How come no one ever asks the women

Our crackdown against child marriage has entered its second week with 3015 arrests made so far The drive against this social evil will continue The positive side is that now people are coming out and surrendering before the policerdquo tweeted the Chief Minister of Assam in February as his administration began to arrest huge numbers of men under the Prevention of Child Marriage Act and POCSOWomen are coming before the police not to surrender but to protest to plead in helplessness and anguish The crackdown is a retrospective onemdashtargeting marriages which took place some years agoToday these people are adults with children POCSO can mean 20 years in prison Reports say many of the men arrested are daily wage labourers and sole earners in their families The arrests leave women children and old people dependent on them utterly vulnerable Two women have taken their lives We can hardly ignore that many of Assamrsquos poorest are Muslim currently also persecuted under citizenship law regimesWhat is a social evil Is rendering poor families helpless pushing them into greater poverty and misery a social evil No one will ask this Elites stigmatise the poor for certain practices with great alacrityHow often have you heard someone say ldquothese uneducated people are a disgrace to societyrdquo as if it is the fault of the poor that they are not educated rather than of a disgraceful systemThe poor and the privileged ldquomarry offrdquo their daughters for some common reasonsmdashldquosecurityrdquo ldquofuturerdquo ldquotraditionrdquo The poor marry them younger primarily because of poverty Elites can comfortably access the advantages of education nutrition and social mobility to enable that thing called agency which helps women marry later It is easy for elites to act like they are not implicated in gendered practices and blame others for being backward This helps them feel they are lsquobetterrsquo when in fact they are simply better off What colonial rulers once did to lsquoprimitive Indiansrsquo elites now do to poorer Indiansmdashcontrol through manufactured moral superiorityAs researchers such as Mary John have shown early marriage is linked to poverty underdevelopment hard times like famines and pandemics or wars and communal violence Research also demonstrates that where girls are able to access schooling and public health the age of marriage goes up organically As per the latest statistics about 74 per cent of rural women in Assam have not completed even 10 years of schooling And yet the Assam government has announced the shutting down of almost 1700 staterun schools as recommended by the NITI Ayogrsquos school rationalisation plan fancy term for no public education The state creates the conditions for early marriage and then punishes people for it After all who has time to address systemic issues when elections need to be fought baba The CM has announced plans to continue the drive till the 2026 state electionsIf men in power care so much for the welfare of women why donrsquot they ask women what they want or need instead of deciding on their behalf That would mean recognising the consent of both women and the poor Masculine power works by domination not care and consent and to serve its own image not the lives of others No wonder it always leaves the women who are being ldquosavedrdquo worse off than beforeParomita Vohra is an awardwinning Mumbaibased filmmaker writer and curator working with fiction and nonfiction Reach her at paromitavohramiddaycom