Citizenship enhanced

The significance of the Supreme Court directive, asking the government to compulsorily register all marriages, is huge. And precisely because its implications go beyond the norms governing marriage. If a person or transaction does not exist in the state8217;s records, it is tantamount to not existing. Period.

This is obvious enough when one considers the area of marriage. Any exercise of rights, any attempt at reform, any intervention to address bigamy, child marriage/trafficking or matrimonial rights, would presuppose a process of marriage registration 8212; the social and legal recognition that the marriage exists. Yet the Indian state, apart from that brief post-independence moment when it sought to correct some of the injustices of the past by codifying Hindu law and enacting the Special Marriage Act, 1954, has pretty much relegated the crucial institution of marriage to the private domain for politically expedient reasons. In fact, at least three governments 8212; Narasimha Rao8217;s Congress government in 1994, the H.D. Deve Gowda8217;s Janata Dal government in 1996, and the Atal Bihari Vajpayee8217;s BJP government in 2000 8212; had resisted the NHRC proposal of making registration of marriages compulsory, although some progressive states had already legislated on the issue. So here again the courts deserve our gratitude for stepping into an important breach caused by executive ennui. Birth registration is a related and equally important process. A child8217;s constitutional right to education, health and social security, hinges crucially on the official recording of its existence.

There are innumerable other sectors in India which demand compulsory registration. There are no mechanisms, to take one example, for the registration of workers in the informal sector. Because they don8217;t exist in records, they are consigned to an area of darkness, robbed of a decent wage and a modicum of security. This is finally about counting every citizen in order to make every citizen count.