May You Be the Mother of a Hundred Sons (30 page)

Margaret Alva’s influence over women’s issues ensured that she would be both a sounding board and a favorite scapegoat for the feminist groups and women’s organizations frustrated over their efforts to change government policy. There was constant quarreling and making up; both sides knew they had to live with each other. “Very often the groups tell me, ‘We have to criticize the government; we are after all women’s groups and we have to fight,’ ” Alva said. “But then they’ll come and sit with me and talk about things and say, ‘Well, how can we do this together?’ ” Yet inevitably there were complaints that Margaret Alva was merely a toady of the Congress party. This charge was made during the Muslim divorce case in 1986, which exploded into one of Rajiv Gandhi’s biggest political disasters. The prime minister’s stand on the controversy cost him crucial support among women and India’s Hindu majority. In retrospect, Gandhi’s aides agreed that the case was the beginning of the educated urban elite’s disaffection with a man they had initially elected as one of their own. For Margaret Alva, the issue created a dilemma that forced her to choose between her personal views as a woman and what she saw as her duty to her government. “Very often our opinion as women activists and our commitment to the larger interests of the party do create situations,” she admitted.

The case was so important to the cause of women that I decided I needed to know more about it. In the spring of 1986, I traveled to the town of Indore in India’s dry central plains to meet the source of the controversy: Shah Bano Begum, a seventy-two-year-old middle-class
housewife, who described herself as just another good Muslim woman trying her best to please her husband, Mohammed Ahmad Khan, a well-to-do lawyer. Years before, when her husband had taken another wife, as allowed by Islamic law, Shah Bano’s upbringing taught her not to object. The result was that for next three decades, the two wives of Mohammed Ahmad Khan raised their children, ten between them, in the same uneasy household. The husband claimed he had tried his best to maintain the peace. “I bought them the same clothes and the same jewels,” he told me with exasperation. “I took my evening meals with Shah Bano, and my morning meals with my second wife.” But the relationship with Shah Bano was never smooth, and in 1978, when her children were grown, Shah Bano’s husband finally divorced her, which Muslim law permitted him to do simply by making a unilateral declaration. “I felt enormous grief,” Shah Bano told me, “but I also hated him.” She was by then living around the corner from her former husband, in a small house that he owned, and was supported by her two sons. She was thin but not frail, with almost mischievous eyes in a lined, sunken face. After the divorce, she sued her husband for maintenance, similar to alimony, and then waited seven years as the case made its way through the lower courts.

In 1985, the Supreme Court of India finally ordered Mohammed Ahmad Khan to pay Shah Bano the equivalent of forty dollars a month, on the grounds that Indian law provides for maintenance payments for a destitute divorced woman. But Shah Bano was not destitute, and she even admitted to me that she wanted the maintenance as “prestige money” for pocket expenses. More important, the ruling disregarded another provision in the law, which holds that in some family matters Muslim “personal law”—based on the Koran and other texts—may take precedence for Indian Muslims. This personal law covers marriage and divorce and was guaranteed to Muslims at the time of independence to ensure that Muslims would not feel that a “Hindu Raj” would replace the British Raj under which they had suffered. Hindus and other religious groups had their own personal laws for marriage as well. Meanwhile, over the decades, various civil laws governing marriage and divorce were enacted, including one guaranteeing alimony. These laws were open to couples of any religion.

The Supreme Court decision, by a Hindu chief justice, set off a rampage across India. In what now seems a foretaste of the Islamic demonstrations against Salman Rushdie’s novel
The Satanic Verses
, millions of Muslims took to the streets, demonstrating against the
judge’s ruling and burning him in effigy. Fundamentalist Islamic leaders made fire-breathing speeches about “Islam in danger” and denounced the decision as a Hindu attack on their culture and “blatant interference” in the affairs of their religion. What had begun as a simple question of whether all women should be given rights in modern India had evolved, for the Muslims, into nothing less than a debate over their future in a nation that is 80 percent Hindu.

