On 25 March 2023, under the new budget announcement, the Government of Rajasthan released a notification stating that the financial aid provided to couples entering into inter-caste marriages be doubled under the existing state scheme ‘Savitaben Ambedkar Antarjatiya Vivah Protsahan Yojana’, from Rs 5 lacs to Rs 10 lacs. The scheme was first put into place in 2006 to encourage inter-caste marriages between Scheduled Castes (SCs) and other non-Scheduled Caste groups among Hindus, with the objective of providing institutional support, doing away with the practice of untouchability and promoting harmony among social groups.?

The announcement has triggered a lot of conversations and has been rightly applauded by some sections of society who believe that the right to choose one’s partner is fundamental in nature and must receive state protection. However, this is not the first time that the Rajasthan government has taken lead in recognising the extremely visible caste conflicts and the brutal history of (dis)honour crimes in the region by providing an institutional remedy to provide state support and protection to marriages of choices, financially or otherwise. In 2019, the state assembly passed the controversial ‘The Rajasthan Prohibition of Interference with the Freedom of Matrimonial Alliances (in the Name of Honour and Tradition) Bill’ which is yet to receive presidential assent to become a full-fledged law.

While the government’s attempts at recognising the political salience of such matters considered essentially ‘intimate’ and ‘personal’ in nature should receive appreciation, there is an increasing need towards reading their impact on the larger socio-political changes taking place in the country owing to the presence of a socially-conservative government at the Centre.

Choices ‘Questioned’, ‘Love’ Criminalized and the Changing Socio-Political Realities

Marriages of choice, both inter-caste and inter-faith have historically remained contested at the level of society as well as the state. However, it is with the rise of the ruling party to power that the existing legal-institutional mechanisms have been significantly altered and the gradual process of widening rift between social groups and religious communities has been accelerated. A larger project of ‘criminalisation of love’ has been set into motion which finds its manifestation in the way a farcical narrative of love jihad has been peddled to discourage and sensationalize inter-faith love alliances. A number of BJP-ruled states including Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh have put into place stringent mechanisms in the name of anti-conversion laws to label men belonging to certain religious groups as ‘committing crimes’ against the majority community by breaching the authority that the latter holds over its women. In such a context, the Rajasthan government’s scheme for encouraging inter-caste marriages can be questioned on the grounds of it covering only Hindu
inter-caste marriages into its fold, thereby discriminating against minority communities, as well as Scheduled Castes among other religious groups.

While the Congress government in Rajasthan increased incentives to encourage marriages of choice, INC MLAs in Gujarat joined hands with their counterparts in BJP to demand that parental consent must be made compulsory for all kinds of choice-based love marriages. Such a demand was made based on the increasing cases of crimes against women by their ‘independently’ chosen partners. While the conversations on crimes against women are hushed up when committed by members of the privileged caste and religious communities, the smallest attempts at transgressing the socially-defined boundaries on part of the women are put under critical political scrutiny to further police their choices, thereby designating them as incapable of making rational decisions for themselves. Isolated cases where women have suffered at the hands of their chosen partners have been negatively symbolised to ‘set examples’ in order to project all socially transgressive love and marital alliances as ‘socially injurious’.

What does the history of such schemes tell us?

In such a charged-up socio-political background, some light must also be thrown on the impact that existing schemes have had in creating, enabling or disabling conditions for people willing to undertake inter-caste marriages. The implementation record of Dr. Ambedkar Scheme for Social Integration through inter-caste marriages, which is a centrally sponsored scheme to promote caste exogamous marriages, reveals how deeply held casteist attitudes and beliefs creep into the institutional machinery to dilute the impact that progressive schemes like these can have. In a study conducted by the Indian Institute of Public Administration in 2020, many of the inter-caste couples who claimed benefit under the scheme argued that the bureaucracy itself is deeply mired in various forms of casteism, thereby making the entire process of availing it extremely troublesome. Moreover, many couples also resent the compulsory recommendation of a local representative (MP or MLA) to get benefits of the scheme as a threat to their security, as in innumerable such cases local representatives themselves are involved in hounding couples who eloped under social pressures.

While Rajasthan’s initiative is a welcome step in the otherwise pessimistic saga of regressive legislation and policies, there are a number of issues which still need to be highlighted. Firstly, the delinking between inter-faith and inter-caste marriages is an important one and needs further scrutiny. While Congress government(s) have successively posed themselves as ‘secular’, why have there been no such schemes at par with the one just discussed which provides equal incentives for cross-religious marriages to take place? Secondly, in the region where caste and religious rifts are widening fast, can reliance only on certain kinds of monetary incentives effectively tackle the larger ideological refashioning that is taking place along the lines of socially conservative narratives? Despite the presence of innumerable schemes sponsored by both, the state and central governments, the percentage of inter-caste marriages remains abysmally low around 4.5 per cent, according to the second Indian Human Development Survey.?

While some still argue that this scheme must be seen as an addition to the series of ‘populist gimmicks’ being thrown by Rajasthan Chief Minister Ashok Gehlot, the only ray of hope is the fact that at least the realisation of the ‘right to choice’ still forms a relevant electoral question to be politically pursued by any of the incumbent state governments.

(Khushbu Sharma is a PhD Scholar at the Centre for Political Studies, JNU. She can be found on Twitter @Khushbu68906378. Mahesh Choudhary is a freelance journalist and researcher. He can be found on Twitter @mahesh999555)