Narendra Modi, India’s prime minister, is concerned about divorce. In particular, he and his Bharatiya Janata party are concerned about divorce within India’s minority Muslim community.
Their dismay is focused on the ease and speed with which Muslim men can legally end marriages simply by uttering “talaq, talaq, talaq”, under the Islamic law that regulates marriage and divorce among India’s Muslims. It is radically different for Hindu men, who must prove in a civil court that their wives have wronged them in order to formally end a marriage over the women’s objections.
Muslim women’s groups have petitioned the Supreme Court to ban the “triple talaq” — which Muslim clerics insist is rare — arguing it violates constitutional promises of gender equality. Mr Modi has thrown the BJP’s weight behind them, repeatedly denouncing a practice he says facilitates “exploitation” of Muslim women.
Instant divorce — in which women can be abruptly cast out of marital homes — is indeed a brutal practice. But many Indians are dismayed at the way the BJP appears to be demonising Muslims over the issue — particularly with unsavoury rhetoric suggesting Muslim men have rapacious sexual appetites. Deeply-embedded in the BJP campaign is the idea that Muslim women are uniquely vulnerable to marital abandonment, while Hindu women are more protected — and their husbands far better behaved.
Yet that, lawyer Kirti Singh says, is a laughable proposition. “As if Hindu men are not doing the same,” she tells me. “It’s just that they don’t bother to get a divorce. They just separate and do their own thing.”
I am reminded of a friend’s Hindu housekeeper whose husband — working in another state — abandoned her and their three children, moving in with a woman in another city.
“The consequences of triple talaq or deserting women generally are the same,” continues Ms Singh, who has written a book on the economic status of Indian women after separation and divorce. “You leave the woman high and dry, often along with the children.”
As less than 30 per cent of Indian women have paid jobs, abandonment by a husband threatens their very survival, forcing most back to parental homes. “They live on the fringes of their natal families,” says Ms Singh. Financial realities make most women vehemently opposed to divorce — no matter how dire the marriage.
Accurately assessing Indian patterns of marriage, divorce and remarriage is tricky, as the census only records people’s “current” marital status and doesn’t separately count re-marriages. But inferences can be drawn. In the 2011 census, 1.3m Indians were divorced and 3.5m were separated, including 3.8m Hindus, and 654,000 Muslims. Of those 4.8m, 3.3m were women while just 1.6m were men, suggesting when marriages end, men move on, regardless of religion. The data also indicate more Hindus separate without obtaining a legal divorce, while Muslims formally end failed marriages.
Mr Modi’s own personal history shows how misleading an official marital status can be. Until 2014, most Indians believed he was a bachelor. But on his 2014 election nomination form, he admitted he was legally married, though it seemed he had not seen his wife, Jashodaben, in decades. His political allies explained the two were promised to each other as children; married as teenagers despite Mr Modi’s objections; and lived together only briefly.
After the sensational revelation, Indian media tracked down Jashodaben, who had supported herself for decades as a village schoolteacher. She was living with her brother, still displaying the traditional markers of a Hindu married woman and praying regularly for the welfare of her long-absent husband. This history — and the narrow focus on Muslim women, while excluding others equally vulnerable — leaves feminists suspicious of the prime minister’s motives over triple talaq.
“They are not interested in giving substantive rights to women,” says Ms Singh. “They are not interested in gender justice. They are only interested in making fun of the Muslims and creating hate around them.”
