A MARRIAGE AT HALF THE PRICE
Indian politician launches bill to limit lavish spending on weddings,
Shaken by incidents that underscore India’s social pressure on families to spend crippling amounts of money on their children’s marriages, Ranjeet Ranjan is pushing for a law to limit how much can be spent on weddings and the number of guests attending, writes Foreign Correspondent Amrit Dhillon
When Indian politician Ranjeet Ranjan and her son Sarthak attended a relative’s Punjabi wedding three years ago, they were struck by the opulence and extravagance of the affair.
Then 17, Sarthak turned to her and said: “Mama, please don’t spend in this insane way when I get married, OK?” Last year, a worker in Mrs Ranjan’s constituency office in Bihar state’s Supaul district told her that he was going to have to spend 500,000 rupees (Dh27,560) to get his daughter married. His salary was 10,000 rupees a month.
The two incidents set Mrs Ranjan thinking.
The result was a private member’s bill which she plans to introduce in the next session of the lower parliament on March 9, limiting wedding expenses for all Indians to 500,000 rupees and restricting the number of guests.
If a family spends more than this amount, it will have to donate 10 per cent of the surplus to a fund that will help to finance the marriages of girls from poor families.
“The root cause of most of our social evils is parents having to spend vast amounts of money on weddings and the dowry. We need to stop it urgently because the middle class, lower middle class and poor families – 90 per cent of our population – are suffering,” says Mrs Ranjan. “Weddings are meant to be celebrations, not obscene spec- tacles. For miles and miles, you have tables loaded with Thai, Chinese, Continental, Italian, Vietnamese and Indian food. People are so full after the starters that most of them leave. Think of all the food that’s wasted.”
There is no denying that weddings have become extreme displays of wealth in India. Wedding costs are almost entirely the responsibility of the bride’s family and are used to display the family’s wealth and status. Families can spend decades paying off debts from weddings.
Even in rural India, poor families sell precious land or end up in debt for the rest of their lives to be able to throw an elaborate wedding party for their daughters.
“It’s OK for the 3 per cent of Indians who want to burn their money on obnoxiously vulgar weddings, but we need to think about the vast majority of Indians who are oppressed by this custom,” says Ranjana Kumari, head of the centre for social research in New Delhi. Weddings, and the accompanying dowry, are also why boys outnumber girls in India. Afraid of the money they will have to spend on their daughter’s wedding, many couples opt to abort a female foetus.
The practice of female foeticide has resulted in a skewed gender ratio of 918 girls born for every 1,000 boys, according to government statistics for 2011.
India’s rich and the political class have set the standards for extravagance. When mining baron and former minister Gali Janardhan Reddy’s daughter was married in December, he paid for a replica of an ancient kingdom to be erected in the grounds of a palace in the south Indian state of Karnataka. Bollywood stars performed for the 50,000 guests during the three-day celebration, while 3,000 security guards were hired to safeguard them. The wedding cost 5 billion rupees, with the bridal jewellery alone costing 900 million rupees.
In 2004, the northern state of Jammu and Kashmir was alarmed at how the rice and mutton used in wedding feasts – it is normal to have at least 30 dishes for a Kashmiri banquet – had caused food shortages.
The state government invoked a rule that same year to limit the bride and groom to 50 guests each, and stipulated how much rice and meat could be used.
That rule was only temporary, however, and never became law, which is what Mrs Ranjan is seeking to make her Marriages (Compulsory Registration and Prevention of Wasteful Expenditure) Bill. On Tuesday, the government in Jammu and Kashmir issued another temporary rule to curb lavish weddings. This time, it stipulated that the number of guests had to be limited to 500 on the bride’s side and 400 on the groom’s, while only seven main dishes and two desserts could be served. “Young Indians support me. They tell me we have to change our mentality. Someone has to start but no one wants to make the first move,” Mrs Ranjan said.
Several editorials in the Indian media have pointed out that, if passed, the bill will destroy the wedding industry – worth about US$ 40 billion (Dh 147bn) to $50bn and growing at about 25 to 30 per cent every year.
Critics say that enforcing the spending limit of 500,000 rupees will not only bring more government interference into private matters, but will also be difficult to enforce.
Mrs Ranjan disagrees, pointing to how child marriages – once equally entrenched in Indian society – were eventually banned and hardly occur today. “Once my bill becomes the law, I will be giving a powerful weapon to families,” she says.