55 couples get married en masse in Buldana district

No brass band. No loudspeaker. No gilt and gold. At the end of the rituals though, everyone joins the mass prayers to bless the newlyweds. There is a modest lunch for all and soon after, the bride and groom seek the blessings of their parents. They then quietly set out on a new life together.

In barely an hour or so, 55 couples have entered wedlock in a shamiyana across the Sofibaug mosque in Nandura. The quazi Hafiz Intishaam Hussain is brisk with the khudba or nikah rituals.

He reads out the akda (contract) before asking every groom present in the pandal if he agrees to marry his bride whose consent has already been sought. “Kubul hai,” every groom says thrice.
“This is the way it has been for a while now,” says Haji Muzammil Khan, “short and simple.”

Debt crisis
Muzammil heads the Ashrafi Education Society and the minority cell of the Buldana district Congress unit. For six years now, he’s been holding the mass wedding ceremony for abjectly poor families, mostly Muslims and adivasis, in rural Buldana.

The agricultural crisis, particularly in cotton, has hit not only the farmers of the area but also the weavers. Most parents are in no position to hold lavish weddings for their children.

“This will help reduce borrowing,” says Syyed Fahimuddin, a Nandura native who teaches at a college in Kalyan.

These weddings stand in sharp contrast to the big fat Indian wedding, which are estimated to cost, on average, Rs5-15 lakh. But in Vidarbha, few can afford splashy weddings. In fact, rich and middle class families in the region too have started opting for mass weddings after social organisations ran campaigns to popularise them.

Kishor Tiwari of the Vidarbha Jan Andolan Samiti, a farmers’ movement, says the financial pressures of hosting a wedding and securing dowry have pushed many to suicide.

Government scheme
A state government door-to-door survey in 2006 found that more than three lakh families could not afford to get their daughters married. One in every nine had expressed interest in the government’s mass marriage scheme.

The scheme has funded the weddings of more than 33,000 couples in four years, says the divisional commissioner of Amravati, Dinesh Waghmare. The government gives Rs10,000 directly to the couples as part of the Shubh-Mangal scheme. It was first mooted as a part of the chief minister’s relief package for the six most suicide-affected districts of Vidarbha and then extended to the whole state.

That apart, the government gives every couple Rs2,000 for small expenses.

Muzammil says his extended family contributes Rs5,000 per couple to help them meet additional expenses. They also chip in to buy a bed and mattress for each of the newly-wed couples.
Political support

For impoverished parents, these small acts of generosity mean a lot. “I did not have to borrow any money for the weddings of my two daughters because of this help,” says Durani Khan Habib Khan, a 55-year-old farm labourer from Wadgaon Hashampur village, 40 km from Nandura. Durani had spent more than Rs30,000 on the wedding of the eldest of his three daughters.

“Many parents have to resort to selling their houses or jewellery to raise money for weddings,” says Waheeda Begum whose daughter Bilkhis Anjum also got married at Nandura. “But a mass wedding saved us from such desperation.” She says that her neighbours and relatives too have realised the advantages of small weddings.

Quick to catch on to the mileage available at such events, top politicians, MPs, and MLAs are now scrambling to hold mass weddings.

Last week, the Khamgaon Congress MLA Dilip Sananda — his family is among the big moneylenders of the region — arranged for the wedding of more than 550 couples. The ceremony was attended by former chief minister Vilasrao Deshmukh. In Gondia, civil aviation minister Praful Patel has hosted two such ceremonies. The irony of course is that political leaders who preach austerity measures to farmers spend a fortune at their own family weddings.