By Anisha Reddy / Outlook India
Criminalising Triple Talaq in 2019
While divorce emanating from the utterance of ‘talaq’ three times was already made illegal in an earlier judgment, the government passed a law in 2019 criminalising the utterance of these three words. So, if a Muslim man says these three words to his wife, they are not divorced but the husband faces a prison term. Muslim activists have criticised the law for skipping the actual process of providing justice and financial security to Muslim women, as imprisoning husbands could prevent them from paying post-divorce maintenance.
Citizenship Amendment Act of 2019
The new citizenship law is an amendment to a 1955 legislation and makes religion the basis for granting Indian citizenship. The law grants citizenship to ‘persecuted’ minorities—Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsis and Christians—from Bangladesh, Afghanistan and Pakistan, but it makes no reference to Muslims from these areas, who would then effectively be denied from seeking Indian citizenship.
Criminalising the Possession of Beef
The first state to criminalise the possession of beef was Maharashtra in 2015 (then under BJP rule). A 2019 report titled ‘Violent Cow Protection in India’ notes that between May 2015 and December 2018, at least 44 people, majority Muslim, indigenous Adivasis, or Dalits—members of India’s most oppressed caste, for whom beef forms a significant part of their staple diet, were killed after being suspected of eating, selling, or transporting beef.
Hijab Ban
The Karnataka High Court upheld a ban on wearing the hijab in class in 2021, saying that it is not an essential religious practice of Islam. The ruling, which was contested in the Supreme Court, is still awaiting a hearing, and has effectively pushed out thousands of Muslim girls from schools.
This story was originally published in outlookindia.com. Read the full story here
