Hypocrisy Unmasked

For years, India’s political class has argued over who gets to speak for Muslims. Rarely has it paused to ask what Muslim women themselves want. Now, a new survey by the Bharatiya Muslim Mahila Andolan offers an uncomfortably clear answer. Across seven states, among 2,500 Sunni Muslim women who are mostly poor and many without steady incomes, an overwhelming majority wants polygamy to be made legally invalid. They are not demanding cultural confrontation or theological upheaval. They are asking, in plain legal terms, for the protections that the Indian state routinely promises but selectively withholds.

The survey is an indictment of a political class and a public discourse that claim to speak in the name of ‘minorities’ while refusing to listen to minority women.

Their testimonies are stark. Polygamy is not experienced as a benign cultural variation. It arrives as humiliation, dispossession and often violence. First wives speak of being abandoned without maintenance, tormented by in-laws and sometimes assaulted by the second wife herself. They reasonably are demanding that if a marriage cannot be sustained, let it dissolve by consent; let the first wife be guaranteed maintenance; only then should remarriage even be contemplated.

In 2016, the BMMA had approached the Supreme Court seeking a ban on instant triple talaq, polygamy and nikah halala. While triple talaq was struck down in 2017, the rest still linger in judicial limbo.

For decades, self-appointed guardians of minority rights which in practice meant an alliance of clerics, identity brokers and sympathetic political parties have presented personal law as sacred terrain, beyond ordinary democratic reform. Any attempt to touch it is instantly framed as an assault on religious freedom. This narrative once found eager patrons in so-called secular parties whose dependence on bloc voting made silence a virtue and reform a liability. The result has been a peculiar inversion where in the name of protecting a minority community, the rights of minority women were indefinitely postponed.

The media, too, has played along. Polygamy appears sporadically as a cultural curiosity or a proxy for majoritarian excess, but rarely as a sustained social injustice voiced by Muslim women themselves. After all, selective liberalism prefers clean abstractions to messy lives.

What makes the BMMA survey politically lethal is precisely its class character. These women cannot be dismissed as westernised outliers. They represent the economic base of the community. When so large a majority demands legal invalidation of polygamy, the old excuse of reform being externally imposed crumbles. At stake is the credibility of progressive politics itself. Can a democracy indefinitely defend gender inequality behind the wall of cultural relativism? Can it keep proclaiming women’s empowerment while excusing a practice that the overwhelming majority of affected women reject?

India’s constitutional promise was never meant to fossilise inequality under the pretext of diversity. The only question is how much longer politics will pretend not to hear what these women are already saying with unforgiving clarity.