The hidden hypocrisy in India’s “pro-women” law
Gender segregation and regulation of behaviour for women in public space cannot be veiled behind excessively cloying romanticisation and idealism using socio-political arguments as premise for their “protection.”
The Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Divorce) Act, 1986, is one that shattered one of these concrete moulds, and is attributed to the Shah Bano case that was discussed in one of the lectures earlier. Albeit it safeguards a woman’s right to sustain and maintain herself with no source of income or a relative to support her after separation, it does not justify the husband’s right to leave his wife on virtually no grounds.
The Act also intimated that a sum of compensation is due to the wife for the iddat period, which is defined as three menstrual courses after the date of divorce, if she is subject to menstruation, or three lunar months after her divorce, if she is not subject to menstruation. It is essentially pointing towards the supposed debility of women, and the idea of reinforcement of physical attributes as vital for fortitude — it is viewed as a leeway “granted” by a man to a woman because he is the one capable of doing so.
A lot has already been stated on the patriarchal attitudes to uphold male privilege in Islam, and the legal strictures borne out of such thinking that are followed blindly till today. We might argue that the framework of law was constituted in a specific context pertaining to the era and the culture therein, but it is difficult to rule out that the preservation of Muslim family laws even in the 21st century hints at a large presence of significant forces that concur with regressional rumination.
The Quran has laid emphasis on the importance of the role of family as the spine to support a “moral and ethical” society (Kazemi, Farhan; “Gender, Islam and Politics”), where women’s role particularly is largely restricted to conditioning their children the Muslim way, alongside being carriers of virtue — an affirmation of Sigmund Freud’s Madonna-Whore complex.
However, it has been noted that several countries do not apply either the full Islamic code or the complete version of personal status laws to their citizens.
This includes instances such as a woman’s inheritance from parents being half of that of her male sibling, and women’s right to child custody being restricted to the first two years after the child’s birth — and the latter, despite the argument made in the aforementioned paragraph on women’s responsibility of the socialization of children.
Another reason why the act is subject to plenty of censure is that it paved way for fundamentalism to encroach into a constitution that claims to be a set of guidelines meant for a secular nation. It is the Other-ing of a creed, and not just women by themselves, deviating attention from what is essentially a women’s rights issue.
Perhaps, this is why it is of no surprise that the original manuscript of the Indian Constitution has been preserved in a glass box, entrapped in an inert gaseous sphere.