Congratulations Communalism Combat on reaching a major landmark. To reach out across the majority-minority gulf with an agenda of secularism in turbulent times is a formidable task and I congratulate you for undertaking this challenge with sagacity, temerity and dedication. The magazine has proved itself by filling in a void of mapping communal conflicts on to the broader canvas of human rights.

This period of strife and conflict has dislodged many established premises and has compelled a re-examination of some accepted norms. A journey that has been particularly agonising for many of us in the women’s rights movement is the reformulation of gender concerns. In a communally vitiated atmosphere, these concerns could no longer be compartmentalised into rigid formulae and warranted constant reshuffling. My concern while writing this salutary note is to contextualise gender within the complex terrain of communal conflicts and threatened identities.

The year 1985 marks the threshold of this journey for many of us, with the controversial ruling in the Shah Bano case when the Supreme Court gave its first call for a Uniform Civil Code (UCC). The women’s movement welcomed the judgement, endorsed the call for a UCC, and opposed the enactment of the Muslim Women’s Act (MWA), which would take divorced Muslim women out of the purview of secular law and place them under a separate personal Act. The MWA was viewed as a symbol of Muslim appeasement by the then ruling Congress government, by women’s rights and civil rights groups.

During the controversial enactment, brought in through pressure from Muslim groups, the media projected two insular and mutually exclusive positions — those who opposed the Bill and supported the demand for a UCC as modern, secular and rational, and those in support of the new Act and opposing the UCC as orthodox, chauvinistic, communal and obscurantist.

Progressive, modern and secular, in effect, also meant nationalist, the opposing side being projected as anti-national. The discomfort came when women’s rights activists found themselves sharing the podium with Hindu communal groups who were using the controversy to whip up anti-Muslim hysteria. Muslim bashing by the Hindu right-wing met with a nod of approval by liberals who believed that a modern state would be violating its constitutional commitments if it permitted separate personal laws based on religious identities.

Contradictory claims of contesting groups – gender justice, national integration, Muslim bashing and claims of modernity – coalesced into the demand for a UCC. How could the rights of minority women be reclaimed from this entanglement? This was the disquieting question that I began with.

Two events boosted the process. The demolition of the Babri Masjid, and its aftermath, the Bombay riots. When the commission of enquiry was set up, the two antagonist groups, women’s rights and Muslim community leadership found themselves working alongside on the broad platform of human rights.

So in 1995, when the Supreme Court once again called for a UCC in the Sarla Mudgal case, there was some discomfort within women’s groups and the protests, though just a whimper, were clearly discernible. The communal undertones of the rulings were also clearly visible. While examining the rights of two wives of a Hindu male, the Supreme Court had prescribed the UCC as an antidote for Hindu polygamy and thrown in the logic of national integration for good measure! The fight between the two Hindu wives was transformed into a demand for a UCC in aid of Muslim women.

At the other end, the slogan, ‘Reform from within’ was gradually gaining ground. In 1997, when we at Majlis won a landmark victory for Christian women in the Bombay High Court, the slogan got a boost. When finally the Indian Divorce Act was amended to weed out gender based discrimination within it, through the collective efforts of many Christian women over two decades, the aspiration of ‘reform from within’ had been actualised, and could now be proclaimed as a counter to the communally vitiated demand for a Uniform Civil Code.

The change within women’s groups regarding the UCC is visible by the lukewarm response to the renewed call by the Supreme Court for a UCC in the John Vallamattom case (more popularly known as the Khare judgement), 2003. Ironically, this judgement does not claim to examine the rights of Muslim women, or even women in general, and deals with the issue of a Christian cleric’s right to will his property for a charitable purpose. Here, the only link that the judgement makes is between the UCC and national integration. This is clearly a victory for the alternate position of gender concerns within the women’s movement. And those who still cling to the dated position of the UCC as a gender equaliser are an insignificant minority.

But what is rather perturbing is that within a communally vitiated atmosphere, the advances made by divorced Muslim women under the provisions of the MWA have been made invisible and glossed over by the media — both mainstream and alternative. Law is not merely an enactment and its essence lies in the manner in which it is unfolded in the courts. Right from 1988, the courts have engineered women’s rights through innovative interpretation of the new statute, ushering in a new set of rights within the established principles of Islamic jurisprudence. Several High Courts and the lower judiciary have given positive judgements benefiting divorced Muslim women under the ‘fair and reasonable provision’ of the MWA.

But the struggle was not easy. Divorced Muslim women had to fight every inch of the way for their rights — from trial courts in small district towns up to the Supreme Court. And they withstood the ordeal with courage and determination. Court after court, judge after judge declared that ‘provision’ contemplates ‘future needs’ and that the Parliament had replaced one set of obligations of a Muslim husband with another.

The final seal came when in 2001, a constitutional Bench, in Danial Latifi vs Union of India (2001 CriLJ 4660) upheld the validity of the Muslim Women’s Act and laid to rest the controversy by proclaiming that Muslim women have the right to a fair and reasonable settlement for life. Both sides, the women’s rights’ groups who had challenged the constitutionality of the Act, as well as the Muslim religious leadership who had pressed for the claim that a Muslim woman’s entitlement was only limited to three months of the Iddat period, had lost. The one to emerge victorious was the divorced Muslim woman who had waged a relentless battle to protect her rights.

As a women’s rights lawyer and researcher, it is imperative that I rejoice at this victory. All the more in the wake of the Gujarat carnage, where Muslim women have been subjected to the most gruesome sexual violations not just because they are women but because they are Muslims. With every communal conflict in the country, the space for negotiating Muslim women’s rights ‘from the outside’ becomes constrained.

Hence, the battles waged from within have to be hailed and saluted. As I greet Communalism Combat on its tenth anniversary, my aspiration for its future is that it will be able to encompass within its realm the complex claims of minority women for an integrated approach of rights so that their claims are not turned into whips with which to bash their own community.