NEW DELHI -- For a country that boasts the 21st-century trappings of a space program, nuclear energy and state-of-the-art communications, child marriage is a shocking sociological phenomenon. Every day children in India are marched to community halls and forced into lifelong relationships that hold little meaning for them. Many do not have the faintest notion about matrimony.
In the northern Indian state of Rajasthan, for instance, even babies in arms are wedded. The other week, 3,000 girls and boys who were barely into their teens tied the knot in Raipur, capital of the central Indian state of Chhatisgarh, in a centuries-old custom, in a ritual that has become an annual atrocity.
Nobody can disagree that the practice is nasty. To push two physiologically and emotionally immature individuals into wedlock is a brutal way of looking at relationships. Sociologists say that marriage even between the most compatible is a road full of obstacles. One reason for this is the complexity of man-woman intimacy in which each has his or her own set of values and, more pertinently, expectations from the union.