Triple Talaq, Halala, Mut’ah, Khula and other issues concerning Muslim women have had a paradigmatic bearing upon Indian politics since the mid-1980s. In fact, the Muslim women question has become the litmus test to deconstruct the ideological posturing and commitment of mainstream political parties championing their cause in contemporary India. It turns out that the prosaic political divide of Left, Right and Centre is redundant at its worst or episodic and issue-centric at best.
Consider the posturing of mainstream parties on the Muslim women question starting with the 1986 Shah Bano case and the 2017 triple talaq case. On both occasions the mainstream Left oscillated like a pendulum, and deliberately adopted a vague position, betraying its religious identitarian praxis as opposed to its stated culture-and-religion-blind rhetoric. The centrist parties fared worse. The Congress openly played to the gallery of religious identities and ironically went to the extent of linking religious identitarianism to India’s secular ethos.
On the other hand, it has been the Indian Right led by the BJP that apparently championed the cause of gender equality in the Muslim community, thereby showing up the Left and Centre both in 1986 and 2017. One must remember that by the mid-1980s, especially after the Shah Bano episode, the BJP succeeded in denting the core of the Nehruvian paradigm not by posing it against the cultural politics of Hindutva but rather against the constitutional morality of secularism. Thus it succeeded in creating a counter-narrative of declaring the Congress, the socialists and the Left ‘pseudo-secularists’.
In the decades since the mid-1980s, the debate concerning Indian secularism has shifted from ‘pseudo-secularism’ to ‘secular-sectarianism’. This structural duality of the Left and centrist parties in both theory and practice has disregarded the interests of many marginalised sections, such as Muslim women and many religious subalterns, whose interests are now being articulated by the BJP. The fact that India treats groups rather than individuals as the social unit of public policy has ensured that a group is often treated as a homogeneous category by the Indian state as well as political parties.
Therefore, we have commissions looking into the state of affairs of Muslims, OBCs, Dalits, etc. This approach is particularly evident in the case of religious minorities whose internal ruptures along lines of gender and caste are often overlooked and justified by selective invocation of the Constitution’s Article 25 and the dictates of multiculturalism, thereby ignoring intra-community repression.
This leads to confining the question of minority empowerment to the realm of political representation wherein orthodox elites of these communities are solicited competitively and engaged on a quid pro quo basis. This leads to internal discrepancies such as gender and caste inequalities within the community being treated as ‘out-of-bounds’ for the Indian state.
This aspect of ‘secular-sectarianism’ was evident in the responses of a majority of Muslim male respondents during our fieldwork on the eve of the recent Assembly polls in Uttar Pradesh. The issue of triple talaq was being raised by the BJP whose supporters enthusiastically debated the possibility of Muslim women voting for the party. Against that backdrop, an overwhelming majority of Muslim males of all age groups said the issue was an andarooni mamla (internal issue) while persuasively narrating instances of Muslim backwardness and victimhood.
The BJP’s insistence on ending triple talaq was perceived as a ploy to paint the community in a bad light. In fact, a respondent in eastern UP quipped that having been defeated in the Delhi and Bihar elections, the BJP would receive the third talaq in UP. It’s another matter that the BJP trounced the Opposition later. The responses of the non-BJP parties and orthodox Muslims were equally parochial but complementary. While no non-BJP party raised the issue of triple talaq in its campaign, the Jamiat Ulema-i Hind went into the towns and villages collecting signatures of Muslim women saying that the issue was indeed an internal matter.
In an interview with one of the authors, Maulana Aamir Rashadi Madni, president of the Rashtriya Ulema Council, who otherwise is a profound voice articulating the issue of Muslim backwardness and victimhood, was acidic in his criticism of the BJP for bringing the issue into the public domain to “humiliate the Muslims”. Madni’s support was sought enthusiastically by the non-BJP parties.
At the root of the political tussle over the Muslim women question is the intent of every outfit to claim the liberal tag and dub its rivals as reactionary. The 1980s, which witnessed the emergence of regressive identity politics along caste and religious lines, also witnessed a new craving for the liberal label as a certificate of adherence to constitutional morality. As a response to this, the BJP’s popularised the term ‘pseudo-secular’ after the SC’s judgment in the Shah Bano case was undone by Rajiv Gandhi and the hierarchy between the universally applied secular law of CrPC 125(1)(a) and Section 2 of the Shariat Act, XXVI of 1937 was reversed.
The road from Tuesday’s verdict is straight and clear. It is a Uniform Civil Code, another constitutional mandate the BJP uses to portray itself as the custodian of constitutional morality. Its rivals will allege the BJP is selective in celebrating constitutionalism when it suits its identity politics. It will be argued that the BJP’s liberal avatar is confined to issues concerning the affairs of the Muslim community. That’s a plausible argument. The test of the BJP’s own liberal credentials will come when it gets to grips with the LGBT issue.
Sajjan Kumar
A PhD from Centre for Political Studies, JNU
Nikhil Anand
A student of the National Law University, Delhi
Email: sajjanjnu@gmail.com
They are associated with People’s Pulse, a Hyderabad-based research organisation
specialising in political and fieldwork-based research