India should repeal religious-based marriage and inheritance laws to include the same public code, the northeastern state minister said on Sunday, focusing on laws allowing Muslim men, for example, to have four wives.
Subsequent governments avoided accepting the code out of fear of offending voters from the Indian majority of Hindus and a minority group of Muslims and Christians. But members of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s faction of the Hindu nationalist party and strong allies want to issue a code to other provinces to test the strength of any regression before national pressure.
“Majority of the Muslims I have met want the same uniform civil code,” said Himanta Biswa Sarma, the chief minister of Assam region and a senior member of Modi’s ruling party, the Baratiya Janata Party (BJP). “No Muslim woman wants her husband to marry three to four wives … just ask any Muslim women and they will agree with what I am saying,” she told Reuters.
More than 30% of Assam’s approximately 34 million people are members of the Muslim community. The code, which aims to incorporate and apply personal laws, will apply equally to all citizens, regardless of religion, gender, sexual orientation, and sexual orientation.
Legal issues in marriage, divorce, and inheritance are now governed by various religious laws. Sarma said she loves the law as a way to end religiously discriminatory laws and empower Muslim women who can easily oppose polygamy in the courts.
But critics see the law, which is reflected in some of the BJP’s election plans, as part of the party’s efforts to achieve its goals and to promote non-Muslims. “There is no need for the government to debate the religious practices of Islam,” he said. S.M. Siddiqui, professor of Islamic studies at the financial capital of Mumbai.
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