On 22nd August, the Supreme Court of India’s five-member bench ruled that instant Triple Talaq was illegal and unconstitutional. This is but a small change in the Muslim Personal Law in the Indian Union which needs much more comprehensive reform. In the 1950s, several laws passed by the Parliament of India were to codify and reform Hindu personal law in India. Muslim personal law was left untouched. The run up to this verdict and its aftermath has been clinched upon by media agencies as a public discussion point. In this case the religious group in question was the minority. These were the Hanafi law following Sunni Muslims of the Indian Union whose practices were in question.
A large swathe of British acquired lands of South Asia was partitioned in 1947. This resulted in two religious communally majoritarian states and as of 2017 three communal states. In each of these entities, what is common among the constitutions is that everybody has the freedom to practice their religion. What is not common is whether a particular religion in an official sense has some special status in the state though unofficially all the three states are religious majoritarian states. This was ‘Hinduism’ in the Indian Union and ‘Islam’ in Pakistan and later in the People’s Republic of Bangladesh. In each of these cases there exists in practice a hierarchy in a religious sense about who is a first-class citizen and who is not.
This has important implications if you are a first class citizen, that is, the state has been formed tacitly in your name to secure your benefits in preference to everybody else’s. Then the state speaks in the voice of that first class. That voice is not neutral. It can never be neutral but it is dangerous and sociopathic when it actively marginalises minorities who have no power to defend or to lean on. This marginalisation can take many forms. The most common form of this is not active destruction but the withdrawal of resources and attention. Minorities usually face harshness on most matters except those about their internal religious matters. This lack of harshness is a lack of considering the minority as one’s own. This non-interference leads to neglect and it is the opposite of freedom.
The religious minority is considered an adopted child in the post Partition national imaginary
The religious majority is like the only child. Its concerns are everybody’s concerns and they can be reformed on a priority basis. However for the religious minority in any such entity who are left to stew in their own soup, such privileges are not available. They have to shout much shriller than others to make their voices heard or hope to become a pawn in a political game like the triple talaq issue became one in the hands of the BJP. When that happens, a sordid display of opportunism and cunning is seen.
The religious minority is considered the adopted child in this post partition sub continental religions national imaginary. Thus, Muslims of the Indian Union are children of Pakistan by definition. In certain areas of the Indian Union, Muslims also tend to be children of Bangladesh. Some significant sections of the political class within the Indian Union consider the continued presence of these other’s children as the unfinished project of Partition. This is true for Hindus in Pakistan and particularly true to this day for Hindus of Bangladesh. Pakistan became almost minority free in all practical purposes quite soon after its formation. The anti-Hindu narrative, though used to inculcate religious hate ideology within the Muslim population, has relatively less practical implications when compared to the Bangladesh situation where Bangladeshi Hindus are still form a major proportion of the population. Hindus of Bangladesh and Pakistan belong to India by the same logic and this is a charge they often hear — of dual loyalty.
The lack of attention demonstrates the state’s indifference to the plight of the victims of Muslims in India. Therefore, family and inheritance laws that are more regressive then the ones prevalent in Pakistan and Bangladesh are implemented. Similarly, Hindus of Bangladesh are governed by much more regressive laws compared to those that the Hindus of the Indian Union live by. Often, this even means without any law. Until recently, marriages of Hindus in Bangladesh were not registered and divorce has no place in the Hindu personal law of Bangladesh. This is a legacy of Partition. We often think of Partition as an effect of ‘religion’. However, religion both led to Partition and has also shaped religion in South Asia.
The writer is a brain scientist and commentator based in Bengal
Published in Daily Times, August 25th 2017.