KOLKATA: A resolution demanding that the state take initiative for safeguarding the constitutional rights of Muslim women who have been given instant divorce by their husbands will be submitted to the office of West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, a meeting of organisations working for the rights of Muslim women, said here today.
The resolution would be submitted during the day, it said.
''We want that laws should be framed as per the Constitution to ensure that women who bear the brunt of unilateral triple talaqs by their husbands get justice and their rights are safeguarded.
We want the right to live with dignity,'' Khadiza Banu, secretary of Rokeya Nari Unnyan Samity told PTI.
''Most of the women who have been given talaq are not getting justice,'' she said.
Over 300 Muslim women, who had been given triple talaq or instant divorce unilaterally by their husbands, assembled here today demanding justice and the right to live with dignity.
The triple talaq bill, which was passed in the Lok Sabha in December last year after Supreme Court's landmark judgement on the issue, lacked transparency, said Afroza Khatun, the secretary of South Kolkata Society for Empowerment of Women.
The bill did not take up issues like the economic condition of the accused husband or how he would bear the maintenance cost of his divorced wife in the event of his incarceration, she said.
''This Bill is nothing but an initial attempt to stop the practice of giving talaq verballly and will not ensure true gender justice and equal rights for Muslim women.
We want a more transparent bill which will take into account the interest of Muslim women in real sense," Khatun said.
Banu said most of the women at the gathering hailed from poor socio-economic backgrounds and were from the districts.
One of them who hails from Murshidabad said she had been given the triple talaq at the age of 15 and after fighting a case against it at the local court for long 16 years she has closed it.
She remarried in 2010 but was abandoned by her second husband too after a year.
Worried that her presence at her parents' residence would affect the marriage of her younger sisters, she now wants to move out.
"I want to study and I want to be economically independent," she said.
Another woman also from Murshidabad, who too was given the talaq by her husband two years after marriage for protesting against his relationship with another woman, said she was finding it difficult to feed her two children whom she had single-handedly raised.