India needs to know how the West deals with live-in relationships

The tragic end of Bollywood actress Jiah Khan, a global girl born to Indo-American Muslim parents and educated in Britain who came to India for a career, has expectedly got itself flagged in public mind as yet another case of abetting suicide. Such a possibility was obvious as Jiah’s mother produced her daughter’s alleged suicide note, bristling with barbs aimed at an unnamed person. Assuming that the person could be none other than her boyfriend Suraj Pancholi, son of actor-couple Aditya Pancholi and Zarina Wahab, police picked him up for interrogation.

Whether Pancholi Jr did abet Jiah to hang herself is a matter to be established in court. Nor is this charge, under Section 306 of IPC, uncommon. But what cries for policymakers’ attention is a part of the prosecution story that says the two were in a live-in relationship for quite some time. Indians still tend to think of marriage as the one and only form of unit that a man and a woman can share. In 2008, the then law minister HR Bharadwaj went to the extent of reminding parliament that a new legislation to regulate live-in relationships wasn’t necessary as its occurrence was statistically insignificant. But over-dependence on statistics is deceptive in India, a land where too many cultures co-exist.

When it comes to marriage, many of the new generation of urban Indians often calculate the responsibility that goes with it with much more diligence than their parents. Living-in is a convenient sub-marital relationship that may or may not lead to a legal marriage. But it leaves open the option of parting ways without undergoing the hassle of a divorce, which may be compounded by a costly settlement obligation. Social workers aver that the phenomenon is common not only in white collar professions like IT and entertainment sectors but is growing even faster among migrant labour.
 

The West, where man-woman relations began changing over a 100 years ago, however, does not leave live-in relations unregulated. France has a system of “civil solidarity pact” that a ‘steady’ couple of any sex must sign at a designated place. The ‘pact’ enlists the obligations of severance.

Subject to that, either of the parties is entitled to terminate the relationship after serving a notice for usually a period of three months. In India, the only safeguard against ill-treatment of an unmarried partner — a situation that Jiah Khan described in her suicide note with the stinging words, “you have cheated me”— is a section in the Domestic Violence Act of 2005 which defines domestic relationship as between “two person” through a relationship “in the nature of marriage”. But that is at best a safeguard against physical violence.

What remain below the law’s radar are the acts of emotional cruelty, like leaving the partner to live on the edge, or of expropriation of joint assets by, say, using the power of being a nominee. These are risks that live-in couples often experience in India. That informal togetherness does not prove enduring is the view of a relationship counsellor in Delhi; she says 9  out of 10 live-in couples who visit her for counseling will “never reach the marriage altar”. She calls the relationship “many nights stand”.

Instead of taking an anachronistic, and exalted, view of marriage, the government should regulate other forms of pairing too, and do it in the least bureaucratic manner. Responsibility must come with more sexual liberty.

The author is a current affairs analyst.