Police nab over 2,000 men for illegal child marriages

GUWAHATI, INDIA >> Indian police have arrested more than 2,000 men in a crackdown on illegal child marriages involving girls under the age of 18 in a northeastern state. Those arrested this week included more than 50 Hindu priests and Muslim clerics for allegedly performing marriages for underage girls in Assam, state police chief Gyanendra Pratap Singh said.

“We have so far arrested 2,169 men based on 4,074 registered police cases involving a total of about 8,000 men,” said Singh.

Many cases of child marriage in Assam go unreported. Only 155 cases of child marriages in the state were registered in 2021, and 138 in 2020, according to the National Crime Records Bureau.