Hers not to inherit

The Mufti Mohammed Sayeed government’s bid to return Jammu and Kashmir to a patriarchal paradigm is regressive in the extreme. Last week the legislative assembly passed a bill, with alarming speed, to deny equal property and employment rights to women who choose to marry ‘‘non-state subjects’’. In its content, the Permanent Resident (Disqualification) Bill codifies medieval notions about a woman’s identity being subsumed by her husband’s. In its provenance, it raises the spectre of legislative intervention to wrest away fundamental rights that a citizen has fought for legally. And in its entirety, the bill is an audacious and untenable attempt to alienate a woman from her land. It is to be hoped that the political controversy that the issue has created in this electoral season will inspire a rethink.

The issue of a woman’s resident status and her choice of groom has a long history in J&K. In the 1920s, Maharaja Hari Singh had pushed through a law detailing the rights of a ‘‘state subject’’ in the 1920s. Later, its contents were preserved through an executive order. Stories — many apocryphal — abound of parents resorting to innovative tactics to get around the legal denial of their property to a daughter marrying someone from outside J&K. In 2002, however, the high court upheld a Kashmiri woman’s petition against the order. In a farcical re-enactment of the Shah Bano episode, the state legislature drafted this bill to re-deny women what the court had recently termed their fundamental rights.

If the Congress’s complicity in the process is unfortunate, its national leaders’ directive to the J&K unit to review its support to the bill, which still awaits clearance by the legislative council, must be welcomed. The National Conference and PDP are rather wholesome in their support of the legislation. The two regional parties tend to be extremely sensitive to J&K’s special status under the Indian Constitution. That status must be kept secure for good reasons, not least among them to guard the rights of the people of the state. Hence, they must know that by pushing through such a backward law, they would do immense harm to the residents of the state. They would renege on the most basic thing a modern state accords its citizens: equal rights.