Passing of the triple talaq Bill will be a dream come true for this Chennai lawyer

Senior advocate Bader Sayeed has a client who was asked last week by a judge if she was okay with her ex-husband going to jail for a month for refusing to pay her maintenance. The judge explained that jailing him would further delay the already long-overdue payment. She replied, “Jail him.” Her response stunned the court.

The woman is poor, her ex-husband owes her ₹6 lakh in maintenance plus her jewellery. The woman’s father had slept on Mumbai’s pavements for days before he finally managed to get the man to appear in court. The woman told Bader, “I’ve waited six years for the money. If he’s still adamant, let him go to jail.”

This is overwhelmingly the mood among a majority of Muslim women in the country barely days after the Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Marriage) Bill, 2017, which seeks to make instant triple talaq an offence, has been tabled and passed in the Lok Sabha. The Bill is set to become law soon with the government determined to pass the legislation during the ongoing Budget Session.

“It’s a dream come true,” says 70-year-old Bader, a long-time advocate for Muslim women’s rights and a former AIADMK MLA. “I never imagined triple talaq would be made an offence in my lifetime.”

Long battle

Bader’s enthusiasm for the Bill stems from years of work among poor Muslim women. Way back in the 80s, she had demanded the codification of Muslim personal law. This was in response to repeated pleas from her clients to save them from the two discriminatory practices they suffered most from: triple talaq and polygamy.

Bader, who intervened in the Shayara Bano case, which led to the August 2017 Supreme Court judgment that declared instant talaq “unconstitutional”, believes that courts alone must adjudicate family matters, for it is only in court that all parties can have their say. In 2014, she had filed a petition in the Madras High Court asking that only courts, and not kazis, should validate divorce. Women would show her divorce certificates given to their husbands by kazis who had not even given the wives a hearing.

Finally, in January 2017, Chief Justice S.K. Kaul gave a favourable order, citing the Kazis Act, 1880, which does not empower kazis to validate divorce. It is only an interim order, but it has made kazis in Tamil Nadu think twice before issuing talaq certificates.

Bader’s actions have always reflected the needs of the poorest Muslim women, but they have also earned her many enemies. When her petition against kazis was being heard, 10 auto-rickshaws filled with slogan-shouting men surrounded her home. She faced threats earlier too, when she had collected thousands of signatures from Muslim women supporting Shah Bano. When she started retrieving encroached Wakf properties as head of the Tamil Nadu Wakf Board from 2001 to 2006 (the first woman to hold that position), a prominent family threatened to break her hands and legs, and a minister resisted her decision to hold elections to the Board as per the Wakf Act.

But none of that has deterred Bader, also the first woman to head the State Minorities Commission. In 1992, she opened a shelter, Roshni, for abandoned women. Roshni is now a full-fledged school for first-generation learners of all faiths.

Bader now wants two changes in the triple talaq Bill: the definition of complainant to be restricted to the wife and her immediate family, and for the offence to be made non-cognisable. As it stands, the Bill allows anyone to file a police complaint, and the police can act without a warrant. “We are afraid this provision may be misused,” says the lawyer.

But she’s not willing to reject the Bill in toto. “That would be throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Let a Parliamentary Committee study it; let lawyers challenge it. In the end, we will get a good law.”

To those who allege that her support for the Bill translates into support for the ruling party, Bader has only one thing to say: “The BJP has its own motives. But what has the Congress done for Muslim women?”

The writer is a Mumbai-based freelance journalist.