UNIFORM CIVIL CODE --- A NECESSITY FOR THE NATION, AN IMPERATIVE OF THE TIMES

Do not say your scripture gives you the right to question when evidently it commands you to submit to its dictates as the inviolable Word of your God. The freedom it allows you is to deliberate on issues not contrary to its tenets but in line with it. At any rate, scripture or no scripture, freedom to think, to question, to doubt and to challenge the tenets of tradition is your fundamental right and you must not cower under any authority, however holy or sacrosanct, to give up your essential human rights. You are intrinsically as holy as the greatest of prophets and it is but natural that you are, endowed as you are with modern scientific knowledge, wiser in many respects than those archaic absolutists that go by the name of messiah, messenger, prophet and so forth. So, under no circumstance must you compromise your freedom to be, to think, your freedom to be sceptical --- for scepticism, as Einstein says, is your birthright --- and your freedom to challenge existing dogmas and dictates from scripture, prophet, dictator or any absolutist source.

If your are living in a secular state and still say that you derive your freedom to question from your religion-specific scripture, then you are either under a hypnotic charm of submission to your religious culture from birth on account of constant indoctrination or else, you are a practising hypocrite and proselytiser of your perfidious tribal cult which ordains you to carry forward its malefic agenda of conversion, subversion and reversion to medieval monstrosity. If, however, you are enlightened enough to understand that India is a secular state and the collective will of its citizenry as enshrined in the Constitution of India bestows upon its citizens perfect freedom to debate, deliberate and even dissent on contentious issues of national life, then you are well on the path of fruitful democratic living which mandates you to work for equal protection for all under the law and no special privilege for such a vast minority as the Muslim community of 180 million in India. Your good sense should exhort you then to work for a uniform civil code which will benefit the Muslim women in its repealing of the iniquities of Islamic personal law and set up Indian Muslim womanhood as the model for the rest of the Islamic world, equal to men in all respects.

A democracy cannot thrive if a large portion of its population identifies itself so much by its religion that it must refuse to subscribe to the secular civil law of the land and adhere to its religious civil law although it is perfectly compatible with the nation's criminal code. How about the protagonists of Muslim civil law (by way of a thought experiment) suffering brutal Sharia punishment for criminal offence committed as their religious code dictates? Here they become wise enough to subscribe to the more humane secular criminal code of the land, violating thereby in principle the dictates of their shelved religious law. Why do we not hear them clamouring for the imposition of Sharia criminal law as well on Muslims? Is it because such imposition will adversely affect the misogynistic Muslim clerics as well and no more remain confined merely to Muslim women who, under the Islamic civil code, have to endure such ignominies as the triple talaq and all other iniquities of divorce settlements and remarriage negotiations which is a shame for a democratic secular country that has so far failed to protect millions of its own female citizens from social, economic and psychological exploitation arising out of this archaic Islamic law? This writer does in no way advocate, though, the efficacy of imposition of the criminal code of Sharia on Indian Muslims in bringing about fair play and justice between the sexes in the community or in effecting any wholesome transformation of the community's structural set-up. The intent here is to take the regressive sections of the population on a thought experiment, as earlier suggested, and thereby reveal their hypocritical stances on religious jurisprudence.

Now, my apologist Muslim friends. If indeed your religion permits you to question its tenets and deliberate on them, it is high time to do so and save half the population of Indian Muslims from this terrible bondage to Muslim personal law. Through your discourse you can set right this imbalance that exists in the Indian legal system and afford a fairer legal dispensation for your fairer sex, your mothers and sisters, your daughters and nieces, your aunts and associates. If, however, your claim to scriptural allowance of a conversation on essential elements of your theology and jurisprudence does not stand ground either on account of doctrinal demands or because of pressures of a living tradition, I can only sympathise with your predicament but, my dear friends, all major changes, all reformation movements in history have had to battle for every inch of ground gained by them in the bargain. So must you wage war against the terrible iniquities that afflict your societal living under the dictates of Muslim Personal Law whose repeal, it seems, is imminent, for Muslim women by the millions are on the march and can neither be suppressed nor held back as the advancing tide of civilisation casts archaic absolutism to the waste-bin of history. Liberal Muslims, wake up! It is time to change.