India’s Hotels Can’t Surrender to the Marriage Police

(Bloomberg Opinion) — Meerut, an hour’s drive from Delhi and home to a mere couple million people, is what in India’s crowded north is considered a small town. There isn’t a lot to recommend it to visitors, and it doesn’t exactly receive hordes of tourists. And yet, the city’s hotels have been all over the news recently.

The Oyo Hotels chain, backed by Softbank Group Corp., announced last week that it would no longer allow unmarried couples to check into its hotels in Meerut and…