After recent events in Haryana we should not underestimate the power of men of religion. I recently had the experience of sitting next to a furious mullah in a TV studio. Don’t want government money for madrasas, he hollered, don’t want modern syllabus, don’t want to produce doctors or engineers, just want to produce more maulanas and it’s my right to do so. He was banging his fists on the table and was in quite a state as he saw his freedoms being curtailed.

Mullah saab is quite right in that like the Mormons or the Amish people in the US he has every right to do exactly what he wants and live in a separate universe – especially now that the right to privacy has been reinforced in a magnificent manner by the Supreme Court.

What the mullah should not have is the right to legally impose his views on others but actually he does have this right via the All India Muslim Personal Law Board (AIMPLB), which has set itself up as the ‘sole spokesperson’ of the Muslim community. Founded in 1973, AIMPLB is a collection of clerics (with a few professionals thrown in) whose main purpose is to protect sharia law. Half its members are life members and ever since it compelled Congress to overturn the Shah Bano judgment in 1986, it’s grown in clout, even as it has created the ecosystem necessary to posit the argument of ‘appeasement’ of a particular community.

Yes, the mullahs have been appeased, even as the people they claim to speak for head downwards on every social and economic indicator. Yet on every matter involving Muslims, including the Ayodhya case, AIMPLB is there positing its views. Now that they have been defeated in the triple talaq matter it’s a good time to ask, on whose mandate does AIMPLB claim to speak for the world’s third largest Muslim community? Did they descend from the heavens to represent India’s unfortunate Muslims till eternity? And why can’t AIMPLB be disbanded and a more representative body created?

Although the triple talaq judgment disappoints in still upholding personal laws over fundamental rights, yet a process has begun where women can question men’s rights to determine laws. All the world religions have historically discriminated against women either on the basis of religious texts or social custom (after all Eve came from Adam’s rib, while virgins await men in paradise and till the last century it was acceptable in parts of India for women to burn themselves on their husband’s pyres). But the whole point of modern societies is equality before law, regardless of religion, caste or gender.

We in India have in theory given all citizens equal rights but in practice personal laws (not just those applicable to Muslims) have been the backdoor route to disempowering women in matters of marriage, divorce, rights over children and inheritance. And because we were a nation born in the bloodshed and chaos of the Partition, those at the helm of affairs have also had a deep neurosis involving the Muslim community. Somewhere down the line, Congress, the dominant party to shape India’s narrative till recently, appeared to have taken the path of auctioning out ‘secularism’ to clerics, naturally all men, who were then expected to deliver the Muslim ‘herd’ as a voter bloc.

It’s as if the great votaries of secularism could not dirty their hands by directly dealing with Muslims so they brought on the mullahs. Regional parties, most notably SP, BSP and TMC have taken this model of politics to the next level. The first two have been vanquished in the age of BJP while TMC is holding ground in Bengal – yet it is inevitable that its advocacy of conservative clerics will lead to a counter polarisation.

Although secularism actually means a separation of state and church, we have evolved something of a perversion in India where the clerics have used the cover of secularism to keep retrograde personal laws in place and thereby their own relevance intact. And it’s not all motivated by divine impulses: Control over a social group also ensures control over whatever resources are available, most notably in the Waqf properties that are reservoirs of corruption instead of being a resource to serve the poor in the community. If our secularism appears to have been virtually flattened by the organised assault of right wing nationalism, it’s because there was a serious structural flaw in it to begin with. Let’s admit that.

A few women have now given some oxygen to the Muslim identity that was being suffocated by the relentless presence of the mullah. This identity should always have been grounded in the reality of artisans and craftsmen who make beautiful things with their hands and in the great subcontinental reservoir of poetry and literature that questioned every structure and saw the mullah as an impediment to knowledge and liberation.

Even today we live in an age of neurosis, where some accuse the women who fought the case of being pawns in a larger conspiracy scripted by BJP. To such commentators i would only say liberate your minds and regardless of whether BJP set a bait or not, equality is always worth fighting for. It is also true that personal laws may not be the most pressing matter confronting the Muslim community, although any set of rules that disempowers women should always matter.

It’s good to see the self-appointed guardians of Islam put in their place. My mullah saab would still be fuming, but frankly, i don’t give a damn as he believes women must live at the mercy of men.