over the role attributed to assimilation within the beneficiary group and the acceptance of the concerned person within that group. In Valsamma Paul, the Supreme Court took the view that the relevant consideration would be the life experience of the individual.

However, the decision in Valsamma Paul was by a two-judge bench whereas the decisions in Jasani and Jahan Ara were by three-judge benches. The approach that considered the life experience of the individual as the determinative factor received the approval for a three-judge bench of the Supreme Court in Sobha Devi (2005). In a decision from January 2012, the Supreme Court settled the position in favour of the approach in Valsamma Paul.

The Supreme Court in Rameshbhai Naika (2012) was confronted with a judgment from the Gujarat High Court that upheld the decision of a local authority to cancel the appellant’s Scheduled Tribe’s certificate on the ground that the appellant had to necessarily inherit his father’s forward caste status and not his mother’s Scheduled Tribe status.

The Supreme Court held that a mechanical application of the position in Hindu personal law that a child born out of an inter-caste marriage inherits the caste of the father is constitutionally invalid as far as determining beneficiaries of reservations is concerned. In the context of inter-caste marriages, the court took the view that it must be the individual experience that must be established to determine the membership in a beneficiary group.

Missing the point

Similarly in Rohith Vemula’s case the argument that he was not a Dalit based on his father’s OBC status misses the entire point of the constitutional jurisprudence that the court has attempted to develop.

When dealing with inter-caste marriages, the Supreme Court has adopted the sensible constitutional position that a mechanical application of Hindu personal law cannot determine social disadvantage. It is futile and incorrect to argue that Rohith Vemula’s caste status is determined by his father’s caste.

The attempt to misrepresent the constitutional position on this issue is indicative of the stakes involved.

As a society we collectively failed in protecting his dignity in life and the least we can now do is to zealously guard his dignity in death.

Anup Surendranath’s doctoral work at the University of Oxford was on reservation policies in India and he currently teaches constitutional law at National Law University, Delhi. The legal issue in this article was discussed in an earlier blog post on ‘Law and Other Things’ in January 2012.

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