That it is morally wrong to marry off 12-and-14-year-old girls is irrefutable. That is why the people wanting to retain these antediluvian laws have to resort to superstition and sophistry to make their arguments. So, for me, the interesting question that arises from the Marriage Bill is this: what are the political motives behind the UNC's and PNM's opposed positions?
On the face of it, the United National Congress seems to have badly miscalculated public outrage by its game-playing with this issue. The party has been getting plenty hard cuff since it appointed three religious fundamentalists to argue in favour of child marriage. Most of the criticisms are ad hominem, basically accusing the UNC of supporting paedophiles and, naturally, particularly attacking Khadija Ameen because she was the sole woman who abstained from voting for the bill. But the UNC leaders aren't insane nor even irrational. So the party must have a rationale for taking this unpopular stance, although it's not the let's-hear-all-sides-cuz-we-so-democratic one they have been claiming.
Whether politicians are promoting a position that is egregious or excellent, citizens should always ask themselves the same question: how does this translate into votes? As political scientist Bruce Bueno de Mesquita puts it in The Dictator's Handbook, "We put ideas of civic virtue and psychopathology aside as central to understanding what leaders do and why they do it. Instead, we look at politicians as self-interested louts...Understanding what people want and how they get it can go a long way to clarifying why those in power often do bad things. In fact, bad behaviour is more often than not good politics."
On that basis, the UNC's strategy becomes clear. They are seeking to get the votes of religious believers, particularly religious fundamentalists. Their calculation, in my view, is that in the marginal seats where a few hundred votes can swing victory or defeat, the fundamentalists can decide which party forms the next government. Bueno de Mesquita writes: "Bloc voting is a feature common in many fledgling democracies...Bloc leaders gain a lot, their members gain less, and the rest of society pays the price." The UNC strategists have also calculated that the votes they will lose because of their opposition to the Marriage Bill do not outweigh the gains, especially if they try to play both sides–claiming that they do favour raising the marriage age to 18 years, but aren't supporting the bill for other reasons.
In this context, Attorney General Faris Al-Rawi seems to have played right into their hands by removing the three-fifths majority from the bill's preamble. This allows Maha Sabha leader Sat Maharaj to mount a legal challenge. But the People's National Movement isn't pushing this Marriage Bill because it is the right thing to do–just like the UNC, the PNM's strategists are using child marriage as a vote-catching strategy.
The PNM's calculations, in my opinion, are this: the voters that the UNC are targeting wouldn't have come to the PNM anyway, since all of them are Indocentrists. Once upon a time, the PNM had the support of Indo-Muslim voters, but that support has been waning since 1995, when the Basdeo Panday-led UNC came into office. But, in any case, the PNM knows that it can buy back the fundamentalist votes, either by appointments to various State bodies, by alternative legislation, or simply by good old-fashioned bribery. But who is the PNM targeting by bringing such a bill to Parliament, when political parties have traditionally avoided offending any and all religions in T&T?
I think it is people like me–ie, floating voters who will be impressed by progressive policies. Again, the PNM is thinking of the marginals–people like me don't usually vote at all but, if even a small percentage of the swing voters can be persuaded to do so, we will vote not on the basis of race or religion but on who has policies that accord with our values. A few hundred votes can again make the difference between a party going into Government or Opposition. In their book Brokers, Voters, and Clientelism, political scientists Susan Stokes, Thad Dunning, Marcelo Nazareno and Valeria Brusco have surveys showing that "swing voters receive too few benefits, whereas loyal voters...receive too many." This is because political parties find it difficult to identify, let alone target, swing voters since, by definition, they are not grouped by race or religion or even ideology. The Marriage Bill may therefore be the PNM's political solution to this campaign challenge in a period when largesse cannot be randomly distributed in the hope of catching sufficient swing votes.
Even removing the three-fifths clause from the bill may have been calculated to provide grist for the UNC and its allies like Sat to be further demonised, especially if the issue is drawn out to 2020 through legal challenges, hence providing a political lever to shift public opinion to the PNM's favour. And this strategy, in my case, has certainly been effective: although I believe that the PNM is trying to manipulate people like me, other things being equal, I would still vote for them on the basis of this bill alone.
Kevin Baldeosingh is a professional writer, author of three novels, and co-author of a History textbook.