With an estimated one hundred million Muslims, India is one of the largest Islamic countries in the world. To the fury of feminists and the dismay of some in his own party, Rajiv Gandhi yielded to Muslim pressures, and his government introduced a bill in Parliament to reverse the Supreme Court decision. The prime minister’s advisers characterized the bill as an attempt to safeguard India’s always tenuous national unity by protecting the rights of the minority; critics said that the bill was in fact undermining national unity rather than strengthening it. Clearly, Rajiv Gandhi’s motives were complex. Muslims had long been a vital part of the Congress party constituency, but as one of Rajiv’s advisers told me: “Grubbing for the Muslim vote is the reverse of the coin that says you are being sensitive to Muslim feelings.” Such a distinction was of course rejected by the feminists. “We were shocked,” said Zoya Hassan, one of the educated Muslim women who led an agitation against the bill. “One does not expect a secular government to introduce a bill based on distinctions in religious communities and which denies rights to women.” Certainly, the condition of many Muslim women in India was already deplorable. I will never forget the first time I saw a Muslim woman in purdah as she walked on the hot streets of the Kashmiri capital of Srinigar, covered from head to toe in a heavy black burkha, like a moving tent with little holes made in the cloth for her eyes. I could never accept in my mind that under Muslim law a man can simply divorce any of his allowed four wives by writing “I divorce my wife” on a piece of paper and submitting it in court.

After an acrimonious floor debate, the bill passed in Parliament. Two years later, when tempers had cooled but the issue still lingered, I asked Rajiv Gandhi about his thinking behind the decision. We were in the conference room at the prime minister’s residence on Race Course Road, and Gandhi, who had said very little publicly during the controversy, was suddenly eager to justify himself. Initially, he said, he had felt “very strongly” that “we must not bend at all, and take a hard stand, what we call a secular stand, and let the Supreme
Court ruling stand.” But the prime minister said that as he spoke to Muslims—“I’m not talking about fundamentalists, I’m talking about educated Muslims,” he insisted—he came to understand that they saw marriage not as a religious sacrament, as Hindus and Christians do, but as a contract. He explained that this gave Muslim marriage a “totally different” character, involving different values. “You cannot put the value based on a sacrament into a contract,” he said. “Now, the real question is, in the Muslim contractual system of marriage, does it give the woman her rights?” The prime minister was convinced that Muslim women did indeed have “rights” guaranteed by their personal law. Under Muslim law, for example, a woman receives a lump-sum payment, called mehr, from her husband at the time of her marriage; in theory, although not always in practice, this is entirely hers should there be a divorce. Shah Bano had received her mehr before she filed her case for maintenance, but the judge did not accept the payment as a valid one, according to his interpretation of Islamic law. “It’s very difficult to put things objectively into place,” Gandhi said, “because most of us, including me, are Western-educated, and Western-educated really means, no matter how secular the education is, there is a basic Christian moral values background.”

It was clear that Gandhi was still struggling with the issue, and that it seemed to wound him that he, of all people—a Western-educated person—should be accused of pandering to religious fundamentalism. He then digressed by telling a story about how “a staunch leftist” in India had remarked that Bangladesh became “secular” after its first ruler, Sheikh Mujib, changed the Muslim holiday, traditionally Friday, to Sunday. “So I said,” Gandhi continued, amused, “ ‘I find it fantastic that you could think Sunday is more secular than Friday. Maybe Tuesday, which is nobody’s holiday, perhaps it would be secular. But Sunday is Christian.’ ” In any case, the new divorce bill, which was a codification of the Muslim personal law, required a husband to pay his wife mehr plus maintenance for three months. Then the financial responsibility for a divorced woman fell to her family or her local Muslim community board. “In our system,” Gandhi said, meaning in Hindu marriage practices, “the girl, once she leaves the home, goes to the husband. And that’s also in many ways the Christian system. The family washes its hands of their responsibility. The Muslim system is the opposite. The family never washes its hands of the responsibility for the girl. Now you have to view it from that perspective, and it’s totally different. You can’t try and take one set of values and put them
in the other one.” Gandhi further reasoned that since Muslims were guaranteed their personal law at the time of independence, “that guarantee cannot be withdrawn, unless it is withdrawn by consensus.” He pointed out that Muslim couples are also free to marry under civil law. “Anybody who wants out can have out,” he said.

