A symbolic blow for women’s equality

A symbolic blow for women’s equality

The Supreme Court has removed the wiggle room in a law that sought to give Hindu women equal rights on par with their male siblings, with its pronouncement on the Hindu Succession Act on August 11. Independent India began the task of giving Hindu women the right to ancestral property on par with men, with the Hindu Code Bill that aroused much controversy. The north Indian Hindu tradition of treating daughters as paraya dhan, someone else’s wealth, came into conflict with the ethos of non-discriminatory equal treatment in matters of inheritance the law proposed. The Hindu Code Bill could not be enacted. Instead, it was broken down into four separate laws and passed, in a much diluted fashion, in the first Lok Sabha, 1952-57. The Hindu Succession Act, 1956, was amended in 2005, to give daughters the right to be a coparcener on par with their male sibling.

However, the wording of the 2005 law left scope for vagueness. This led to one Supreme Court ruling in 2015 that this equal right was available to daughters if the father was alive when the amendment to the 1956 law came into force. However, another Supreme Court ruling of 2018 held the view that a coparcener derives his or her legal entitlement from being born and that has nothing to do with whether the father was alive at the time of the 2005 amendment. These two differing Supreme Court rulings could not both be right. Tuesday’s ruling has removed the conflict by, essentially, upholding the 2018 ruling. This is all to the good.

The ruling also foreclosed much litigation by holding that all partitions done by December 20, 2004, as proposed in the 2005 amendment, would be final. In any case, the law gives women automatic right only over ancestral property of the Hindu Undivided Family, but not over individually earned property, which can be willed as desired or will be inherited as per the law on intestate succession.

Society has evolved much since the 1950s. The principal forms in which wealth is held has evolved even more.

Being a coparcenary matters increasingly ever less — for property, but not for equality.