Reviving the dead letter - Why liberals must support a common civil code

http://www.telegraphindia.com/1150418/jsp/opinion/story_15128.jsp#.VTHrUPmUfsw Politics and Play - Ramachandra Guha

Thirty years ago this fortnight, the Supreme Court passed its famous judgment in the Shah Bano case. A Muslim man had divorced his wife and stopped providing for her maintenance. The brave woman fought the injustice all the way to the highest court of the land. Finally, on April 23, 1985, a five-judge bench headed by the chief justice endorsed her claim, upholding an earlier judgment of the Madhya Pradesh High Court that she be provided an allowance sufficient for her needs. The Shah Bano case brought into conflict two sets of laws: Muslim personal law, which specified that a divorced wife need not be maintained by her husband after the elapse of a period of time (known as iddat); and the Criminal Procedure Code, Section 125 of which specified that "any person having sufficient means" was obliged to support his wife, even if she lived apart from him. The Supreme Court held that Section 125 of the CrPC applied in this case. In their unanimous judgment, the justices deplored the fact that, under Muslim personal law, "the Muslim husband enjoys the privilege of being able to discard his wife whenever he chooses to do so, for reasons good, bad or indifferent, indeed for no reason at all. And, is the law so ruthless in its inequality that, no matter how much the husband pays for the maintenance of his divorced wife during the period of iddat, the mere fact that he has paid something, no matter how little, absolves him forever from the duty of paying adequately so as to enable her to keep her body and soul together?" Having dealt with the specifics, the Supreme Court further observed that although Article 44 of the Constitution had called for a uniform civil code, there was "no evidence of any official activity" to bring this about. The court believed that "a common Civil Code will help the cause of national integration by removing disparate loyalties to laws which have conflicting ideologies".