In the year of over 3,000 shootings, US teenager faces life bullet ‘Triple talaq’ divorce unjust: Indian PM Historic Indian mosque agrees to lift ban on women
India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi yesterday criticized the controversial practice of triple talaq, which allows Muslim men to divorce their wives instantly with a single word, saying women should not face discrimination on religious grounds. Triple talaq divorce is legal under the Indian constitution, which allows the country’s 1.2 billion citizens to be governed by their own religious laws when it comes to marriage, divorce and property inheritance.
The practice has faced repeated legal challenges in recent years, and Modi’s Hindu nationalist government has said it wants to replace it with a new uniform civil code applicable to all religious groups. But that proposal has met stiff opposition from Muslim groups, who argue that it would discriminate against them. “What is the crime of my Muslim sister that just like that over the telephone someone says ‘talaq’ three times and her whole life should be ruined?” Modi said at a rally in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh. “No injustice should be meted out to our mothers and sisters in the name of religion or community,” he said in the televised speech.
Uttar Pradesh is India’s most populous state and 20 percent of its 200 million people are Muslim. Modi, whose Bharatiya Janata Party is gearing for state elections there early next year, said it was his government’s duty to ensure the rights of Muslim women were upheld. “We should not look at religion when it comes to respecting or protecting women,” said Modi. “Election, votes, politics must be kept on one side: Muslim women must get their rights.” Some Indian Muslim women have in recent years launched legal challenges to triple talaq, which they say discriminates against them and violates their human rights.
A case in the mid-1980s involving Muslim woman Shah Bano, who took her rejected demand for alimony to the Supreme Court, triggered debate across India about whether the court had authority over Muslim personal law. The court upheld her right to alimony, but its verdict was reversed by a law passed by the then-Congress party government after Muslim groups reacted angrily. The Supreme Court is currently hearing a petition filed by women’s rights activists who want the judiciary to declare triple talaq unconstitutional. Muslims make up more than 13 percent of the population of India, a secular democracy with a Hindu majority.
Historic Indian mosque
In another development, an historic mosque in India agreed yesterday to scrap a ban on women entering its inner sanctum, after a bitter legal battle about the restriction in the deeply religious country. The Haji Ali Dargah trust has since 2011 barred women from the landmark mausoleum off the coast of Mumbai, insisting the presence of women near the tomb of a revered saint is a “grievous sin” in Islam. The trustees had appealed to the Supreme Court against a lower court’s order in August to overturn the ban, a ruling made on the grounds that the prohibition violated constitutional rights of equality.
But the trust told the Supreme Court yesterday it would now admit women, but needed several weeks to set up special entry areas to the tomb in the 15th-century building. “The trust has decided to give women access to the sanctorum housing the saint’s tomb,” its lawyer Gopal Subramanium told the court. A Muslim women’s rights group hailed the decision as a victory which would likely put pressure on other places of worship that have gender restrictions. “It’s a victory for women’s rights,” said Noorjehan Niaz, co-founder of Bharatiya Muslim Mahila Andolan which campaigns for the rights of Muslim women in India.
“It is restoring the Islamic values of what we have always believed as Muslims, that Islam is a religion of equality, democracy and women’s rights,” she said. Niaz was one of the petitioners who filed the case against the Haji Ali Dargah trust on constitutional grounds. Women in India have been intensifying their campaigns to be allowed to enter a string of Hindu temples and other religious sites. Hundreds of women staged a protest march to a temple in Maharashtra state in January, leading the high court in Mumbai to strike down a ban against women entering a shrine there.
The reasons for the trust’s change of heart in the latest case were unclear. But the Supreme Court when taking up the appeal had expressed hopes of a “progressive” approach from it, according to the Press Trust of India. Haji Ali Dargah is one of Mumbai’s most recognizable landmarks and receives tens of thousands of not only Muslims but Hindu devotees and sightseeing tourists every week. The mosque is located on an islet accessible via a causeway at low tide. It was built in memory of a wealthy Muslim who gave up his worldly possessions and went on a pilgrimage to Makkah. —Agencies