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If love is a red, red rose for boys and girls, it is a red, red rag for many parents who would like to tame the rampaging hearts of their children, if ever they had a chance. But the territories of love have no laws and rules, and when love makes its own rules, can a government frame a law to regulate it? Gujarat Chief Minister Bhupendra Patel says he will try, and will study a proposal to make parental consent mandatory for loving couples to marry.
He has not said whether it will be part of the uniform civil code his party is working on. The idea was aired at a community event of Patidars. The Chief Minister spoke there as a community leader, a ‘khap’ chief, and not as a leader of a democratic society where the Constitution gives lovers the fundamental right to marry. Communities have often looked at love between girl and boy as a threat and disapproved of it. The Patel proposal is another sign of the wish to take our democratic society back to the old community. That is also taking the ‘love jihad’ war cry to a new level.
While love unites girl and boy, families and societies have considered it disruptive and subversive. Communities are patriarchal and feudal, and are held together by bonds of religion, caste, clan, etc., and values based on conventions and traditions. Parents consider children falling in love as rebellion, and as challenge to authority. It is even ingratitude: haven’t we brought them up and is this the reward? Should the girl run away with a boy we haven’t even seen, or should the wrong girl come and rule the family? Basically, it is the community trying to tame individuals.
But parents do not figure in most of the world’s love stories, whether they ended in tragedy or whether the girl and boy lived happily ever after. Whenever parents did enter the story, the ending was not great for the girl and the boy, as with Anarkali and Salim, Romeo and Juliet, or even Sati and Lord Shiva.
Patel’s proposal has consequences. If parental consent becomes mandatory, to avoid a future heartbreak, the boy and the girl will have to seek their consent to fall in love in the first place. The parents may have to consult the horoscope to grant consent. But these are future complications. Patel, in any case, cannot win this for himself, the community or the party. The Constitution is with the girl and the boy. If that too fails, their own constitution — the throbbing heart, the sparkling eye, and the joy of being lost in love — will help them beat any Patel in power.