New Delhi, December 4
The long pending demand for registering the marriage of the members of the Sikh community appears to have found favour with the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Personnel, Public Grievances, Law and Justice headed by E.M. Sudarsana Natchiappan unanimously as it today recommended to the Congress-led UPA government to come forward with a simple amendment to the Anand Marriage Act of 1909.

The Committee at its meeting here impressed upon union Law secretary K.N. Chaturvedi of the necessity to amend the Anand Marriage Act, thereby facilitating the Sikh community to register the marriages as mandated by the Supreme Court recently.

The members of the committee strongly favoured that the Anand Marriage Act be amended. Besides, a dozen MPs of the community cutting across party lines and belonging to both Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha, including Deputy Speaker of the Lok Sabha Charanjit Singh Atwal, signed a letter to the chairman of the committee to add the clause of registration to the Anand Marriage Act.

Other MPs who signed the letter were Sukhdev Singh Dhindsa, M.S. Gill, Rana Gurjit Singh, Rajmohinder Singh Majitha, Rattan Singh Ajnala, Atma Singh Gill, Naresh Gujral, S.S. Bajwa, Zora Singh Mann, Preneet Kaur, and Sharanjit Singh Dhillon.

Rajya Sabha MP and former chairperson of the National Commission for Minorities, Tarlochan Singh, has been in the vanguard of overcoming the glitch of not being able to register marriages of the Sikh community under the Anand Marriage Act necessitating them to take recourse to the Special Marriage Act, 1954, or the Hindu Marriage Act, 1955. The community felt rather perturbed about this aspect, which assumes significance especially in the wake of the order of the Supreme Court some time back that the registration of marriages was a must.

Chaturvedi is believed to have found merit in the contention of Tarlochan Singh and other MPs along with the members of the said committee that the Anand Marriage Act needs amendment to a limited and specified extend. Nevertheless, the draft of the proposed amendment by Tarlochan Singh will now be considered and vetted by the law and justice ministry. It is widely believed that the simple amendment to the Act might well become a reality in the Budget session of Parliament next year.

The committee forwarded to the law ministry Tarlochan Singh’s draft amendment Bill to the Act. Of late it was being felt that in the absence of a distinct form of registration of marriages, a lot of avoidable confusion was caused. The proposed Bill provides for the enabling provision to provide for an Anand Marriage Register in every state for the registration of such marriages.

A letter addressed to the committee was also forwarded to the law and justice ministry by the SGPC, Amritsar.

Tribune