20-year-old woman who was married off at just 11 months old is fighting to annul the marriage

                          Santadevi Meghwal                    (C) Nilima Pathak/Gulf News

At the age of 16, Santadevi Meghwal discovered that her parents had entered an arranged marriage for her when she was just 11-months to the ‘husband’ she has since described as crude and aggressive. When her would-be husband and in-laws showed up at her home in the western state of Rajasthan, she refused to leave her house. In addition, the husband’s family wanted her to abandon her education and become a housewife, which is not the life Meghwal, a college student studying to become a teacher, has in mind.
Apparently, the tradition in her village is that when an elderly relative dies, a child in the family has to get married within 13 days and thus, she was a victim of tradition. Though the marriage function is a small affair and the child bride and groom are only made to sit next to each other, the understanding is that a formal wedding would take place once the girl becomes an adolescent.
Because of Meghwal’s refusal to go ahead with the arranged marriage, her “husband” went on to stalk her when she went to college and threaten her, actions that eventually led her parents to support her decision to reject the marriage, even after her village’s council, called a caste panchayat, urged her family to pay a lofty fine of 1.6 million rupees (over $25,000) and banished them from the village in lieu of sending her to live with the man, who is now 28.
According to Gulf News, the practice of child marriage is widespread in Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh, Jharkhand, Bihar and Chhattisgarh. These states have an average age of marriage below the legal limit of 18 for girls and 21 for boys. According to the 2001 census, about 1.5 million girls were married when they were under 15. While child marriage is banned in India, it is not ‘void’ and has to be annulled, should either partner wish to do so.
Meghwal has since turned to Kriti Bharti, a child rights activist with the Saarthi Trust NGO, for help. According to NDTV, they are working to have the marriage annulled by mutual consent and planned to pursue legal action concerning the fine threatened by the village council.