This Indonesian couple chose the auspicious wedding date of "11/11/11", but will that make them safe from a rising divorce rate? [Photo / Agencies]

In India and Indonesia, the rules of marriage are changing as well, steered by a rising middle class and women who will no longer tolerate inequality in marriage. Tiffany Tan has the stories.

It's a bit of a surprise to discover the person behind India's biggest matchmaking site for divorcees is a single, attractive, 30-year-old - not exactly someone you would expect to be pondering the intricacies of remarriage.

But Vivek Pahwa is no ordinary young man. At 26, he noticed an emerging demographic trend and decided to create a product specifically for that segment of the population.

"We put up Secondshaadi.com to solve a need for people in this space, because they did not get the right response from other sites," Pahwa says in an email from his headquarters in the Indian capital of New Delhi.

From a thousand users within two weeks of its launch in June 2007, the site now has 200,000 members, mostly 25-40 year olds. And it sees 200 new registrants every day, says Pahwa, named "Asia's Best Young Entrepreneur" by Businessweek magazine in 2008. 

"There is a clear trend of higher divorces because of changing lifestyles and more influence from other countries," he says.

Unlike China, however, India is not new to divorce. Indian social scientists say the dissolution of marriage, as well as remarriage, has for decades been a fact of life for the majority of Indians. Many couples, whether due to their economic status or traditional practices, do not officially register their union or separation.

What's new is this: the number of registered divorces in India is on the rise. The nation of 1.21 billion doesn't compile divorce statistics, but news reports estimate that one in 100 Indian marriages end in divorce. In the 1980s, New Delhi had two divorce courts; now it has 16, says the Associated Press.

"From 2000 onwards, the trend has been on the rise and it's been a spiraling phenomenon," says Sanjoy Ghose, a New Delhi-based lawyer who specializes in matrimonial law.

The upward divorce trend can be largely attributed to India's middle and upper-middle classes, "the kind that go to courts to register divorces", says Madhu Purnima Kishwar, a senior fellow at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies in New Delhi.

By 2030, nearly half of Indian households are projected to be in the middle class, a four-fold increase from 32 million to 147 million, according to consulting group McKinsey Global Institute.

But right now, India's divorce rate still represents one of the lowest in the world, lower than China's two divorces in 100 marriages. On the other end of the spectrum is Russia with five divorces for every 1,000 people, according to 2008 United Nations data, the latest available.

For the same year, the United States registered 5.2 divorces for every 1,000 citizens.

Like China, India is among the world's largest economies - China currently ranks second, next to the US, while India is No 4, after Japan.

The growing divorce rates in both countries, old Asian civilizations with deeply held marital traditions, are consequences of their economic boom, as well as their growing Westernization and modernization, say the experts.

In India, this means a growing number of women have become financially independent enough to leave abusive husbands, there's been a decrease in the stigma attached to divorce and there are greater opportunities for extramarital affairs in the more mobile, urbanized and interactive society.

Kishwar, who founded an Indian journal on women and society, believes the increase in late marriages and the decline of extended families have also affected the stability of Indian marriages.

She says people who wed later have more difficulty adjusting to married life "because both partners are much more set in their ways". And women nowadays are less willing to put up with their in-laws or "share" their husbands with his family.

"That very often becomes a major cause (of divorce) because not many men are ready to leave their parents in old age," Kishwar says. "The culture is still strong that your parents deserve and need your support in old age."

She says living with the in-laws does have its advantages.

"Parents and other family members can often act as a buffer as well. They're not always a problem. But if a marriage is left to the devices of the couple alone my sense is that chances of divorce are higher."

Ghose, the matrimonial lawyer, began noticing the divorce rates climbing in 2000, about a decade after India began instituting reforms that strengthened its economy, mass media and communications infrastructure.

These are roughly the same factors that have contributed to the surge of divorces in Indonesia, another fast-modernizing society and Southeast Asia's largest economy.

The country of 240 million has seen a three-fold increase in divorce rates since political reforms were instituted in 1998. This rate translates into 200,000 divorces a year, out of 2 million divorce petitions, according to Indonesian news reports.

"Media exposure and increasing emphasis on women's rights have played important roles in rising divorces," Tim B. Heaton and Mark Elwin Cammack, US academics who have studied Indonesian divorce trends from 1987-2007, say in their paper titled, "The Recent Upturn in Divorce in Indonesia".

The study says that the increasing economic independence of women, smaller families and emphasis on individual choice, as well as self-fulfillment with relationships, "may shift the tide toward less stable relationships". These echo the changes being seen in both Chinese and Indian societies.

Unlike divorces in India, however, those in Indonesia do not seem to favor any particular subset of the population, the divorce study says.

Some marriage counselors see divorce as a measure of society's progress: a sign of the emergence of more assertive women and their emancipation from the chains of age-old tradition.

"I don't see it like that," says researcher Kishwar, whose work supports democratic rights and women's rights in India. "I think the breakdown of marriage, especially when children are involved, can be devastating.

"The moment the 'me' and 'mine' become larger than 'us' and 'we,' that's the beginning of the end of the marriage. You can't have a family where 'me' is all supreme. Family intrinsically means 'us,' 'we', and each one willing to put their trust in 'we'. "

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