Court Rules Religious Law Cannot Override Ban on Child Marriage

By Mahima Katal

New Delhi, July 7: A regional court in northern India has reaffirmed that religious exemptions cannot be used to circumvent national child protection laws, in a ruling that touches on the long-running tension between India's religious personal laws and its secular child welfare statutes.

What Happened

The High Court of Allahabad — the top court for India's most populous state, Uttar Pradesh — has ruled that a provision within Islamic personal law, which allows a girl to marry once she reaches puberty, cannot be used to bypass India's national law banning marriage under the age of 18.

The two-judge bench found that permitting such marriages would conflict with two federal statutes: the Prohibition of Child Marriage Act, 2006, and the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act (POCSO), 2012 — India's principal law criminalizing sexual abuse of minors. The judges held that the legal marriage age in India is 18 for every citizen, regardless of religion, and that no community's religious law can create an exception to that rule.

Background: India's Legal Framework

To understand why this case matters, some context on India's legal system is useful. India does not have a single uniform civil code covering matters like marriage, divorce, and inheritance. Instead, different religious communities — Hindu, Muslim, Christian, and others — are governed by their own "personal laws" in these areas, a system carried over from the colonial era and preserved after independence in 1947.

This creates an ongoing legal tension: when a religious personal law conflicts with a national law passed by India's Parliament, which one prevails? Indian courts have grappled with this question across many contexts, and child marriage is one of the most contested.

Under one interpretation of Islamic jurisprudence, a girl becomes eligible for marriage once she reaches puberty — commonly understood as around 15 years of age. Groups relying on this interpretation have argued in multiple cases that the 2006 national law banning marriage before 18 should not apply to Muslims, since marriage is governed by their own religious law.

The Case Itself

The ruling arose from a criminal case, not a marriage registration dispute. Police and child welfare workers had intervened to stop the wedding of a 16-year-old girl in Bulandshahr, a district in Uttar Pradesh, after receiving information that her family and community were proceeding with the marriage despite her age.

According to case records, the rescue team was met with resistance: nineteen people were later accused of assaulting and threatening the officials in an attempt to prevent the girl's rescue. Those nineteen individuals were charged in a criminal complaint (called an FIR — First Information Report — in the Indian system, roughly equivalent to an initial police report that opens a criminal case) and subsequently asked the High Court to cancel the charges against them. Their central argument was that the marriage itself was lawful under Islamic personal law, and therefore the intervention by police was unjustified.

The High Court rejected this defense and refused to cancel the criminal case. It found that the rescue operation had been a legitimate act of duty by officials trying to prevent a violation of the child protection law, and that the resistance and alleged assault on the team could independently constitute a criminal offense — separate from any dispute over the marriage's validity.

The Court's Reasoning

The judges reasoned that marriage under the age of 18 cannot realistically be separated from sexual activity, meaning that permitting it would inevitably create a conflict with POCSO, since that law criminalizes any sexual contact with a minor. On this basis, they concluded that no religious personal law — however sincerely held — can be used to sidestep a law designed to protect children.

The Bench also noted that Indian courts remain divided on this question. It specifically endorsed the reasoning previously adopted by the High Court of the southern state of Kerala, which reached a similar conclusion in an earlier case, while acknowledging that other courts have taken different views.

An Unresolved Question at the National Level

The judgment also flagged a broader, unresolved legal issue. India's Supreme Court — the country's highest court — had indicated in a 2025 order that it had reservations about whether religious personal law could override the child marriage ban, while a proposed amendment to strengthen the 2006 law was still pending in Parliament. That amendment, introduced in December 2021, would have made the child marriage ban explicitly override any conflicting religious law.

However, the bill lapsed when the lower house of Parliament was dissolved ahead of general elections, and it has not been reintroduced. As a result, India's Supreme Court has yet to issue a definitive, nationwide ruling on the question — leaving it to individual High Courts, like the one in Allahabad, to decide the issue for now, sometimes with differing outcomes across states.

Why It Matters

Child marriage remains a significant concern in parts of India, where UNICEF and Indian government data have long shown rates above global averages, particularly in rural areas. For law enforcement and child protection workers, rulings like this one provide legal backing for intervention: it signals that courts increasingly view attempts to invoke religious exemptions as insufficient grounds to shield participants from child protection statutes, and that resistance to rescue efforts can itself carry criminal consequences.

At the same time, the case underscores that India's legal position on this question is not yet fully settled nationwide. Until Parliament revives the lapsed amendment or the Supreme Court issues a conclusive ruling, the balance between religious personal law and child protection statutes will likely continue to be decided court by court, state by state.