Make it win win

Make it win win

Personal laws permitting triple talaq had to go but criminalising it spawns new injustices.

The passage of the Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Marriage) Bill criminalising instant oral talaq in the Rajya Sabha fulfils a BJP electoral promise. The party’s Hindutva base and even a number of Muslims opposed to the writ of religious leaders and personal laws reigning supreme in their community have welcomed the moment. By prescribing three years imprisonment for Muslim men who pronounce the talaq-e-biddat, the law sticks out with rough edges for treating divorce as a criminal offence.

From a system which gave archaic personal laws a long rope for decades to now criminalising practices like triple talaq that it fostered, India is veritably swinging between extremes. The old order had to change, but it is unfortunate that the new law failed to strike a balance. Personal laws gave religious leaders disproportionate influence and denied many people, especially women, the benefits of living in a free society and under meaningful protection of the s tate. By overriding personal laws, government is indeed doing Muslim women a world of good but in failing to treat triple talaq as a civil offence, as in any other messy divorce case, it may conceivably end up doing more harm than good to the woman.

A legal challenge in Supreme Court is certain to raise issues like proportionality: whether the severity of punishment befits the seriousness of the crime and whether there are less onerous ways of achieving the legislation’s goals. In a sense the social and political cost of not having a Uniform Civil Code, which would have been in tune with the secular ethos of the country, is showing. From Congress “appeasement” of minorities – or to be more precise clerics within minority communities in the hope they would deliver a “vote bank” – the pendulum has now swung to the other extreme where, under a Hindutva-oriented government, the law appears to have a punitive edge for Muslim men.

In a contrary scenario, a UCC would have united the country in true fashion where citizens irrespective of religion would follow the same laws for marriage, divorce, succession, etc. This government has a manifesto that promises UCC and a mandate that can make it happen. It must bite the bullet while earning trust by upholding, rather than debunking, other aspects of secularism as well.