This story is from March 13, 2017

Ahead of time: Bhavnagar tried to give Muslim women right to divorce

Ahead of time: Bhavnagar tried to give Muslim women right to divorce
AHMEDABAD: It was in 1985 that the Supreme Court passed its historic verdict in the Shah Bano case on a Muslim woman’s right to alimony from her divorced husband. But little is known of the first attempts to introduce reforms in Muslim personal laws by the princely state of Bhavnagar in 1943 in Gujarat, while it was ruled by Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavsinhji.
The bill, which remains in the state archives of Gujarat, claimed that Muslim women suffered more when husbands divorced them without any prior warning or intimation.
The bill, in fact, proposed to give rights to Muslim women to divorce their husbands. It witnessed fierce opposition from several quarters.
The Bhavnagar state through a gazette notification gave three months for the community to respond to proposed bill.
“The copy of the bill gives an insight into how this princely state wanted a participatory approach to the reform process. The issue was so sensitive that many sent telegrams asking the ruler to withdraw the law urging that many marriages will be destroyed,” says city based historian Rizwan Kadri.
In its opening remark, the Muslim Divorce Bill of Bhavnagar had claimed that it put the suffering of the Muslim women at the heart of the proposed bill. In its preamble, the bill had taken note of cases where a husband left immediately after marrying for offshore work and did not provide for the newly married woman. It also mentions instances of domestic violence, cases of infidelity committed by husband, mental trauma suffered by women at the hands of in-laws and lack of financial support by husband.
The bill was introduced by Bhavnagar state’s legislator, Sheth Kasam Usman, on February 27, 1943, in the fourth meeting of the Bhavnagar legislative ‘darbar’ mainly for inviting objections and suggestions. The bill proposed to give rights to a woman to divorce her husband, if a newly married wife could prove that her husband had left her and failed to keep contact or provide support to her for four years or more, and in cases of domestic violence.
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