A controversial Hindu leader in Trinidad and Tobago (T&T) has apparently justified child marriage after revealing that he too married a child bride decades ago. 

Sat Maharaj is the secretary general of the Maha Sabha, the country’s leading Hindu organization.

The 85-year-old firebrand leader had recently told the Archbishop of Port of Spain and US ambassador to ‘go to hell’ over the issue and he further refused to apologise for his remark.

However, this comes even as he claimed that Hindu child marriages do not exist in T&T anymore and challenged Attorney General Faris Al-Rawi to produce statistics over the past two years to back his claim.

“There is no Hindu child marriage in T&T. There is Hindu teenage marriage. There are no local pictures to support that child marriage is taking place. They are picking up pictures of this outside of T&T on the Internet,” said Maharaj.

He added, “In any event, the society is correcting itself and over the last two years we had no such marriage. We are asking the AG for specific figures. Tell us how many Hindu child marriages take place over the last two years. None!”