In June 2025, we convened a workshop at SOAS, funded by SOAS Law School, and titled Policing Intimacies: Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Regulation of Love, Marriage, and Inter-community Relationships. Our initial intention was to bring together an international set of scholars working on inter-community unions. To our surprise, however, we received an overwhelming response from scholars focusing on love and marriage in India. The heightened sense of political crisis and urgency, coupled with multiple recent legislative changes, shaped the agenda of the workshop.  This blog series grows from that gathering. It brings together five pieces written around the topics of conversation at the workshop. Written by scholars and practitioners from a range of disciplinary backgrounds including law, political science, sociology, anthropology, these pieces engage with the question of policing of romantic sexual relationships in India.

Nidah Kaiser and Swapnil Singh chart legislative developments. Nidah writes about impacts of new legal restrictions on non-marital and interreligious relationships in the northern Indian state of Uttarakhand, brought about through the Uniform Civil Code of 2024 and the state’s anti-conversion law. Swapnil speculates over the meaning of a newly defined offence of deceptively induced sexual intercourse in the new penal code Bhartiya Nyaya Sanhita (literally, Indian Justice Code) of 2023. Soumya Saxena and Surabhi Singh reflect on how administrative and legal changes interact with existing structures of support. Soumya reflects on her experience of managing a One Stop Centre (OSC) in the central Indian city of Bhopal, where the integration of civil society initiatives into the formal state machinery places constraints on the Centre’s ability to provide support to women in socially unacceptable relationships. Surabhi writes about the emotionally volatile judicial adjudication of the police protection request by an eloping interfaith couple in the context of anti-interfaith-love law and rhetoric in Uttar Pradesh. Despite these legislative shifts and the negative impact on freedoms in romantic partnerships, Gitanjali Joshua’s piece makes space for hope; it centres the possibility that in the process of seeking marriage equality, the law may be forced to confront the gendered inequality and communal and casteist control of sexuality at the heart of marriage. Perhaps through this queering of law, some of its power to police can be undone, even if only incrementally.

Here, we pose some questions that the reader might consider when reading the pieces in this series.

First, the authors centre the concepts of love (emotion), and agency (individual capacity) in making choices (action) in an attempt to conceptualize political and legislative responses to romantic relationships that disturb the social order. Surabhi shows how the emotion of love – the desire to make kin – and the constitutionally protected rights that enable it, take a backseat in the face of a judge’s disgust towards interfaith unions. Nidah and Swapnil imagine new laws as constraining choice in who one can love. As Soumya’s reflective account illustrates, the likelihood of financial instability often dictates the limits of “choice” and “agency”. But she speaks about this assessment by OSC staff with guilt – as if in assessing this, the OSC counsellors look beyond the “choice” of the woman sitting across from them. Feminist counselling, in this imagination, would entail respecting her choice even when it seems unpragmatic (in actively entering a financially unstable family unit) or anti-feminist (converting to be accepted by the affinal family or embracing gendered restrictive religious practices). These concepts of love, choice, and agency find centre-stage in attempts at understanding the governance of seemingly misoriented desires and intimacies, respond to and/ or critique it. Yet these concepts elude easy definitions. Their conceptualization in the law often meets the limit of material realities that shape the possibilities of choice in loving and sustaining that love. Agency – amorphous and fragile – is sought to be protected but is often relinquished in narratives constructed by women and their lawyers of deception, as Swapnil’s account of “promise to marry” litigation shows. What then is the theoretical purchase of these concepts in legal analysis? How do they shift perspectives of the neoliberal legal structures that can de-contextualize individual liberty? What are their limitations? Are there other ways of thinking about freedoms in romantic-sexual relationships in the law?

Second, as many of our authors show, laws that claim to protect are also used to police relationship-making. Denial of agency is at the centre of this façade of protection. In conceptualizing their invocation by parents, police, and judges as “misuse”, do we encourage the very same discourse that denounces gendered-legal protections (for example, under section 498A of the Indian Penal Code) as susceptible to misuse by angry women? What is misuse of law? How can one distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate uses of law, when cases rarely fall within the pigeon-hole legal categories of acts that warrant remedies in the law? Who decides when the law’s invocation is wrong? Is misuse, or its possibility, a good enough reason for dismantling a law in its entirety, or should our attention lie in rethinking how laws operate on the ground and who bears their costs? Does such framing obscure the more fundamental question of how laws are designed, who applies them, and toward which ends?