Weddings and the Mai-Baap Government

WTF news of the day:

The Punjab and Haryana High Court has asked the Punjab Police to crack down on expensive wedding celebrations … on the basis of the Anti-Dowry law.

This is quite ridiculous: people should be allowed to spend their money as they please, without the state passing judgment on it. And if lavish weddings are a form of dowry, criminalizing such weddings will merely shift the mode of payment to something else. The only beneficiaries of this will be the cops, who will now have yet another revenue stream open to them.

And really, what’s the judiciary doing getting involved here?

In other news, the supreme court has ordered “all states and Union Territories to bring in suitable legislation within three months to make registration of marriage compulsory.” Eh?

(IBN link via Smoke Signals.)