-- Arindam Sen
Raped by father-in-law, served ‘talaq’ against the will of husband under the shadow of fundamentalist fatwas, forsaken by the ‘secular’ state – with the Chief Minister of UP endorsing the injustice meted out to her and the Union government shifting all responsibility to the State government – the hapless mother of Muzaffarnagar is not alone. Supporting her cause are any number of women’s organisations and other progressive forces.
While the National Commission for Women lacked the courage to confront Imrana’s oppressors and direct the State and Union governments to take appropriate steps for her social rehabilitation, the Muslim Women’s Personal Law Board came boldly forward. It organised a Muslim women’s panchayat and passed a unanimous resolution criticising the fatwas served by local clerics in Charthawal village (where the crime was committed) and by the Darul Uloom in Deoband (DUD). They even advised Imrana to file a case against those unjust edicts and expressed their willingness to be a party to the legal battle (PTI, 30 June). The board also came out strongly against the All India Muslim Personal Law Board (AIMPLB) for its reported endorsement of the Deoband edict.
The strong voice of protest from aggrieved women, from within the minority community in particular, no doubt comes as a bright silver lining to the dark cloud over half the sky. Happily, the women’s law board is not the only body fighting for the cause. A statement signed by 17 Muslim women social and human rights activists in Ahmedabad said they strongly condemned the communalisation of the case which should have been left within the purview of the women’s human right organisations and the criminal justice system. They said that the “fatwa” did not reflect the tenets of Islam and was contrary to the principle of natural justice as propagated by the latter. They regretted that bodies issuing fatwas were given legitimacy in a democratic country such as India .
“We are also deeply anguished”, they added, “that every time a case of violation of a Muslim woman’s rights occurs, it gives rise to the otherwise dormant debate on the Common Civil Code, while experiences of women’s groups are that at all times, Hindu or Muslim, or other caste panchayats have always violated women’s rights and never provided justice to them.” (The Hindu, 7 July 2005 )
But it is not just women who are voicing the protest. Since early July, the Jamiat Ahle Hadees in Murshidabad district (where, like in Muzaffarnagar district in UP, Muslims constitute a sizeable section of the population) in WB has been propagating, with a fair degree of popular support, against the Deoband fatwa. Quoting extensively from the scriptures, the Maulavis and Ulemas have sought to show that (a) a victim remains pure and cannot be punished in any way, so the edict that Imrana has been rendered ‘haram’(impure) and must be served ‘talaq’ goes against the spirit of Islam; (b) the rapist is liable to be punished severely, even by death; (C) no woman can be married to her father-in-law, so Imrana cannot be asked to stay with the rapist.
Add to these organised – albeit small – protests, the large number of Muslim (as well as non-Muslim) women and men who have come out strongly, in the national press and other media, against the rapist as well as the clerics who issued the fatwas. Some of them advocated reforms in personal law, though not a uniform civil code (UCC). The AIMPLB too has been widely criticised for its apathetic role.
The loud chorus of condemnation by progressive Muslims has generated a lot of controversy within both the DUD and the AIMPLB and pushed them into a defensive position. In both cases, office bearers have issued contradictory statements. Thus AIMPLB general secretary Maulana Syed Nizamuddin said on 12 July: “The board deems it fit to make it clear that it has so far not issued any statement in the Imrana matter and whatever views have been expressed by members of the board are their individual opinions”. (The Hindu, 13 July 2005 )
If there is a general tone in the multiple protests against the religious rulings, it is that the latter are based on wrong interpretations of the scriptures. For us, of course, the whole thing is not merely a matter of correct or incorrect interpretation of the scriptures; but the facts cited above are important in so far as they portray the actual trends of progressive thought within Muslim civil society. So far as we are concerned, all religions are the products of patriarchy and serve more or less to maintain and reinforce male domination. That is why we deem it necessary to fight out the Hindutva campaign which depicts Islam as especially retrograde and anti-woman; we particularly condemn the BJP ploy to use the travails of a tortured woman in the narrow interest of their communal politics.
