By Our Staff Reporter
Dehradun, 6 Aug: State President of the Uttarakhand Sikh Coordination Committee and National Advisor of the National Minorities Commission, Sardar Gurdeep Singh Sahota has welcomed the decision of the Uttarakhand Government to implement the Anand Karaj Act and thanked Chief Minister Pushkar Singh Dhami and the BJP state organisation.
The Anand Marriage Act was passed for the registration of Sikh marriages in the year 1909, which was passed in the Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha in the year 2012 as the amended Anand Karaj Act. However, since then, many states neither made its rules nor implemented it. The demand of the Sikhs has been raised many times in this regard. Recently, in December 2022, the Chairman of the National Commission for Minorities, Iqbal Singh Lalpura, wrote to the Chief Minister and Chief Secretary of the state and asked them to implement the rules of the Anand Karaj Act in the state. In 2022, the Uttarakhand High Court also passed instructions to the state government to implement the Anand Karaj Act after the decision on a petition.
The state government prepared the rules for Uttarakhand after studying the rules in Delhi, Kerala, Chandigarh, etc. With this, Uttarakhand has become the 10th state of the country to implement this act.
Incidentally, the BJP-ruled Assam and Uttarakhand approved this act together on the same day, 3 August, 2023, by their respective state cabinets.
Sahota said that, when suggestions were sought regarding the Uniform Civil Code in the state, a team of the Sikh Coordination Committee held a meeting with the members of the expert committee of the state government and requested that the Anand Karaj Act be kept out of the Uniform Civil Code.
Members of the Sikh community have welcomed and appreciated the sensitivity shown by the state government in this matter.
With the implementation of the Anand Karaj Act in the state, marriages held in the Gurdwaras of the Sikh community can now be registered under this act.