That said, a couple of points bear discussion, especially now that the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has decided that the “triple talaq” abomination is something that will assist its campaign in Uttar Pradesh.
First, there is nothing inherently unusual about liberals, who do not support a uniform civil code. They simply believe in a communitarian form of liberalism rather than in the more traditional individualistic form. That the Congress, for example, prefers the former to the latter is neither surprising nor unique. What is absurdly known as “vote bank politics” in India is common or garden multiculturalism as practiced elsewhere in the world. Many other countries are lucky that they did not have multiple personal laws to start off with, or the multiculturalists in those countries would unquestionably be defending multiple civil codes just the way some liberals unfortunately do in India. (And again, those noisy liberals who claim to believe in individual rather than community rights should stand up for the right to convert, if they do not want to appear cynical hypocrites.)
The second point is this: There is no contradiction between believing strongly in a uniform civil code and arguing that the BJP is the last set of people, who should be allowed to create one. This is because the BJP’s statements on the subject are a product of bad faith. Regardless of the prime minister’s claims, his partymen do not discuss a uniform civil code because they are votaries of improving women’s rights or because they are instinctive liberals. They do so because they do not believe that Muslims should be given any privileges in a Hindu country, and they see a separate personal law as a privilege. There is no need to ascribe any great virtue to this point of view. Indeed, if you believe in a genuinely liberal civil code, as I do, it is equally important to ensure that those who argue for it in bad faith do not dominate the writing of it.
Any genuine movement for a uniformly liberal, gender-neutral civil code would be to give a voice to precisely those Indians who are oppressed by our current laws. That our politics has chosen to silence these voices — Muslim women among them — is deeply unfortunate. Our courts have been the only venue where such voices have been able to receive a fair hearing — from the Shah Bano case in the 1980s to the Shayara Bano case today. This is not to say that courts should make law. But it does reveal that such voices exist, and that they are not being amplified by our political parties.
There will undoubtedly be considerable benefits for the first political entrepreneur who tries to combine the promise of actual security (which rules out the BJP) with outreach to those who have been silenced thanks to a community-first approach to politics. I had long hoped that Mayawati’s Bahujan Samaj Party might be that entrepreneur. After all, it has been serially let down by the “leaders” of UP Muslim communities that it has sought to woo. And it does have an ethos of inclusiveness and of outreach to the silent. But it appears that Mayawati has chosen not to evolve in this direction; she said last week that the triple talaq question should be “left to the Muslim community”.
So who’s left? The BJP is untrustworthy. The Samajwadi Party is not just regressive in temperament but in thrall to precisely those people within UP’s Muslim communities who would want to silence women. The Congress, which is the party that should ideally take the conversation forward, is limited by its communitarian turn, its lack of imagination — and above all by its inability to admit that people named Gandhi could have made awful mistakes. After all, if it seeks to empower women Muslim voters now, doesn’t that mean that Rajiv Gandhi’s decision to overrule Shah Bano was wrong? Such an admission, in today’s Congress, would be like the Roman Catholic church admitting a pope wasn’t infallible. And as for the great new liberal hope, the Aam Aadmi Party of Arvind Kejriwal, there’s not a chance that it will take a stand on principle, since it never ever has; if anything, it has been revealed as more cynical than the Congress it seeks to replace.
None of this means that the uniform civil code — or even modernisation of our current, multiple personal laws — does not deserve support. It simply means that the only political movements that seem willing to address the problems are those who wish to do so in the most obvious bad faith. Unless a few judges take a genuinely courageous step, the voiceless will remain voiceless.
m.s.sharma@gmail.com; Twitter: @mihirssharma