Gender Inequality and Religious Personal Laws in India

Spring/Summer 2008 • volume xiv, issue 2 Contemporary India is a multicultural society that is pluralistic with regards to religious law. Different groups in India have separate religious personal laws (RPLs), which India’s secular state is reluctant to reform. However, these laws have generated debate about the meaning of gender equality in India, since all RPLs to various extents give women fewer rights than men, but Indian women have been promised equality as a constitutional right. Though the RPLs allow for inclusiveness in religion, the history of these laws in India shows that they have been used selectively as a tool of governance and often to the disadvantage of women. In the past, feminists argued that various differences of identity—such as race, ethnicity, and sexuality—should be recognized and accounted for in the law. But in the case of India’s cultural pluralism, religious difference comes into conflict with gender equality. I argue for replacing the religious personal laws with gender-just family laws. Though this argument may seem exclusionary, cultural identity and gender justice do not have to be antithetical values. One way of pursuing both goals is to keep the historical and social specificities in the forefront of any discussions. It is possible to argue for common rights for all women by re-conceptualizing the feminist project as one of constructing inclusive legal theory that is sensitive to demands of differences but also those of justice. This article is divided into four broad parts. The first part explains the origin of the concept of religious personal laws and their selective reform by the state. The second part traces the development of various feminist legal responses to the issue of gender equality and the post-structural proliferation of differences. Here an argument is made for contextualizing the demand for recognizing differences and examining whether feminists can argue without contradiction that different religious personal