Vidhi Doshi
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| Social activists hold placards during a protest in New Delhi against the triple talaq law, a divorce practice prevalent among Muslims in India. Photograph: Altaf Qadri/AP |
Once treated like a hero, Shumayala Javed says she gave up her netball career to marry – only for her husband to shun her when she had a girl
It looked like the happiest day of her life. Women were dressed in the finest needlework, speakers blared out love songs and the food was piled high. Nobody could say the bride’s parents hadn’t looked after their guests.
But to Shumayala Javed, the celebrations felt bittersweet. Her marriage meant the end of her netball career. She was a national champion.
“I had trained and trained ever since I was a teenager,” she recalls. “It was not a small thing, you know, for a Muslim girl from a poor family, to play at that level.”
The story of the netball star, who claims she was eventually divorced by her husband for giving birth to a girl, has become part of a wider debate on Islamic divorce practices in India, which is home to more than 138 million Muslims.
The country allows Muslim men to divorce their wives simply by repeating the word “talaq”, meaning divorce, three times. While some Muslim groups in India claim the custom is allowed under sharia law, most Muslim countries do not recognise India’s triple talaq as legally binding.
A debate is under way in India’s supreme court to determine whether the practice is constitutional.
On Monday, during court proceedings, a concession was offered by the All India Muslim Personal Law Board, an umbrella organisation that claims to represent India’s Muslim voice, and which has always argued that triple talaq is an intrinsic part of Islam. Keep triple talaq legal, and Muslims would collectively phase out the practice themselves, the board said in an affidavit.
Qazis performing wedding ceremonies will now be instructed to discourage triple talaq, and husbands who divorce their wives without giving marriages a fair chance will face social boycotts.
But any changes will be too late for Javed. “When I was playing netball I was treated like a hero. I never thought this is where my life would take me,” she says.
Playing netball for Uttar Pradesh, her home state in northern India, had given Javed opportunities to which few women have access in India. Her sporting skill enabled her to study physical education at one of the state’s top universities and travel nationwide to play against rival teams.
Friends and neighbours worried that she was being given too much freedom.
In 2014, to liberate her ageing father from the financial burden of supporting her career, Javed agreed to marry. “He was going to retire and we were worried about money,” she says. “Playing netball didn’t make me any money. I didn’t have time for a job, and we got no help from the government.”
But just days after the wedding ceremony, says Javed, her husband’s parents started demanding a dowry. “My husband’s brother had been given a car for his dowry. They wanted my family to do the same; they wanted my father to pay so that my husband could start a business.”
According to Javed, her father, who had enthusiastically supported her sports career, started sending small cheques – a few thousand rupees here and there, whatever he could afford on his meagre clerk’s salary. But to keep the cheques coming, and extort larger sums, the family started harassing Javed, she claims.
Demanding dowries is banned in India, but still widely practised. In-laws often use violence and abuse to put pressure on the bride’s family to give cash, cars and other gifts after the wedding. According to the national crime records bureau, 7,634 women were killed in dowry-related disputes in 2015.
Javed says the pressure increased after she became pregnant. She claims that her husband, who wanted a son, forced her to take an ultrasound examination to find out the baby’s sex, which is illegal in India but available through unscrupulous doctors.
According to a UN study, India is the deadliest place on Earth for baby girls. Girls under five are 75% more likely to die than boys. They are considered a burden because of the costs associated with their weddings, and because they are less likely to earn money. Newspapers frequently report abandoned baby girls being found in rubbish bins, and in some states cradles have been placed outside hospitals for parents to leave unwanted girls.
Mothers are often blamed – and ostracised by their husband’s families – for the birth of a girl.
After the baby was born, says Javed, her husband sent her a letter ending their relationship. When she subsequently met him in person, he divorced her on the spot, she says: “Talaq, talaq, talaq, and it was over, just like that.”
Javed has appealed for help to the state’s chief minister, Yogi Adityanath, a hardline Hindu whose track record as a politician includes rejecting affirmative action for women and saying they need to be protected from birth to death by their fathers, husbands and sons.
Though hardly a champion of women’s rights, Adityanath has spoken out on several occasions about banning triple talaq, which he says liberal politicians have allowed in India in order to appease fringe Muslim minority leaders.
Since the 2012 gang rape of Jyoti Singh in Delhi, a nationwide feminist movement has galvanised the country, and women’s concerns are now discussed regularly and openly on news channels, in universities and among friends.
India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, has established a number of initiatives to improve women’s rights. But the vast majority of women are still fighting for basic rights – to work, speak freely, wear what they want, and choose who they marry.
Javed hopes the India in which her daughter grows up will be kinder to women. For now, all she can do is pray. “If Allah’s going to give you a daughter, he better give you some good luck too,” she says.
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