Yesterday, the Ministry of Information Technology and Telecom held a press conference because it had an important announcement to make. In conjunction with the Ministry of Home Affairs and the National Commission for Women, the ministry had formulated an advisory on matrimonial websites. In case you were wondering if two ministries and one commission were enough cooks for this one broth, let us inform you that Women and Child Development Minister Maneka Gandhi had also been “actively pursuing the matter”.

Thanks to all these departments’ energetic and industrious efforts, an advisory has been drawn up to check the misuse of matrimonial websites. This is obviously the most critically important social issue that India is facing at the moment, since problems like caste and gender prejudice, racism and minority rights are all under control. The key point in the advisory for matrimonial websites is, “Service providers should make a declaration that website is strictly for matrimonial purpose only and not a dating website and should not be used for posting obscene material.” Users will now have to authenticate themselves by giving identity and address proof. Websites are to store IP addresses of a profile creator for one year from the date of activation.

Revealing the present dispensation’s understanding of romance and marriage, the advisory is very clear that the road to marriage does not include a pit-stop at dating. If you’re one of the depraved who thinks there’s nothing wrong with a little sexting and exchanging some explicit content, Patanjali probably has a pill or syrup for you. We are a centuries-old culture and the Indian way is to discover the dodgy aspects of one’s life partner or incompatibility after marriage. If you’re looking for modernity, the Aadhar card has biometric data, baby. Booyah!

Doesn’t it give you the warm fuzzies to know that the government cares so deeply that it will keep tabs on one of the most private aspects of a person’s life? Are you not exploding with volcanic relief that it can monitor how you conduct a romance on a matrimonial website (presuming, of course, that you’d bother with romance when deciding on your ‘life partner’)?

The advisory is the equivalent of a telescope aimed at your window — the one on your computer, that opens on to a matrimonial website. You’re being watched and your data will be stored for an entire year. (At least the responsibility of storing this is on the websites, unlike the information collected by the Central Monitoring System. Who’s got the government contract for storage of online data?)

Of course, there’s no reason to object to this advisory unless you’re one of those perverts who thinks couples should date before getting married so that one actually knows the person they’re marrying. This is, as rising divorce rates prove, a terrible idea. The less you know about the person you marry and the more stringent the social and legal conventions to keep you in the marriage, the stronger the institution. Why mess around with our ancient practice of arranged marriages, in which two people are essentially blindfolded and bound to matrimony? It’s worked seamlessly for ages. Just think of the excitement of discovery when that blindfold is removed!

And please, let’s not talk about these fanciful notions of happiness, compatibility and personal fulfillment. Next you’ll want a law for marital rape, and we all know that a) that doesn’t happen in India, and b) the government would never intrude so rudely into a couple’s personal life. Few countries can boast of having a government that will so sensitively decide which aspect of your privacy it will violate.

It’s obvious that the government is doing this only for our welfare. Because the average adult Indian either can’t be trusted to behave civilly if the fear of being caught isn’t drilled into them or because the existing laws and systems of enforcement don’t actually provide redressal to those who have genuine grievances. This is why the government needs to operate on the premise that everyone who goes online is someone who registers on matrimonial websites only to dangle the carrot of being married to their awesome self and snatch away said carrot at the last minute. To do this online is to damage the fabric of our society. To ‘cancel’ a marriage because the bride failed a “virginity test”, on the other hand, is fine. The problem lies in new-fangled things like the internet, not in traditions like a caste panchayat that will wait outside while the married couple has sex for the first time because they need to know if the bride is virginal and the only way to ascertain this is to see if the postcoital bed sheet is blood-stained. That’s not offensive or an example of ignorance or misogyny. It’s tradition.

And anyway, what’s the Ministry of IT and Telecom supposed to do about cases like this? Go talk to the National Commission of Women or the Women and Child Development Minister. They’ll no doubt leap into action now that they’re done with this advisory for matrimonial websites.