by Harish Gupta, National Editor, Lokmat Group
With the courtroom battle for a seminal change in Muslim personal law—that of prohibiting the vile practice of giving divorce with the husband uttering the words ‘talaq’ thrice—now heading for climax, it is clear that the administration led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi has at last secured a bridgehead behind enemy lines. For the initiative to bring the matter of ‘triple talaq’, the nikahhalaal (compelling a divorced wife to consummate marriage with some other person and getting divorced by him before being allowed to remarry the first husband), and polygamy has come neither from politicians of any hue nor from the Islamic clergy and scholars. It has come from Muslim women, whose resentment against such misogynism in the name of religion was simmering over decades.
The practice of triple talaq, which is now being conveyed even through WhatsApp and text messages, is alleged by some of the leading Muslim women’s organization to be “un-Quranic”. Under the banner of Bharatiya Muslim MahilaAndolan (BMMA), an Indian Islamic feminist organisation and other bodies, signatures of over one million Muslim women were collected on a petition demanding abolition of triple talaq and nikahhalaal for being un-Islamic. Simultaneously, two women, Shayara Bano and Afreen Rahman, unilaterally divorced by their husbands, approached the Supreme Court with the same request.
The government has become a party as it strongly supports the Muslim women’s demand. “Lives of Muslim women cannot be allowed to be destroyed by triple talaq”, Modi announced at a pre-election rally in Bundelkhand last year. And now the Supreme Court has asked all sides to submit statements, including the government, the Muslim women’s organisations, as well as the All India Muslim Personal Law Board (AIMPLB) that administers Muslim personal law and is opposed to any change in the existing system. March 30 is fixed as the date for the written submissions. A five-judge Constitution bench will decide issues relating to legal aspects of the practices of triple talaq, nikahhalalaand polygamy among Muslims but will not include in its ambit the overall question of divorce within the Muslim law. The bench, headed by Chief Justice of India JS Khehar, made it clear that it would not deal with the politically thorny issue of Uniform Civil Code, which is now under consideration of the Law Commission of India.
The AIMPLB, on its part, is invoking the divine Sharia laws on one hand and, on the other, drumming up support among opposition political parties for the issue of Muslim divorce to remain under its grips. It held rallies in Kolkata, where Trinamool Congress chief minister Mamata Banerjee, known for her vote-bank politics, sent two of her powerful ministers to be seen on the dais. More recently, during the ‘demonetisation’ furore, she reminded Modi that the difficulty that had been caused to ordinary people due to scrapping of 500 and 1,000-rupee notes would prompt them to “give BJP triple talaq”.
India’s 15 per cent Muslim voters have always been a foil for the BJP; hardly any prominent member of the community is known to support the party that has barely concealed contempt for the Constitution’s secular ideals and its supporters have been involved in communal riots. But the simmering discontent in the Muslim households on the triple talaq issue has given the BJP under Modi a foothold it never dreamt of. In Uttar Pradesh, the 19 per cent Muslim voters have voted in an unexpected way. In most of the state east of Allahabad, Muslim women have reportedly voted against the diktat of the mosque leaders to press the voting button in a tactical way so that the constituency’s winnable ‘secular’ (non-BJP) candidate—be it from SP or BSP—gets the vote. They have voted instead in accordance with their conscience, which has often turned poll strategists’ calculations on their head. On the other hand, in the riot-prone western Uttar Pradesh district of Muzaffarnagar, with 40 per cent Muslim population, the minority women have either voted for BSP, or have wasted their vote in some way or the other. In Muzaffarnagar, which witnessed horrible riots in 2013, the then ruling SP not only failed to resist the riot but sided with the clerics who were supporting triple talaq. Hence the Muslim women’s support for rival BSP. But what is more important is that they were unmoved by the prospect of the BJP winning by their refusal to obey the mosque’s instruction. In fact the BJP has won all the six assembly constituencies in the district.
For the BJP, it was a Trafalgar moment. For the first time, the Muslim society seemed open to negotiations. It was so much different from the Rajiv Gandhi government in 1985, when it lacked the courage to give effect to the Supreme Court judgment on the Shah Bano case (giving proper alimony to divorced wife); instead it brought about a clearly illogical amendment to an existing law to leave the Muslim divorce norms as patriarchal as ever.
The difference between Rajiv Gandhi in 1985 and Narendra Modi in 2017 is not only the long span of 32 years that separate them. The years have brought about drastic changes in the Muslim mindset, with a new generation of lawyers, doctors, accountants and other professionals among women in the community now crying for attention as a class demanding gender equity. The BMMA is a prism onto it.
Will the male chauvinist AIMPLB give way? Much depends on how the Supreme Court frames its judgment. If the apex court focuses on triple talaq, it is unlikely that the legal opposition to it will hold. And its credit will go to Narendra Modi and emergence of a new BJP.
