An Indian village has banned unmarried women from using mobile phones for fear they will arrange forbidden marriages that are often punished by death, a local official said today.
- A Kolkata slum dweller talks on a mobile in India, where the phones have become more affordable/Photo credit: Jayanta Shaw/Reuters/Corbis
The Lank village
council decided unmarried boys
could use mobile phones, but only under parental supervision, said one
council member, Satish Tyagi. Local women's rights group criticised the measure as backward and unfair.
Marriages between members of the same clan are forbidden under Hindu custom in some parts of northern India, where unions are traditionally arranged by families. In
conservative rural areas, families sometimes mete out extreme punishments, including "honour killings", for those who violate marriage taboos. In some cases, village
councils themselves have ordered the punishments, though police often intervene to stop them.
The Lank village
council feared young men and women were secretly calling one another to arrange to elope.
Last month, 34
couples eloped in Muzaffarnagar district, where Lank is located, in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, police said. Among the
couples who did so, eight "honour killings" have been reported in the past month, police said.
"Three girls were beheaded by the male members of their family after they eloped," said the police assistant director general, Brij Lal, in the state capital of Lucknow.
Rulings by village
councils – called panchayats and
comprising village elders selected by the
community – are not legally binding in India but are seen as the will of the local
community, and those who flout them risk being ostracised. In Uttar Pradesh, panchayats are particularly powerful and have declared that boys and girls of the same clan are essentially siblings.
The mobile phone ban for unmarried women is part of a wider, regional effort to curb intra-clan marriage among the 3 million people of western Uttar Pradesh, Tyagi said. The Lank
council ruling, which applies to around 50,000 people, is being
considered by
councils in nearby villages.
"The village
council members feel that cell phones helped in the elopement of young
couples," he said by mobile from Muzaffarnagar.
Most marriages in the region are still arranged by the parents, sometimes without the
couple meeting before the wedding. But young people are mingling more, with more women in schools and offices and increased access to the internet. They are also watching more western TV shows that focus on independence and individuality, sociologists say.
Mobile phones, meanwhile, have be
come so
common and affordable that even city slum dwellers, rural day labourers and children have them. Across the nation of 1.2 billion people, there were more than 670m mobile phone
connections as of August, with the number growing by nearly 20m a month, ac
cording to government figures.
The local women's rights group, Disha, said the ban demonstrated the
councils' archaic mindset, and warned that it
could put girls at a disadvantage in other areas of life.
"These help in easy
communication, which in turn helps these youths to get jobs. One cannot discriminate in the use of these
contraptions on the basis of sex," said the Disha president, KN Tiwari.
