Hindustan Times
October 25, 2006 (Editorial)
A simple compact has governed India's treatment
of its minorities. Given that the overwhelming
majority of the country is Hindu, the system
has gone out of its way to reassure minorities
that brute majority in Parliament will not be
used to compel them to change their customary
law. The early leaders of the country did not
hesitate to codify the personal laws of the
majority community through statutes like the
Hindu Marriage Act, but steered clear of doing
the same for minorities. When, in a celebrated,
if infamous case, the Supreme Court insisted
on providing maintenance to a divorced Muslim
woman, based on civil law, and against customary
Muslim law, the government of the day passed
an act that nullified the court's judgment.
It was not as though the government was against
maintenance for the woman, but that it felt
the need to reassure the minority Muslims. The
process of change, this secularist theory insisted,
would have to come from within the community
in question, even though there was wide acknowledgement
that many of the customs that the communities
wanted to preserve were patriarchal and discriminated
against women.
While courts have managed to provide a measure
of relief in some cases, by and large women
continue to suffer from the consequences of
personal laws. This is what brought about the
multiple tragedies that Imrana has had to suffer.
She was raped by her father-in-law, an act which
local Muslim clerics decided, through an incredible
somersault of logic, nullified her marriage
since she has become her husband's mother. For
Imrana, the conviction of her father-in-law
for rape has been less of a victory than a disaster
- the judgment having once again led to a clamour
among Muslim clerics that her husband abandon
her.
How long should the Indian State, confronted
with such levels of obscurantism, suffer the
insult to the rights that every Indian should
have under its Constitution? The Directive Principles
of State Policy have accepted the need for a
uniform civil code and the Supreme Court has
sent repeated reminders through judgments of
the need for the code. The time has come to
grasp this bull by its horns, or face malign
consequences