Just take a cursory glance at the spate of scandalous incidents that shocked us over the last one year– the Arif-Gudia and Sonia-Rampal cases, the killing of Nilam, the case of the Anganwadi supervisor who had her hands almost chopped off for doing her official duty (i.e. campaigning against child marriage), the Sati at Banda (UP) with a minister attending the ceremony, the very recent incident at Ghariamal in Orissa, where a young mother was paraded naked and severely beaten up by none other than her husband in complicity with local powerbrokers (her crime was that she dared to question the ways of her husband) and so on – and you need no further proof of the absolutely wretched condition of Indian women irrespective of creed, class, caste and region. Recently, in Nagaon , Assam , Jyotsna Bibi became a victim of a pathetic rerun of the Imrana episode,
And for those who believed that the left bastion of Bengal was free from the all-India trends, a recent incident of July this year in a Murshidabad should suffice to drive the truth home. In Beldanga town Anjali Hazra (a domestic help) committed suicide after being fined by the local ‘arbitration meeting’ on charges of being ‘characterless’. Witch-killing is regularly practised in some parts of the State, bride-burning is an all Bengal practice, and as in other States, cadres of the main ruling party are frequently found involved in all sorts of atrocities on women.
What are the main factors responsible for the drastic rise in familial and social torture on women throughout the country during the last 10-15 years?
There is of course nothing new about the ubiquitous tendency to dominate women, to keep them eternally subordinated to men. But now that women are, more and more, participating in social production and earning for the family, getting educated and exposed to trends of the times, when they are striving to stand upright and assert their relative independence in domestic and social life, inevitably and everywhere they are coming up against a brute backlash of male chauvinism. The latter, however, does not walk alone. It gets embedded in existing power structures like caste hegemony, feudal-kulak domination, religious fundamentalism, communal virulence and other networks of social oppression and gets embedded so thoroughly, so completely, that in most cases you cannot identify and fight it as a separate entity.
In rural areas, traditional caste or sect-based panchayats which operate as seats of feudal-kulak-patriarchal power play a heinous role in this regard, as correctly pointed out by the Ahmedabad protesters. The landlord path of capitalist development in agriculture has only served to further strengthen such networks in all their reactionary dimensions (hence the higher incidence of atrocities on dalits and women in many of the strongholds of green revolution) and thanks to their role of vote managers they enjoy full patronage of political parties, the administration and the police. The camouflage of collectivity helps these bodies operate with a degree a social sanction and this explains the helplessness of victims like Imrana. Uniform across India in their essential role, naturally these bodies display wide regional variations in forms and modus operandi. In West Bengal, for example, power of the rural rich operates through a network of four p’s: party (the main ruling party), panchayat, prashashan (administration) and police – a network which runs so efficiently as a hegemonic force that crude large scale violence needs to be resorted to only in exceptional cases.
Seen in a broader perspective, all sorts of oppression on the weak (dalits, women, the poor in general) by the strong (forwards castes, males, the rich) are escalating everywhere in the current environment of right-centre-left ‘consensus’ over neo-liberal economics, acute rightist drift in politics and deep cultural degeneration. Rural areas constitute the main theatre of this reactionary onslaught and if the revolutionary women’s movement works more vigorously in the countryside and in closer coordination with the agrarian labour association, it could surely give a fresh and much-needed impetus to the movemental assertion of the rural poor in general and women in particular.
Unable to grasp this total politics, pure feminism fights patriarchy separately, i.e. in isolation from other elements in the integrated oppressive power structures. On the other side of the coin, there are ‘pure’ politicians – you will find them on the Left, including the revolutionary Left, too – who fail to see the new phenomenon of increasing atrocities on women in the new socio-political perspective and therefore treat it simply as old social evils. Why should a political party, or a communist party for that matter, devote its time and energy to these non-political issues, issues of social reform – they ask. What they fail to appreciate is that the struggle against repression on women and for empowerment of women is one of the most important strands in the multi-dimensional war to build counter-hegemony against the ruling classes, ruling strata and ruling ideas. In this sense, it is a major component in our broader struggle for democratisation of society, a major task of the communist party (not of its women’s wing alone) in the stage of democratic revolution. An arduous task, a protracted war that will see many more Imranas, Anjalis and Manjus maimed and martyred, but a war we will win together.