Where’s her choice?

In May 2005, when the Muslim women of the country were looking up to the All India Muslim Personal Law Board (AIMPLB) to come up with a model nikahnamah — or marriage contract — that purported to reform marriage practices in the community, they were in for a huge let-down. The AIMPLB’s document ensured neither equal rights for women within marriage nor addressed the vexatious problem of adequate maintenance. On the extremely retrograde and tragically prevalent practice of triple talaq it did little, apart from pronouncing in the meekest of tones that it was “avoidable”. The All India Women’s Muslim Personal Law Board had, at that juncture, spoken for many voiceless women within the community when it rejected the entire exercise.

Given this unfortunate history and the well-known reluctance of the stalwarts who comprise the AIMPLB to alter in the slightest degree the existing gender status quo in the community, the Board’s latest decision to keep Muslim women from taking recourse to secular law should not surprise. But there can still be no getting away from the irony that the Board’s ostensible agenda of “social reform” in the first decade of the 21st century does not include increasing choices for the women of the community. Muslim women may opt to approach the Shariat court or they may not, but the right to choose their legal recourse must be theirs and theirs alone.

There is another irony that needs to be flagged. If the secular courts of the land can be trusted to dispense justice when it comes to cases involving riots and the like — the Supreme Court’s verdict on the Best Bakery case, for instance, was widely applauded by Muslims — why cannot they be trusted to dispense justice when it comes to matters pertaining to the private sphere? This is a question that the AIMPLB cannot but confront.