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Abolition of triple talaq is an idea whose time has come

The fact remains that the only constant in the march of the human civilization is change.

Triple talaq case, supreme court hearing, muslim personal law, islamic law, religious conservatives, triple talaq hearing, Supreme Court, India news, indian express opinion The fact remains that the only constant in the march of the human civilization is change. C R Sasikumar

The lawyers have argued, the judges have heard the lis, the media has reported it blow by blow and now everybody waits with bated breath for the day of reckoning. Will these three words and the underlying practice be held to be illegal by a Constitution bench of the Supreme Court or not?

If I was a betting man I would wager most certainly they would, notwithstanding the arguments put forth by proponents of this practice that courts should not interfere into matters of faith that stretch far back into millennia. For if this argument was valid then the progress of humankind would have languished somewhere in the Stone Age. The fact remains that the only constant in the march of the human civilization is change.

Religious conservatives throughout the long evolution of the human race have been fiercely resistant to change. Nothing exemplifies it better than the resistance by the Catholic Church to even the translation of the Bible into languages easily understood by the people.

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Roman Catholicism decreed Latin as a holy language. Ordinary people were given strictly limited access to the Bible, and it had to stay that way. This stand provided the clergy control over the masses. They did not want regular folks pottering in spaces they circumscribed as their own territory. The Catholic order unquestionably recognized that several of its instructions were based, not on the Bible, but on church tradition. Undoubtedly, this was one of the reasons for their averseness to permit their faithful to have access to the Bible. By merely reading it, people would become mindful of the contradictions between church canons and scripture.

Thus, as far back as 1079, in response to the request made by Vratislaus, Duke of Bohemia, seeking permission to use Slavonic language in local church services, Pope Gregory VII pronounced, We cannot in any way grant this entreaty.

Festive offer

Later In 1559, Pope Paul IV circulated the first catalog of books proscribed by the Roman Catholic Church. It banned possession of Bible renditions in Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish, as well as some in Latin. Anyone who desired to study the Bible was told to obtain permission in writing from bishops or inquisitors—not an alluring possibility for those who wanted to remain above suspicion of heresy.

People who ventured to own or disseminate Bibles in the everyday languages of their expanse had to cope with the wrath of the Catholic Church. Many were incarcerated, burnt at the stake, roasted on spits, condemned to life in prison, or dispatched to the galleys. Appropriated Bibles were scorched. Indeed, Catholic priests persisted in impounding and burning Bibles well into the 20th century.

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Similarly in the medieval and obscurantist Indian ethos, the highest aspiration for a woman was a convoluted commitment to the virtues of pureness, and fidelity to the husband. From this belief stemmed the ritual in which a wife was almost divinely ordained to immolate herself on the funeral pyre of her deceased husband as evidence of this devotion.

The underlying rationale for this abhorrent practice was that by sacrificing herself a widow saves herself from the wretched existence of widowhood and therefore bizarrely ends the hazard she posed to society. Those days a widow was not allowed to remarry, nor was she permitted to turn to religious scholarship, and thus condemned to a miserable and harsh existence. It was drilled into the psyche of women, since infancy, that the pain of the pyre was less agonizing than the torment she would endure physically and emotionally for the rest of her life as a widow.

Raja Ram Mohan Roy was the first Indian to protest against this horrendous custom. In spite of protests from orthodox Hindus, he carried on his crusade against this ghoulish ritual. Finally, he was able to convince Lord William Bentick, the Governor General of India, who promulgated a law in 1829 abolishing the custom of Sati by making it illegal and punishable as culpable homicide. If it would not have been for the conviction of courage of this brave soul, Hindu women may still have been burning on the pyres of their husbands in cremation grounds across our great land.

A century and some decades later in the flush of a liberation tainted by partition in 1947, as the makers of modern India settled down to draft the Constitution of India they were confronted by the abhorrent practice of untouchability that was institutionalized in the Hindu faith. A person belonging to the lowest rung of the religious pecking order was considered to be so inauspicious that even if his mere shadow fell on people higher up in the social order amounted to sacrilege.

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With one stroke of the pen the founding fathers inserted Article 17 into the Constitution of India and abolished this demeaning outrage. Article 17 states: “Untouchability is abolished and its practice in any form is forbidden. The enforcement of any disability arising out of Untouchability shall be an offence punishable in accordance with law.”

The Civil Rights Act of 1955 implemented this constitutional fiat. Now this reform did not come from the wellsprings of the Hindu faith. Religious bigots did argue that this faith-based practice actually preceded the Indian Constitution practically by a couple of thousands of years and therefore could not be done away with even by the supreme law of the land. However such retrogressive diatribes did not deter the framers of the Constitution from doing what was right. Had they not acted possibly untouchability would have been prevalent even today.

At the other end of the spectrum lay the erstwhile rulers of the princely states who believed in their special, inherited privileges till perpetuity. But Article 363-A, inserted into the Constitution on December 28, 1971, stripped them of their titles, privy purses and immunities. The rationale was simple. All citizens, irrespective of his or her station in life, are equal in the eyes of the law. Several of these erstwhile Maharajas and minor princelings, including those epitomes of debauchery, argue that these privileges were hard won honors in battles waged in the past and must enjoy constitutional protection.

But the rising tide of egalitarianism knows no boundaries. Although, it’s a pity that some of the dishonorable descendants of these disempowered people still cling onto the pitiful vestiges of that decadence.

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To conclude, the relentless march of the movement for gender justice ordains that the abolition of Triple Talaq is an idea whose time has come. Either the self appointed custodians of the faith can do it voluntarily or the courts or legislation will most certainly do it for them.

First uploaded on: 22-05-2017 at 08:38 IST
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