State of Karnataka recently enacted the Karnataka Freedom of Choice in Marriage and Prevention and Prohibition of Crimes in the Name of Honour and Tradition (Eva Nammava Eva Nammava) Act, 2026 (‘the Act’). This is one of India’s first laws to punish honour killings as distinct offences, yet it protects only inter-caste couples. This piece argues that silence on interfaith couples, set against the State’s Protection of Right to Freedom of Religion Act, 2022 (‘anti-conversion law’), cannot survive the equality guarantees under Articles 14 and 15 of the Indian Constitution.

The Act was formulated after the honour killing of a 19-year-old pregnant woman, Manya Patil, for marrying a Dalit man. The 242^nd Law Commission of India Report defines ‘honour crimes’ as incidents of violence and harassment caused to couples marrying against the wishes of the community or family.

Though a pioneering initiative, the Act carries a conspicuous omission. Section 2(a) of the Act defines inter-caste marriage as marriage between persons belonging to different castes or sub-castes, while making no parallel provision for interfaith unions. While Section 5(1) carries a general prohibition barring acts against “any person” in the name of caste, custom, tradition or “honour”, the legislation’s structure, definitions and the stated object centre solely on caste, leaving out interfaith couples from its protection. This selective recognition is not neutral as it tracks the same suspicion of interfaith unions that the State has already written into the anti-conversion law.

The State has a protective obligation towards couples in inter-caste and inter-religious unions. In Lata Singh v. State of Uttar Pradesh and Shakti Vahini v. Union of India, the Supreme Court directed the Centre and state governments to protect inter-caste and inter-religious couples from honour-based crimes and to uphold fundamental constitutional values. The right of choice of one’s partner is constitutionally protected as per Shafin Jahan v. Asokan K.M., where the Court held that choice of a life partner, including interfaith, lies at the heart of dignity and autonomy as recognised in K.S. Puttaswamy (Retd.) v. Union of India and also invokes the freedom of conscience under Article 25. None of this compels the State to legislate protection at all. But that is not the claim: having elected to protect honour-crime victims, it cannot draw the protected class along religious lines.

It is important to contextualise this omission within the broader socio-political context. Karnataka’s anti-conversion law imposes stringent punishments for “unlawful conversions” and renders marriages between interfaith couples void where conversion is treated as unlawful under the Act. It empowers the family members of couples to file complaints alleging unlawful conversion, the same actors who perpetrate honour crimes in most instances.

This produces a stark contradiction. As per the 2026 Act, a person in an interfaith marriage is a victim deserving protection; however, the anti-conversion law casts aspersions on the same union, and the same person becomes a potential perpetrator. How can the act of marital choice deem a person a victim under one law and an offender under the other? It is this coexistence that makes the omission arbitrary rather than merely incomplete.

This contradiction lies at the heart of the issue. The distinction between inter-caste and inter-faith couples is perfectly intelligible; the flaw lies elsewhere. In The State of West Bengal v. Anwar Ali Sarkar, the SC laid down that Article 14 permits classification only where (i) there is an intelligible differentia and (ii) that differentia bears a rational nexus to the statute’s object. Here the object is protecting couples who marry against family/community wishes, and interfaith couples face that risk no less than inter-caste couples (242^nd Law Commission report). The second limb therefore fails.

A defender might say this is under-inclusion, not discrimination, and that a legislature may protect by stages. That answer works only where the omission holds a space open for later protection. Here it does not. The excluded couples are not merely unaddressed; they are branded as suspects by the State’s own 2022 anti-conversion law, which the 2026 Act leaves untouched. The State might have protected interfaith couples through some other instrument, but Karnataka has enacted none and offered no reason for confining this Act to caste; an unreasoned exclusion, set against an active regime of suspicion, is not phased reform but a choice. Silence set against that statute is not phased reform but sustained suspicion. In Shayara Bano v. Union of India, the Supreme Court’s test of manifest arbitrariness against legislative action as capricious, irrational and/or lacking an adequate determining principle reaches exactly this animus-based line. And Article 15(1) forbids it outright, since the disadvantage falls on couples only because their union crosses a religious line. That is a constitutionally impermissible classification, not a drafting defect to be cured later.