Tags:
Journalism of Courage
Moments that hold the potential for social change often remain unnoticed because national obsessions lie elsewhere. Yet, today, there are significant reasons why it is possible to address the seemingly intractable issue of delivering justice to Muslim women in ways that appeared impossible even a few months ago.
For one, the BJP has lost power at the Centre. It’s ironic to state this, because the party had projected itself as the greatest guardian of the “welfare” of Muslim women, as its loud championing of the uniform civil code would indicate. But the BJP’s concern extends only to the extent that the issue is a convenient stick to beat the community with and expose the Congress for its hypocritical policies of “minority appeasement”. This is not to say that the Congress hasn’t been despicably double-faced when it came to addressing this concern. Its years in power saw Muslim women increasingly relegated to the four walls of home, the notorious chardiwari of feudal norms and individual disempowerment.
The return of the Congress to the Centre does, however, have one positive fallout. Muslims have less reason to worry about their identity or rights being threatened; less cause to be defensive about their public stances. This makes the community more amenable to the idea of reform. Already there are indications of this. The All India Muslim Personal Law Board may not have outlawed triple talaq after its sitting earlier this month, but it has promoted the notion of a reformed “nikahnamah” (marriage contract), recognised officially that triple talaq is a “social ill” which Muslim society has to address, and, significantly, has ruled that denying women the right to inherit agricultural property was not sanctioned by the Shariat.
It is true that Muslim women in India are way behind their counterparts in Pakistan and Bangladesh in terms of personal law. In ’55, the All Pakistan Women’s Association (APWA), reacting to the marriage of then prime minister, Mohammed Ali, to his Middle-eastern social secretary while being still married to his first wife, began to lobby for the promulgation of the Muslim Family Laws Ordinance in ’61, which raised the legal age of marriage to 16 for girls, placed restrictions on polygamy, ensured the registration of marriages, acknowledged the wife’s right to divorce and adequate maintenance. Above all, it rejected triple talaq and set a more transparent procedure in place.
Such reform would perhaps never have come Pakistan’s way if it had not been under martial rule at that point — Ayub Khan pushed it through ignoring protests — and the fact that an elite body of women like the APWA had direct access to those in power. In India, by contrast, Muslim women constitute one of the most invisible communities in terms of education, rights, employment and decision-making. Unequal Citizens, A Study of Muslim Women in India, by Zoya Hasan and Ritu Menon, based on the findings of the first comprehensive baseline survey of Muslim women in India, reveals that across the country Muslim women are more illiterate than Hindu women: 59 per cent of them have never attended school, less than 10 per cent have completed it. To compound matters, 26 per cent of educated Muslim women have illiterate husbands and less than 15 per cent said they were working.
But damning as this evidence is, there has been over the last decade or so a groundswell of expectations among Muslim women and an increasingly focused articulation in favour of reform. The voices of ordinary women that were raised at the public hearings that Syeda Saiyidain Hameed, as a member of the National Commission of Women (NCW), conducted all over India in ’02, were a vivid reflection of this. Collectively, these voices signified one important phenomenon: that the patent lack of individual rights of Muslim women was a consequence of their poor status. It would seem, then, that the singleminded focus on personal law that has marked the public debate is an insufficient, even skewed, approach. If they are empowered as individuals, with access to education and employment, they would themselves be better equipped to fight for their rights and promote reform .
Hasan and Menon recognise that this “disproportionate emphasis” on the gender bias of personal law has led to the neglect of the secular discourse of development.. They argue that to understand Muslim women better, it is important to locate them within the broader context of economic, political and other interests and recognise their “disadvantage, discrimination and disempowerment are experienced at specific and particular intersections of class, caste, gender and community”.
It is interesting to revisit history to discover how Muslim women were left marooned on an island of indifference and discrimination. In many ways, they suffered the most from Partition, being twice-damned as a minority within a minority. In post-Independence India, Muslims as a whole felt their identity threatened and women, as the manifest symbol of that identity, paid a high price for this by being deprived of even the weak currents of reform that may have come their way. Today, the mean age of marriage for Muslim women is 15.6 years, while the all-India figure is around 20. Yet not many know that among the first demands of the All India Muslim Ladies Conference was education for Muslim women and the raising of the minimum age of marriage to 16.
These demands were put forward in 1914. As historian Gail Minault explains in her essay, ‘Sisterhood or Separatism: The All-India Muslim Ladies Conference’, the members of the Conference were clearly of the view that early marriage was detrimental to the education of girls. That a demand articulated in 1914 is, tragically, still relevant in 21st century India highlights the immeasurable injustice that Muslim women have suffered.
Today they want to step out the dark, they want education and employment. They want to be seen, not just as members of a community but as individuals with rights. Professor Zameeruddin, speaking at an NCW hearing, expressed the enormity of the task graphically: “To solve the problems narrated by these women today is not in human hands. Perhaps the angels have to descend from heaven.”
