Written by: Debanjan Borthakur
The question is not merely whether a state government can ban live-in relationships. The deeper question is: why does the modern state repeatedly feel tempted to enter the bedroom of consenting adults? In India, this question has become urgent again after reports that Assam’s proposed Uniform Civil Code Bill will cover marriage, divorce, succession, and live-in relationships. Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma has said the Bill will be tabled in the Assam Assembly on May 26, while Scheduled Tribes are reportedly exempted from its purview.
An outright ban on live-in relationships between consenting adults would almost certainly face a serious constitutional challenge. The Supreme Court of India has repeatedly protected adult choice in intimate relationships under Article 21, the right to life and personal liberty. In S. Khushboo v. Kanniammal (2010), the Court refused to criminalize public advocacy of premarital sex and noted that social disapproval cannot by itself become a ground for criminal law. In Indra Sarma v. V.K.V. Sarma (2013), the Court also recognized that some live-in relationships may fall within the protective framework of the Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act, 2005.
The state may regulate certain aspects of cohabitation: age, consent, fraud, domestic violence, maintenance, protection of women, and the rights of children. But regulation is not prohibition. A state might impose registration, establish safeguards, punish coercion, and prevent exploitation. However, it cannot and should not simply declare that two competent adults are not allowed to live together unless they marry. Such a rule would change the state’s role from a protector to a moral overseer.
History shows that when the state regulates private intimacy, its goal is often political control rather than morality. This pattern appears worldwide: from laws enforcing racial hierarchies, such as anti-miscegenation statutes in the US and the Immorality Act in South Africa, to modern religious and moral policing, such as cohabitation bans in Indonesia and Iran under Sharia law. The criminalization of LGBTQ+ identities, seen in the UK’s past laws, India’s Section 377, and Uganda’s statutes, demonstrates that policing the bedroom is a tool governments use to enforce social norms.
Across societies, conservatives often place greater emphasis on family order, sexual restraint, religious tradition, and bodily purity. Jonathan Haidt’s Moral Foundations Theory helps explain this: conservatives tend to place greater moral weight on authority, loyalty, and sanctity, while liberals tend to emphasize harm, fairness, and liberty. This does not imply that all conservatives are authoritarian or that all liberals are morally progressive. It means that moral conflict often arises when people use different moral compasses. For one side, live-in relationships symbolize freedom and adult autonomy. For the other, they may symbolize disorder, impurity, family breakdown, or Westernization.
But when the moral emotion of disgust becomes law, liberty shrinks. Many authoritarian movements begin not by banning elections, but by regulating intimacy, speech, dress, food, sexuality, and association. Women’s choices, interfaith relationships, queer identities, and non-marital intimacy might symbolize cultural control. Florida’s so-called “Don’t Say Gay” law, signed in 2022, restricted classroom instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity in younger grades and later became the subject of litigation and settlement.
In Assam, the question is whether the concern is genuinely about protecting vulnerable partners, or whether it is about moral policing. If the concern is protection, the state should strengthen domestic violence remedies, women’s shelters, legal aid, sexual health education, police responsiveness, and economic independence.
Debates over sexuality are emotionally powerful, media-friendly, and polarizing. They can shift attention away from harder questions: unemployment, healthcare, education, corruption, infrastructure, gender violence, and institutional failure. When the state claims to defend women while many elected representatives across India face criminal charges, including serious charges in some cases, the moral high ground becomes shaky. Association for Democratic Reforms reported that 46% of newly elected Lok Sabha MPs in 2024 had declared criminal cases against them. A society should be cautious when political classes with unresolved ethical deficits appoint themselves guardians of private morality.
Philosophically, the issue touches on the oldest conflict between community and freedom. Marriage is a valuable institution. Many people freely choose it, and that choice deserves respect. But freedom also includes the right not to marry. Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir famously rejected conventional marriage, seeing it as a structure that could freeze two free persons into a social role. Their own relationship was not without flaws, and it should not be romanticized blindly. Love becomes morally meaningful only when it is chosen, not when it is imposed.
Indian civilization, too, has never been as sexually puritanical as modern moralists sometimes pretend. Martha Nussbaum has argued that Hindu traditions historically gave sexuality a recognized place through the triad of dharma, artha, and kama: morality, worldly order, and pleasure. She writes that Hinduism, among major religions, has often given the body and its pleasures a central and positive place. It seems some modern defenders of “Indian culture” borrow more from Victorian bodily shame than from the plural and textured traditions of India itself.
Freedom does not mean anarchy. The law should clearly protect minors. It should punish coercion, deception, trafficking, domestic violence, abandonment after exploitation, and financial abuse. It should ensure that children born from such relationships are not stigmatized. It should provide legal remedies for women trapped in unequal informal unions. But once people are adults and consenting, the state should not force marriage as the price of intimacy.
Banning live-in relationships will not end sexuality; it will push relationships underground, leading to hurried marriages, coercion, police harassment, and increased vulnerability for women. It may worsen the stigma around premarital sex, hindering access to contraception and legal help. Societies that view sex as dirty often become hypocritical, unsafe, and repressed. The key ethical issue is not premarital sex, but whether individuals treat each other with honesty, consent, dignity, and care. Marriage can sanctify love, but it does not guarantee virtue, and the law should acknowledge this.
Assam, along with the rest of India, has every right to discuss family law. But democracy is not majoritarian supervision of private life. The Constitution protects unpopular choices because popular choices do not need protection. If two adults choose to live together, society may approve, disapprove, bless, gossip about, or ignore them. But the state should not criminalize them. The task of the state is not to manufacture virtue by force. It is to protect dignity, prevent harm, and leave room for human beings to choose their own imperfect paths.