New Delhi: If the enthusiasm with which the BJP pushed the triple talaq Bill in the Lok Sabha on last Friday is any indicator, the Narendra Modi government in its second avatar has already hit the ground running. And post elections, the Opposition, if political commentators are to be believed, seems even more at sea than ever before. More so the Congress, which had earlier supported the Bill with certain conditions, but on Friday, it wasn’t averse to sharing the anti-Bill platform with usual suspects like Asaduddin Owaisi and Azam Khan.
“It was a matter of great distress that the Congress chose to oppose the introduction of the triple talaq Bill. Earlier they had not opposed it. Last time they had walked out from the Lok Sabha. But today they were siding with the likes of Asaduddin Owaisi, who were opposing it,” Union Law and Justice Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad told reporters. He also didn’t forget to remind the Congress’s “anti-woman position” even when Sonia Gandhi called the shots as its undisputed leader.
“With this move, the Modi government seems to have hit two birds with a single stone. One, it promises to gain the BJP a rare access into the Muslim community, especially its womenfolk, howsoever minuscule the number be,” says an RSS sympathiser who teaches in a Delhi college. “And two, it puts the Opposition, especially the Congress, in a bad light among the liberals, women at large and the youth who just don’t connect with this kind of regressive policies. In one stroke, the Congress has been painted as a dyed-in-the-wool ‘unprogressive’ party.”
Defending the party move, a senior Congress functionary concedes the “damned-you-do, damned-you-don’t” scenario for the party. “Had we supported the Bill, all the credit would have gone to the BJP, which would not have missed a single opportunity to project itself as a messiah of Muslim women. So, the support for the Bill doesn’t assure us the votes of Muslim women, but it definitely has the potential to alienate the community as a whole,” she says.
The Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Marriage) Bill, 2019 aims to replace an Ordinance introduced in February this year for the second time since September last year. The Bill seeks to make instant triple talaq—of divorcing wives by pronouncing “talaq” three times in one go—a criminal offence punishable with three years of imprisonment.
Hilal Ahmed, Associate Professor of CSDC, reminds in his 2019 book, Siyasi Muslims: A Story of Political Islams in India, that the 2017 Supreme Court verdict on triple talaq, while recognising the fact that triple talaq is “a socio-religious problem”, unequivocally argues that “this evil practice must be banned, for creating gender-just and egalitarian social order”. He, however, adds that the Supreme Court judgement “doesn’t clarify the nature of offence”, if triple talaq is practised by a man. The triple talaq Bill, he states, “proposed to make the declaration of talaq a cognisable and non-bailable crime”.
Noted activist Shabnam Hashmi, however, sees no reasons for the introduction of the Bill. “Once instant triple talaq has been declared void by the Supreme Court, it’s the end of the matter. We support the court verdict, agree that instant triple talaq should go, but I don’t understand why you criminalise a civil matter. A woman can always seek the redressal of her grievances under the domestic violence act, which has enough teeth to give her protection” she says. “This Bill has been brought mainly to polarise,” she adds, “It has again activated Muslim fundamentalist forces, thus marginalising Muslim women further.”
Ahmed, too, believes that the Bill has erred in making divorce, which is generally in the domain of civil jurisdiction, into criminal offence. The Bill, he explains, “seems to endorse the view that the protection of the rights of Muslim women can only be possible if Muslim men are punished–as if Muslim women do not consider themselves Muslims at all and their only objective is to protect their marriages!”
But there are many who seem to support the government’s move, especially the women and their immediate family members suffering from what Hasan Suroor, a London-based journalist and author of India’s Muslim Spring: Why Nobody Talks About It?, calls “a shotgun divorce system”, which is “like the sword of Damocles permanently hanging over a woman’s head”. “It has become an instrument of oppression in the hands of misogynist men and their mullah brethren,” he states.
Shamima (name changed on request), a resident of Delhi’s Okhla area, believes there has to be a deterrent which can only be ensured through punishment. “If there is a punishment for stealing an object, why shouldn’t there be any for destroying a woman’s life? Is the life of a woman cheaper than that of an object?” Fifty-one-year-old Shamima is fighting a case on behalf of her daughter who has been left by her husband working in Abu Dhabi. “He divorced her through phone,” she reveals.
Asked why she refuses to be identified when she is not afraid to fight a court case, Shamima reminds how all hell broke loose when the news of her challenging triple talaq broke. “I still can’t forget that day when several men barged into my house. So much pressure was put on us with all sorts of arguments—from our move going against the shari’ah, to playing into the hands of the BJP. The pressure became such that we sometimes thought we were better off not challenging the injustice,” she recalls.
Opinion may be divided on criminalising a civil matter like instant triple talaq, but there seems a consensus that politically it’s a masterstroke by the Modi government. “It brings the inner discord within the Congress into the open. While the party may be working hard to paint itself as a guardian of the liberal idea of India, it, by opposing the Bill, invariably finds itself marginalised. It supports a practice which, ironically, many Islamic scholars call ‘un-Islamic’–a system that even Pakistan, a nation born in the name of Islam, abolished way back in 1961,” reminds the DU teacher.