Why Shouldn’t Minimum Age Of Marriage For Men & Women Be The Same?

New Delhi: While marriages in which the man is younger than the woman are happening in society, they are not widely and conventionally acceptable. The legal age for marrying in India continues to be 18 for a woman and 21 for a man.

A few months back, a local leader in Delhi sparked off a debate on the radio when he defended the law saying by 18 a woman attains puberty and is therefore ready to bear children. Little does ‘Mr XYZ’ know that girls attain puberty even at 12 and 14. By that logic, should the accepted age of getting married brought down even more?

Now, the Supreme Court has agreed to examine a transfer petition pending before the Rajasthan High Court seeking gender-neutral uniform minimum age for marriage. The petition has been filed by BJP leader and senior advocate Ashwini Upadhyay. A similar petition is also pending before the Delhi High Court, as per a report in India Today.

It may be recalled that Prime Minister Narendra Modi, in his Independence Day speech in 2020, said the government had set up a committee to review the minimum age of marriage for women.

The law

The minimum age for marriage in India was last amended in 1978 when it was set at 18 for women and 21 for men. Petitioner Upadhyay argued that this legal provision is based on “patriarchal stereotypes” and a wrong notion that women mature earlier than men.

The logic for setting 18 years as the minimum age for marriage is derived from the Indian Majority Act 1875. This law makes the age of majority gender-neutral and says that an individual attains the age of majority at 18.

Patriarchal stereotypes

“There is no scientific backing for different ages for marriage except for the distinction based on patriarchal stereotypes,” the petition filed in the Supreme Court argued. It advocated that the age of 21 years be fixed as the uniform minimum age for marriage for both women and men.

The idea of gender-neutral age for marriage was supported by the Law Commission in a consultation paper that called the differential marriage age for women and men as the perpetuation of a “stereotype that wives must be younger than their husbands”.

What activists say

Women’s rights activists have rejected the age-old notion that women mature faster. The UN Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) called for the abolition of laws based on the assumption that men and women have different physical or intellectual rate of growth. India ratified CEDAW in 1993.

Elsewhere in the world

USA and UK

18 years for both men and women

Japan

20 years for both men and women

Nepal

After 21 for both men and women