Mobile Connections

The debate on the dangers of excessive use of mobile phones usually centres on the possible harmful effects of its electronic systems; the gadgets’ deleterious impact on relationships is hardly considered. The Punjab State Commission for Women (PSCW) linking the rise in divorce cases to the wide spread of mobile phones, therefore, opens up a new angle.

Telecom companies should rejoice that practically everyone is now connected and unlike their predecessors in decades past, modern brides who are unwilling to cut umbilical chords now have the option of replacing them with telephonic ones instead. But there is reason to investigate the commission’s statistic of 90% newly-weds wanting divorces because brides are suspected of talking to other men, when in fact they are merely discussing the goings-on in their marital homes with their parents.

Why does a bride’s new family presume she is talking to an old flame? Indeed, why should a portable communication device be dubbed the culprit if a bride’s family interferes too much in her relationship with her new in-laws ? Then we might as well blame India’s attractive telecom tariffs — that facilitate long cross-country confabulations — for Punjab’s divorce dilemma. Of course, the PSCW is not the first institution to home in on the mobile phone as a home-breaker .

Nine years ago, a Zambian judge averred that “cell phones are contributing to the destruction of people's marriages (and being used for) other than their intended purposes” when deciding on a case of a woman suing her husband’s female business partner, under a law that country has on marriage interference. Perhaps India needs just this sort of intermediate law to redress such grievances, instead of a caveat on newly-weds’ mobile phone usage, or divorce suits.