What can Rs 500 buy?

It’s high time the anachronistic laws on maintenance went

A divorced woman in India faces not just social stigma, she has to reckon with anachronistic and discriminatory laws which do not protect her even while they claim to do so. The interim relief a woman is entitled to under the law is a princely sum of Rs 500, which is insufficient to keep a pet poodle well fed, leave alone a human being. Ironically, even this miserable pittance is sometimes not forthcoming and the family courts in this country are filled with desperate women filing relief claims, often with little success. The Cabinet’s decision, earlier this week, to do away with the existing ceiling of Rs 500 a month on interim relief and speed up the adjudication on maintenance claims has come much too late, but needs to be welcomed nevertheless as an important policy move in the right direction. Hopefully, Parliament will endorse the suggested changes in the next session.

To understand why this is vital it may be useful to recall the findings of the National Family Health Survey-2 which demonstrated that the majority of women in India continue to be excluded from even the most mundane decision-making within a family. For instance, nearly 90 per cent of women in Uttar Pradesh and over 80 per cent in Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Haryana and Andhra Pradesh needed to take permission before they left the house to visit a friend, or even the market. What was perhaps even more telling was that at least half of the women surveyed did not have access to money. When such a group of disempowered individuals are faced with the trauma of desertion and divorce, their plight can well and truly be imagined. There have been cases when wives were turned out of their marital homes with only the sari they were wearing to call their own. The pattern is a fairly universal one cutting across caste and community lines and the Cabinet has only recognised this by endorsing amendments in four Acts involving maintenance: the Indian Divorce Act, the Special Marriages Act, the Hindu Marriage Act and the Parsi Marriage and Divorce Act.

It is unfortunate that Muslim women will once again be left out of a move seeking to grant a modicum of security to divorced women. In what can only be seen as a cop-out, the government has clarified that Muslim women will continue to be governed by the provisions of the cynically termed Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Divorce) Act, 1986, under which a divorced woman is not entitled to any maintenance beyond the iddat period. Yet, as several public hearings of Muslim women held all over the country have indicated, there is great disquiet among them on the issue of arbitrary divorce — even postal talaq and talaq by telegram are not uncommon. An old woman called Shah Bano spent seven years of her life seeking justice on this score and thousands of women, along with their children, are forced to eke out a miserable existence after they have been deserted by their husbands. Since the government seems disinclined to do anything about this, it is time that the change-makers within the community asserted themselves and ensured that divorced Muslim women get the same protection that women in other communities are entitled to. It is time to correct this institutionalised injustice.