Earlier this week the Indian Supreme Court ruled that annulments granted by ecclesiastical tribunals lacked any legal force, meaning that couples who had received an affirmative decision still required a civil decree of divorce before they could remarry.
While the decision has been viewed by some as further evidence of the marginalisation of religious minorities in India by the Hindu government, at first glance there doesn't seem to be much evidence to support this claim.
The decision of the court was based upon two Victorian-era laws: the Divorce Act of 1869, and the Christian Marriage Act of 1872. These two provided for the regulation of civil divorce and the civil recognition of religious marriages respectively. While Church weddings were accepted by the state as having legal force in the latter law, there was never any provision for the tribunal system in cases of nullity. This shouldn't necessarily come as a surprise; at that time civil divorce was an extreme rarity by modern standards, as too were decrees of nullity. The Christian Marriage Act assumed, as does the very concept of Christian marriage itself, that all unions would be permanent, indissoluble, and life-long.
