The missing women that ‘Delhi Crime’ and official statistics fail to acknowledge

The new season of the Netflix series Delhi Crime explores the issue of missing women who have been trafficked. The series draws attention to the very real problem of women being trapped under the guise of being offered jobs and then sold to clients.

However, many viewers do not realise that the official data fail to specifically recognise a significant category of women who are classified as missing: those whose whereabouts may not be known because they have eloped to get married to partners of their choice.

If their families do not approve of these unions, they often register a missing person’s complaint.

As a consequence, the law labels women who have eloped as victims even though they are actually autonomous individuals.

That is evident from the National Crimes Records Bureau data for 2023. It shows that 113,564 women were abducted and kidnapped but does not list how many women have been classified as missing because they have eloped.

In researcher Neetika Vishwanath’s 2018 study on fast track courts and 15 police stations in Lucknow, she found that in most cases where a woman elopes, an FIR of kidnapping and abduction is lodged against the man.

Vishwanath points out that it is not the consent of the girl that matters, but rather that of her parents, who attempt to prove that she was a minor eloping for marriage.

Symbols of ‘izzat’

Historian Uma Chakravarti, in her work, “From fathers to husbands: of love, death and marriage in North India” notes that women who elope for inter-caste marriages are seen as violating social and familial codes of honour or izzat.

This is why relatives often threaten women who want to exercise their right to marry partners whom they choose. If such women begin the process of getting married under the Special Marriage Act, the law mandates that their details must be publicly notified, leaving them vulnerable to violence. As a consequence, women are forced to “go missing” to register their marriages in places other than their home towns.

These social attitudes are contrary to the judgment of the Supreme Court judgment in the Lata Singh vs State of UP in 2006, which reaffirmed the right of two adults to marry partners of their choice.

“This is a free and democratic country, and once a person becomes a major, he or she can marry whomever he/she likes,” the court said.

Nonetheless, exercising their right to choice is often a struggle for women marrying for love.

Families often claim that such women gone missing after being kidnapped as a minors, making their consent to a marriage invalid. The authorities sometimes force women to undergo a medical procedure known as an ossification test to cast doubts on the fact that they are actually adults.

Legal scholar Pratiksha Baxi writes that families try to claim a right over women who have eloped by using Article 32 of the Constitution – habeas corpus, a remedy aimed at protecting an individual against illegal detention. In such cases, families usually argue that adult women eloping to marry are minors or are of unsound mind and so cannot make autonomous decisions for themselves.

Under pressure

My PhD research on runaway marriages among inter-caste and inter-faith couples in Delhi and Lucknow shows that women violating the social sanctions of religion and caste face the prospect of being questioned by the state authorities or communal vigilante groups.

Over the last decade, the implementation of anti-conversion legislations in Bharatiya Janata Party-ruled states such as Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Uttarakhand and Rajasthan has shown that women converting to their husband’s religion to marry face the prospect of the state stepping act as the “parens patriae” – acting as a guardian on the assumption that the woman is not able to care for herself.

Another layer has been added to the narrative because of the claims of love jihad, the Hindutva conspiracy theory that maintains that Muslim men have been luring Hindu women into marriage solely with the intention of converting them to Islam. The state treats them as gullible individuals who have been duped.

The state must move decisively beyond the outdated notion of treating all women as victims. Official data must clearly distinguish between women who have been abducted and those who have made marriages of choice. Consensual marriages must be protected.

This would be helped by applying the category of missing women judiciously, avoiding conflation with cases that do not involve actual disappearance.

Manisha Chachra is a political scientist specialising in gender, marriage, and political studies, with a PhD from Jawaharlal Nehru University focused on inter-faith and inter-caste runaway marriages.