Inter-caste marriages are still heavily frowned upon by many communities in India. But in Surat, 42 women from Orissa will marry into the Patel community on October 16 in a mass marriage, which was approved by the community and organised by the Samast Patidar Samaj (SPS).
Why is it community approved? Because thanks to many, many cases of female infanticide within the community, there just aren’t enough women left in the Patel community for the men to marry. So they have no choice but to marry women from outside the community.
The Patels (the Patidar community) have been in the news days because of their agitation for reservation in Gujarat, to be classified as a backward class community. They publicised their protests and self-immolations with pride, revelling in the revolt. But this mass marriage is something nobody is talking about.
The 42 women from Orissa who will marry into the Patel community hail from the Kurmi community. They chose their husbands among the most ‘eligible’ of Patel bachelors in a two-day swayamvar held in Surat by SPS. These kind of weddings, reports the Indian Express, were started as an ‘experiment’ two years ago by the SPS, a social group of Leuva and Kadva Patels, to overcome the problem of “bride shortage” in the Patidar community because of the skewed sex ratio. Patidar men had already started choosing brides from the tribal community in south Gujarat.
Gujarat, surprisingly has a very skewed sex ratio of only 919 women for every 1000 men, according to the 2011 census. In fact, a TOI article published in April states that 6.29 lakh men in Gujarat between the ages of 30 and 40 are unmarried because of the unavailability of women from the same caste.
So while the Patel community in the US is also agitating over the reservation issue for their community back home, citing unemployment and low access to education, there is one huge section of the Patel population who are and will continue to remain silent over the issue – that’s the missing women in the Patel community who were killed at birth or in the womb. No agitations over these Patels, I guess.
Image Courtesy: Reuters
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