Indian Child Bride Annulment
Indian Child Bride Annulment, Eighteen-year-old Laxmi Sargara found out she was married when her parents-in-law came to tell her that in a few days time they’d come back to take her to live with them.
It was a few days before Akshaya Tritiya, an auspicious day for child marriages in India, when many parents in the poorest areas of the country promise their children to other families.
Sargara was just one-year-old when she was married to Rakesh, then a three-year-old child from another village in the Jodphur district of Rajasthan.
Now 18, Sargara, was expected to go willingly. Instead, she ran to her brother in Jodphur city for help, and together they went to see Kriti Bharti, a social worker from the Sarathi Trust.
“She said, “I don’t want to go, I want to die first.” She was not in that situation to accept all these things, to accept her in-laws, to accept her husband,” Bharti said. “She was very frightened.”
Within days — on the very day she was due to go and live with her husband and his parents — the couple signed an official document confirming their marriage was annulled.
My objective is to rehabilitate her socially, mentally and she can live her life happily ever after
Kriti Bharti
Sargara is unable to read the document, she is illiterate, but she was “very happy,” Bharti said.
Her former husband Rakesh, who drives earth-movers for a living, took some convincing.
“He told me the marriage had been conducted properly, she’s my wife, I’m going to take her,” Bharti said. “Then I told him that it was not a marriage, that the rituals are done by the parents, not by them, (and) they have not promised to each other all things that were in the ritual. Then he understood that this is not a marriage.”
The marriage wasn’t annulled in the traditional sense of the word, because under Indian law child marriages are not legal. (CNN)
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