Religion, Feminist Politics And Muslim Women’s Rights in India

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Religion, Feminist Politics And Muslim Women’s Rights in India
Thursday, 5 June 2014 16:22
Zoya Hasan

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is the strongest advocate of a uniform civil code while Muslim conservatives are among its strongest opponents. In these excerpts from the just released Women and Law – Critical Feminist Perspectives, edited by Kalpana Kannabiran and published by Sage Publication, writer Zoya Hasan looks at the arguments for and against the enforcement of a state-sponsored civil code and its impact on women.

Historically, the women’s movement has focused its attention primarily on the relationship between women and the state, especially with regard to the rights of women in the legal domain and the relationship of women and politics in relation to political representation. The most important campaigns of the women’s movements have centred on issues of dowry, rape and personal laws and more recently women’s reservation in legislatures.

The last two decades have contributed to the opening up of the “woman’s question” in India in ways that have challenged the existing systemic discriminations and deprivations in a way never envisaged by any of the political tendencies or groups that had hitherto espoused the cause of societal change.

Over the years the debate on religion in the women’s movement has shifted from a position that virtually ignored religion to an attempt to work for religious reform from within. This shift occurred at a time when the communalisation and politicisation of religion was apparent in the series of events, some unintended, others calculated, which helped anti-secular forces to gain a foothold and destabilize the political system. As the issue of minorities catapulted to centre stage Muslim women’s rights became a subject of considerable debate, typically with reference to the status of Muslim personal law and the conflicting claims of personal law, identity and gender. This was most clearly underlined during the Shah Bano controversy resulting in the 1986 Muslim Women’s (Protection of Rights on Divorce) Act (MWA), 1986, which denied divorced Muslim women the same rights to maintenance as other Indian women under the Criminal Procedure Code (CrPC). The Shah Bano case exemplifies the potential conflict between religion, politics and women’s rights....

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