Social norms are often given legal forms to make them laws of the land to facilitate their enforcements by the government’s law enforcement agencies like administration, police and judiciary. Still, there are political pressures and compulsions of legislatures to deviate in making laws in accordance to social norms. One reason for such a deviation is existence of differing social norms in different communities and different regions of the nation.
Law versus Society on Marriages in India
The general laws of India allow marriage of any two male and female adults in the country without any consideration of caste, community, location, mutual relationship, etc. This provision, though seems to be logical apparently, but suffers from the defect of not prohibiting a marriage between even a real brother and sister. For this defect, it has come into a direct confrontation with social norms of rural India which has its relationship norms quite different from those of urban population in the country.
In a village, all the residents are considered as members of a huge family for the ways villages got into existence initially by a family moving out from a locality and resettling elsewhere forming a new village. Thus, all the villagers are parts of a single family. At later stages, more families from other places move into such a village, and even these persons are absorbed in the village family with everyone related to all others through rational relationships, like brother, sister, uncle, aunt, grand-father, grand-mother, nephew, cousin, grand-son, grand-daughter, etc.
Intra-village Marriage
For the above-said traditional social norm of relationships in villages of India, intra-village marriages are socially and traditionally prohibited like those between siblings. But the law allows it.
In my village, a boy has run away with a girl of the village with the said intention of marrying her. Since, this is prohibited socially, villagers approached the police to prevent this marriage, but the police find them helpless in the face of legal provisions in this respect. The mental turmoil is going on in the whole village which is spreading to nearby villages too.
Some persons argue in favor of such marriages saying that many boys and girls of a village are often found to have sexual relationships, so why not allowing intra-village marriages. The counter argument is that all such sexual relationships are considered illegitimate in the eyes of the society, though there is no provision in law to treat them illegitimate. Thus, law is limited while the social norm is exhaustive and continues to be valid. Therefore, even if these relationships are converted to marriages, shall remain illegitimate in the eyes of the society without any regard to the laws in this respect.
Intra-gotra Marriages
In India, every community is divided into castes, with every caste having a multiplicity of sub-castes, called ‘gotras’. A gotra indicates the name of the original village of a person to which his/her ancestors might have belonged centuries ago. For this reason, all persons belonging to a gotra are considered to be belonging to a large family with its parts residing at thousands of locations now. Therefore, marriages within a gotra have been traditionally prohibited as a social norm. Again the law is silent over the issue. In a case regarding such a marriage, the judiciary, however, has allowed such a marriage with total disregard to the social norm.
Honour killings
India has a tradition of arranged marriages within castes only. Although, this tradition is giving way to love marriages in urban societies of the country, rural people still continue to follow this tradition, by and large. For this reason, love affairs of youths from villages are not liked by parents of the lovers and beloveds, particularly the latter. They see it as a great dishonor to their whole family if some girl chooses to marry a boy of her choice, particularly, of some other caste.
In many such cases, the family members are so much estranged that they choose to kill the girl to save the family honor. In many cases, even the boy chosen by the girl is also killed. In many such cases, the boy commits suicide after knowing that his beloved is killed. In some cases, families of the boy and girl join hands in killing the both. Many such killers surrender before the law and confess their killing operation. Such killings are termed as ‘honour killings’, and the Indian judiciary has shown it strong displeasure at such incidents.
A Law against Humanity
Muslims in India are legally provided a privilege of each man marrying up to 4 women, a tradition carried forward from beastly past of humanity, when might was right. This privilege was granted to please the community by some leaders of the nation for political reasons at the time of getting independence from British Empire in 1947. If we see it in the mirror of the whole society or even the sober Muslim society of the nation, this provision is generally opposed, hence, is against the social norm, apart from being against women forming 50 percent of humanity. But no political leader dares to raise his/her voice for a change for political expediency. This provision is called a personal law of the Muslim community. It is when no other community in the nation has been granted any such provision of personal laws.
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