On Tuesday, February 6, the Uttarakhand government tabled the much-awaited Uniform Civil Code (UCC) in the state assembly.
The bill included various provisions, including a complete ban on polygamy and child marriage, a standardised marriageable age for girls across all faiths, and a uniform process for divorce. These proposals, geared towards promoting gender equality and social harmony, will be discussed during the ongoing special four-day assembly session, which commenced on Monday and will run until Thursday.
The draft of the Uniform Civil Code (UCC) covered a wide range of aspects of civil life. It includes suggestions regarding inheritance rights, compulsory marriage registration, and raising the legal age of marriage for girls to enable them to pursue education before marriage. Moreover, couples who do not register their marriages will not qualify for government benefits, signalling an emphasis on legal documentation.
The proposed UCC aims to establish uniform civil laws applicable to all communities within the state and end the complex labyrinth of individual laws that govern different communities, which presents challenges to the uniform enforcement of legislation that is the cornerstone of a secular society.
As the Uttarakhand government tabled the Uniform Civil Code (UCC) Bill in the state assembly on Tuesday (February 6) for discussion, The Times, a British national daily, found an opportunity to perpetuate its longstanding anti-India campaign, vilifying the Modi government and stoking fears among its Muslim population with unfounded claims and patently misleading conjectures.
The headline is a dead giveaway that The Times was up to its mischievous ways to undermine the Indian government and pressurise it to drop the Uniform Civil Code. The Times published an article titled ‘India prepares to pass a law overturning Sharia in ‘Muslim crackdown”, giving a false impression that Muslims remain under a constant threat of persecution in India.
Not only is the headline evidently erroneous since the bill was not tabled in the parliament and by the central government. Instead, it was proposed by a state government for discussion in a state assembly. In their zeal to defame India, The Times and its author went with a headline and a featured image of PM Modi to imply that democratic polity has given way to authoritarianism and the Modi government is moving to pass a law aimed at ‘clamping down’ at its Muslim population.
The preposterous headline naturally created quite a flutter on social media, with several social media users criticising the British daily for characterising the Uniform Civil Code, a set of rules that forms the bedrock of secularism, as a tool of ‘Muslim crackdown’. Facing fierce online backlash that could and should invite legal repercussions for The Times in India, the British newspaper quietly amended the headline and redacted ‘Muslim crackdown’ from its headline.
But it maintained the anti-India and irrational sentiment of the article in its body. Paradoxically, The Times and other Western media houses that routinely hold forth on the need to save ‘secularism’ in India, perhaps out of their historical habit of suppressing Indian consciousness and preventing India from shaping its destiny based on its moral compass, was concerned with the neutering of Sharia law with the introduction of the Uniform Civil Code.
Here’s how The Times rhapsodised the Sharia Law:
If the above paragraph is anything to go by, The Times was not only supporting Sharia Law, but it was also going into raptures about the abhorrent practice of polygamy that allows Muslim men to take more than one wife, thereby contributing to their mental and physical health outcomes, including severe depression, anxiety, psychosis, and in some cases, domestic violence too.
The Times also came out in support of another regressive practice called ‘halala’, which according to Islamic customs, is a practice where the divorced wife has to temporarily marry another person, consummate the marriage and get talaq again. It is intimately linked with triple talaq, which has already been invalidated by Indian laws.
The practice reduces women to being a mere commodity that can be discarded by pronouncing ‘talaq talaq talaq’ and then acquired again by undergoing ‘halala’, which involves marrying her to another man, establishing sexual relations with him and then divorcing him if she wants to remarry her first husband.
The evil practice, of course, has a serious bearing on Muslim women and deeply affects their physical and psychological well-being. But it is of little concern for The Times which seeks to ignore these inequities meted out on Muslim women as long as it helps them in mounting their attacks against the Modi government.
The other casualty of The Times’ perversity is secularism in India. The Western media never fails to pontificate India on “secularism” and the need to protect it, even though India has never been a secular country and “secularism” in India’s context has always been pluralism and composite culture, where people espousing different religions not only found refuge but also thrived and their religious practice protected.
However, despite being a staunch advocate of secularism, The Times and the Western media have no compunction in railing against a law that seeks to abolish oppressive individual laws and introduce a set of rules that apply uniformly to all sections of society and treat them as equals regardless of their caste, creed, and race.