Muzaffarnagar District and Sessions Judge R.D. Nimesh has unwittingly brought the issue of uniform civil code to the national forefront once again by sentencing 60-year-old Ali Mohammed to ten years imprisonment for raping his daughter-in-law on 6 October 2005. Twenty-eight year old Imrana, wife of a rickshaw puller in Charthawal village, Uttar Pradesh, became a national celebrity when the local Ansari caste panchayat ruled that her marriage to her husband was dissolved as a result of the rape and she would henceforth have to treat the father of her five children as her son.
At that time, Nur Ilahi stood by his wife, and both continued to live together, albeit in Imrana’s village, with her natal family. But with sections of the clergy now reiterating that Imrana cannot live with her husband, the poor valiant fighter faces an uncertain future.
Yet Imrana’s plight highlights a significant and changed reality of her community, viz., poor women at the receiving end of unjust decisions by maulvis are eager for action to save their dignity. In just the space of one short year, unnoticed by Hindu-baiting activists, sensitive Muslims are veering round to the view that it is the moral responsibility of the Indian State to provide them with a level legal terrain. Muslims now want a uniform civil code as they have given up hope of internal reform by the community orthodox.
This is not a wrong assessment. Despite some politically correct noises, the All India Muslim Personal Law Board remains stuck in its old groove, failing, even a year after the Imrana case hit the headlines, to codify Muslim law to make it more egalitarian and just for all. This is imperative because so far, what is happening in Indian Islam is that the Hanbali school of Shariat followed by Deoband Darul-Uloom and the Sunni Muslims is being privileged as the only valid interpretation of Islam.
This is the most orthodox and obscurantist version of Islam. But it is equally true that there are other more liberal Islamic schools such as Shafi, Malik and Hanafi. Codification could thus result in an internal reform that would bring relief to the faithful. The move towards a uniform civil code would then be easier for the community.
The obduracy of the AIMPLB makes it imperative that the government should stop privileging these self-styled custodians of the Muslim community. It is well-known that the Board came up to resist the alimony granted to a divorcee, Shah Bano, by the Supreme Court in the 1980’s. With hindsight, it is obvious that prime minister Rajiv Gandhi’s buckling under pressure to deny alimony to divorced Muslim women legitimized the illicit power of the Islamic clergy. Since then, local Maulvis have subjected Muslim women in remote villages and small towns to terrible injustice and hardship in the name of personal laws.
In the Imrana case, Deoband’s fatwa dissolving the marriage (since denied) led even Salman Rushdie to protest that a democratic country should have a single, unified legal system (New York Times, 10 July 2005). Rushdie said: “any country that claims to be a modern, secular democracy must secularize and unify its legal system, and take power over women’s lives away, once and for all, from medievalist institutions like Darul-Uloom.”
The forced divorce of unfortunate Muslim women has other unsavoury dimensions that need urgent redressal. Soon after the Imrana case hit the headlines, one Sharif of Hilwari village in Baghpat, UP, pronounced the triple talaq in a fit of anger. After calming down, he repented and proposed re-marriage of his wife Khursheeda. Since the local maulvis insisted on halala (re-marriage and divorce) before the re-marriage, the families on both sides wanted this done in a manner that respected the couple’s dignity and self-respect. The Sharif family wished to get Khursheeda married to Sharif’s 13-year-old brother who would divorce her the next day, leaving her free to re-marry Sharif. But, till last heard of, the local maulvis were opposing this ruse. They wanted Khursheeda to maintain the prescribed period of purity as per the Shariat (iddat) and marry a man who can consummate the marriage before giving a divorce (Hindustan Times, 10 August 2005).
Similar cases have been reported in other parts of the country. Anybody with a modern sensitivity can see that all Muslims, whether upper class or poor and illiterate, do not wish to submit to such an unsavoury situation. No woman trapped in such a situation wants to be forced to have sexual relations with a man with whom she does not intend to have an abiding relationship. This is objectification of womanhood, and must be resisted by all right thinking persons.
Yet the AIMPLB has neither banned the triple talaq in one sitting, nor moved to abolish halala. Since all Muslim men and women caught in such a situation are unhappy with these provisions in their personal law, it is imperative that the State now step in to ensure the equal citizenship, human rights, and dignity of Muslim women. Muslim women must be liberated from the threat of triple talaq and have the unfettered right to remarry their previous spouses, if they so desire.
Another issue that needs to be faced is the flourishing Hyderabad bride bazaar. Old and lusty Arab men continue to descend on the city, marrying underage girls for a few weeks, and simply disappear after pronouncing the triple talaq. The marriage brokers, maulvis, and girls’ parents make money, and the poor victim subjected to what is clearly a form of prostitution. A country pretending to superpower status cannot allow its women citizens to be so victimized, and there must be strong laws against such bridegrooms, marriage brokers, and maulvis.
Imrana is a test case of India’s ability to stand up for its terrorized and exploited women, its ability to raise second-class citizens to equality by abolishing a regressive personal law and instituting a common civil code.
Organiser, 5 November 2006
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