Definitions can wreak havoc on principles and provide a hundred escape routes for those who want them. The Supreme Court has decided to look into the raging confusion created by the inconsistencies among laws regarding age of consent, child marriage and rape of minors. The immediate context of the proposed re-examination was a petition requesting the Supreme Court to set aside the judgments of the Delhi and Andhra Pradesh high courts, which had recently validated under-18 marriages. The problem is that even when a law decrees 18 as the ?age of consent? or, alternatively, as the minimum marriageable age, it does not say whether such a marriage, once performed, can be made invalid. The high court had tried to seek a way out by saying that if a 15 year-old girl, who has reached the ?age of discretion?, marries of her own free will, it will not be considered illegal. The judgment may have been realistic, but its dangers were multiple. Child marriage and trafficking are both widespread throughout the country. These are caused by poverty and regressive cultural attitudes, and are aided by the confusions in the law. There is not even agreement about the legal age of ?child? and ?minor?; the laws are uncertain whether child and minor are the same phenomenon or different ones.

The Supreme Court is attacking the problem at the root, confronting the knot of conflicting definitions and odd silences and trying to unravel it with the help of the Law Commission. It has stayed the high courts? judgments on the teenage marriages while it looks into the inconsistencies. One that is immediately obvious concerns rape of a minor: raping a girl under 18 according to one law, and under 16 according to another, is a crime, but sex with an underage wife is not. The sanctity of marriage is taken for granted; the question that must be asked is which marriages are to be sanctified in the first place. The Supreme Court?s recent decision to make registration of marriages compulsory would help reduce child marriages if monitoring could be ensured. The question is ultimately of political will ? to safeguard the health, education, economic security and happiness of women and children, and not the interests of trafficking networks and culturally primitive political supporters and fund-raisers. An unambiguous law has truly become urgent, but the change in attitude among society and the administration is as important.