The Karnataka Chief Minister Siddaramaiah on Sunday took to the stage at a wedding he was attending to state that lavish wedding ceremonies were a "vulgar display of wealth" and that they need to end.
Attending an all-religion mass marriage programme in Dharwad, the CM said that such lavish display of wealth at weddings were vulgar, and must come to an end, reports The Times of India.
“Many are forced to sell their ancestral property or get into debt trap to get their daughters married off," TOI quoted him as saying.
Not only were the prices of goods and services on the rise, but conducting weddings have turned into a costly affair for the poor and the middle class, the CM said.
Karnataka Chief Minister Siddaramaiah has time and again courted controversy over VIP treatment. From holding up ambulances to make way for his convoy multiple times to a leaked video footage of a man kneeling down to tie the Congress man's shoe laces, Siddaramaiah has however, only reiterated his "dislike" for VIP treatment.
Earlier, in November last year, the CM had deliberately stayed away from attending the extravagant marriage of small scale industries minister and sugar baron Ramesh Jarkiholi’s son Santosh.
After the extravagant wedding of mining baron G Janaradhana Reddy's daughter was held in November last year, the Siddaramaiah government had said that it was mulling to levy tax on lavish wedding ceremonies.
Although the bill was drafted in 2015, it hadn't gained enough push, but the state government had promised to revive it in the wake of Janardhana Reddy spending a fortune on his daughter's wedding.
However, a recent report by The Times of India indicates otherwise. Sandeep Moudgal reported in February that the Siddaramaiah government was set to shelve the anti-superstition bill and the bill that puts a cap on wedding expenditure, ahead of the assembly polls in 2018.
A similar discussion on cutting down on wedding expenditure has been doing the rounds in Kerala for some years now. In 2015, the state women's commission had proposed to cut down the "big fat" weddings and even went ahead to prescribe rules for the same, such as the number of gold ornaments the bride and the groom can wear. The guidelines also prescribed a maximum expenditure limit for the clothes and other accessories for the bride and groom.
More recently, the state government is taking efforts to encourage eco-friendly weddings, by cutting down on the plastic waste that is generated out of it.