Indian police nab over 2,000 men for illegal child marriages

Indian police have arrested more than 2,000 men in a crackdown on illegal child marriages involving girls under the age of 18 in a northeastern state.
The state police chief said, those arrested this week included more than 50 Hindu priests and Muslim clerics for allegedly performing marriages for underage girls in Assam.
The police chief said, “We have so far arrested 2,169 men based on 4,074 registered police cases involving a total of about 8,000 men.”
Many cases of child marriage in Assam, a state of 35 million people, go unreported.
According to the National Crime Records Bureau, only 155 cases of child marriages in the state were registered in 2021 and 138 in 2020.