A draft Muslim family law that seeks to end polygamy and unilateral divorce was on Thursday released here by some of the petitioners in the case against triple talaq that was decided by the Supreme Court last month.
After the Supreme Court judgment held the practice of instant divorce or talaq-e-biddat unconstitutional, the Bharatiya Muslim Mahila Andolan (BMMA), one of the petitioners in the case, drafted a Muslim family law along the lines of Hindu and Christian Marriage Acts.
Based on Quranic injunctions as well as the Constitution of India, as per BMMA co-founder Noorjehan Safia Niaz, the draft seeks to prohibit the practise of polygamy and provides for registration of Muslim marriages in court apart from the Nikah Nama.
In cases of divorce, the draft Muslim family law gives both parties equal rights, ending unilateral divorces. The draft also advocates for the mehr, or the amount given to women at the time of marriage, to be at least as much as the annual income of the husband.
Speaking about the draft law, an activist and petitioner in the triple talaq case, Rais Ahmed said: “Awareness of people is must. Nowhere in the Quran is it mentioned about giving superiority to men or ill treating women. People are assuming and twisting the background in Quran according to their needs.”
Punishable offence
Among the other provisions in the draft, Nikah Halala, where a woman marries someone else, consummates the marriage and then is divorced in order to be eligible to remarry her first husband, would be a punishable offence.
The draft also seeks to fix the minimum age for women and men to get married at 18 and 21 years respectively.
As per the draft, in case of divorce, the husband has to give maintenance for the wife and children even if the wife has an independent source of income.
Published - September 08, 2017 01:44 am IST