Even before I interviewed Rajiv Gandhi I had agreed with this point of view. My feeling put me at odds with most of my friends and acquaintances in India, and I frequently found myself disagreeing with educated “secular” Hindus and supporters of women’s rights. Their arguments were undeniably correct: that the bill was bad for women because in effect it prohibited a Muslim woman from going to court to seek a maintenance payment from the man who divorced her—which was an apparent unconstitutional discrimination against women on the basis of religion. It was also true that the bill was seriously flawed: many mehrs were negligible; and it was hard to see how a local Muslim community board could provide financial support to a destitute divorced woman, since the boards generally had no money. And finally, it was undeniably true that fundamentalist Muslim leaders were inflaming the controversy for their own political gain. But it seemed to me that if Muslims were guaranteed their personal law at the time of independence, and if modern India had interpreted its status as a secular country to mean that the personal laws of all religions should be respected, then the prime minister had to abide by that interpretation—at least until the country could agree on a uniform civil code, which theoretically would combine elements from all the religious laws into one. No one expected a consensus on a uniform civil code to emerge any time before the next century. Some of Gandhi’s less rabid critics admitted that he in fact had no other choice but to do what he did, although they argued that the prime minister should have stalled by turning the matter over to a commission so as not to appear to be caving in to the Muslims. Maybe so. But however it might have been handled, it did not seem right to me that a “secular” Hindu majority should impose its will on the personal law granted to a religious minority. Every indication was that most Muslims supported the supremacy of their personal law. Although I felt that change in their law was desperately needed, the change had to come from the Muslims themselves.

Among the many women who disagreed with the prime minister was Margaret Alva, although she made her views known only in private. “I made my own opinion on the bill very clear with the prime
minister,” she told me, explaining her view that allowing the Supreme Court decision to stand “would gradually help us move toward a uniform civil code.” She gave up when she saw she had lost. “Once the majority in the cabinet takes a decision, this is a decision of government,” she said firmly, as if expecting an argument from me. “I have no independent views here.” The women’s groups were appalled, but Alva felt she had no other option and apparently did not feel strongly enough about the matter to resign from the party, as did one liberal Muslim member of Parliament who disagreed with the bill.

Margaret Alva was the first of a number of women I met in Indian politics, from the aristocratic Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, one of the political grandes dames of the subcontinent, to K. R. Gouri, a Marxist from a low-caste family who had risen to become the most powerful woman in the southern Indian state of Kerala. These women represented a multitude of social and political forces in India—the independence movement, former royalty, the popular cinema, the left. They were interesting to me because they had moved out of the shadows of powerful men and had established identities and to some extent political bases of their own. I met them in palaces, bungalows and cramped government offices. For me, their lives were a rich part of the tapestry of India.

By far the most exotic political women I encountered were two former maharanis, Vijayaraje Scindia of the old princely state of Gwalior and Gayatri Devi of Jaipur. Both had become members of Parliament as the wives of once-influential maharajas, both had written as-told-to autobiographies about extraordinary lives (Gayatri Devi’s was
A Princess Remembers
, published in 1976; Vijayaraje Scindia followed nine years later with
Princess
), and both had been imprisoned as members of the opposition by Indira Gandhi during the Emergency. The two were in Tihar jail, Delhi’s infamous hellhole, where they shared a bathroom. Scindia described the experience in
Princess:
“Gayatri Devi and I may have been ex-Maharanis, but Tihar had its own ‘Queen,’ an under-trial prisoner who had twenty-seven registered offences against her, including as many as four murders. She went about with a razor-blade concealed in her blouse, threatening to ‘carve up the face’ of anyone who dared to cross her path.” There were flies, filth, stench and disease which made it, Scindia wrote, “depressing beyond words. Gayatri Devi, who was ill and in need of major surgery, had convinced herself that she was going to die in Tihar. ‘Only my body will be taken out,’ she used to say, and she had given her family
instructions about where and in what manner she wanted to be cremated.”