HAVING apparently learned nothing from the divorce revolution in the West, India is preparing to dramatically alter its divorce laws to eliminate lengthy waiting times, to make incompatibility an acceptable ground for divorce and to make it especially easy for women, who currently have no right to property acquired by their husbands during marriage, to sue for divorce.  The Times of India reports about proposed amendments to the Marriage Act:

According to the amendments, while a wife can oppose a husband’s plea for a divorce under the new “irretrievable breakdown of marriage” clause, the husband will have no such rights to oppose if the wife moves the court on the same grounds: the dichotomy reflecting deference to the view that allowing speedier divorces will leave women, already having to deal with the pro-male bias in law, worse off.

In all likelihood, India will see what America has already seen: an epidemic of divorces initiated by women. Marriage in India too will be trivialized.

— Comments —

Jesse Powell writes:

From the research I’ve done the historical divorce rate in India has been about 1 1/2 % up until relatively recent times. It should be remembered in the United States in 1870 the divorce rate was 3% and already climbing rapidly. Very very low divorce rates compared to modern standards are typical of societies that are well functioning and traditional.

In looking at how family breakdown progresses over time one can grade the level of family breakdown as being Very Low, Low, Moderate, or High. In the history of America and Europe countries typically stay in the “Very Low” category for three generations and then progress from Low to Moderate to High with each degradation occurring after a single generation. America left the “Very Low” category of family breakdown and entered into the “Low” category in 1960. America entered into the “High” category in 2010.

A country typically enters into an accelerated rate of family breakdown; the beginning of the “Low” category; after 30 years of accelerated economic growth. For America the accelerated economic growth started in 1933 in the recovery from the Great Depression and following this accelerated family breakdown started in 1960.

In China accelerated economic growth started in 1978 with Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms. This means that China’s level of family breakdown has probably already entered into the “Low” category and is now increasing at an accelerated rate similar to what happened in the United States starting in 1960.

India started its period of accelerated economic growth in 1991 with the economic liberalization program of the P. V. Narasimha Rao government launched in response to International Monetary Fund demands after India suffered a balance of payments crisis. Since it is now 20 years after accelerated economic growth in India began one can expect that family breakdown in India will enter into the “Low” category in about 10 years time.

I suspect the loosening in India’s divorce laws is a kind of warm up for the future acceleration of family breakdown that is coming.

Finally, I will mention that the economic growth rates of India and China since their respective economic accelerations began are much greater than the growth the United States experienced from 1933 to 1960. Economies that developed after the European derived societies already experienced their time of economic growth are able to piggy back off of already discovered Western technologies and in that way grow faster than the Western economies that had to discover the innovations for the first time did. This means that the technological shock to Third World countries is greater than the technological shock experienced in the history of the Western countries. This means that family breakdown has tended to occur even faster in the newly rich countries that just went through very rapid economic growth compared to the history of the Western nations. In these countries divorce rates tend to rise particularly fast and fertility rates tend to decline particularly fast.

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