POPULATION: India Moves to Give Women Equal Inheritance Rights

Ranjit Devraj

India, where extreme patriarchal attitudes prevail, is about to make a giant step towards gender equality by introducing a bill that would give women an equal share in family property.

NEW DELHI, Dec 18 (IPS) - To be introduced in the ongoing winter session of Parliament, the Hindu Succession (Amendment) Bill 2004, will remove discriminatory provisions in an existing law enacted in 1956 that ensured that only males inherit ancestral property.

''Studies clearly show that when women have access to resources it improves their power to make decisions,'' said Saroj Pachauri, South and South-East Asia director of the international non-governmental organisation the Population Council.

Commenting on the bill, Pachauri told IPS that some of the worst manifestations of gender discrimination in India such as female foeticide and dowry, particularly in northern India, can be traced to biased inheritance laws, which add to the vulnerability of women.

''Discrimination follows women through life from the womb to the tomb and ultimately affects the development process in the country itself,'' added Pachauri.

Pachauri pointed to the case of Kerala, in southern India, which followed matrilineal succession until the mid-70s, as instructive. Despite sharing the overall poverty of India, Kerala boasts close to hundred percent literacy and is the only major province in India with a positive gender ratio.

Under the Kerala matrilineal system called in Malayalam 'marumakkatayam', children belonged to the matrilineal joint family called the 'tarwad' and enjoyed inalienable inheritance rights, regardless of sex, in the 'taward' where their mother belonged.

In the 'marumakkatayam' system, woman was free to terminate her relationship with her husband or lover any time she pleased by merely placing his slippers outside the door as a symbol that she wanted him out of her life. The brother-sister relationship was far more important than the conjugal tie on account of the siblings being members of the same 'tarwad'. Consequently, maternal uncles played a far more important role in the lives of children than their own father.

According to Nirmala Seetharaman, a member of the National Commission for Women (NCW), a government body, the bill would go a long way in curbing dowry which is considered foremost among modern India's social evils.

''With girls getting coparcenary (equal entitlement to ancestral property on division) there would be little reason for either demanding or accepting dowry,'' she said.

Other well-known women's rights activists said the bill could only be considered as a beginning and that they would like to see it extended to acquired (rather than ancestral) property as well especially in cases where parents die intestate (without leaving a will).

But experts said such a law could have far-reaching consequences for the corporate world that, in India, is still largely controlled by families with sons tending to succeed the father's business while daughters are generally excluded.

Right now, for example, the 25 billion U.S. dollar Reliance business empire created by the late Dhirubhai Ambani is witnessing an ugly succession war involving his sons Mukesh and Anil. Curiously, however, the war does not include his two daughters.

The new bill affects Hindus as well as followers of the Jain, Sikh and Buddhist religions that are considered to be offshoots of Hinduism, the major faith in the constitutionally secular country.

It does not, however, affect Muslims who form 12 percent of India's one billion people or Christians who make up another 2.5 percent of the population. And there already are clamours for a 'uniform civil code' that would treat all citizens equally on matters of inheritance.

''If the government can include the same provision in personal laws of other religions or enforce existing laws that support gender equality it could dramatically change the status of women in this country,'' said NCW's Seetharaman.

But that is easier said than done although even the Supreme Court has been prodding the government to meet constitutional obligations and ''remove contradictions based on (religious) ideology.''

Invidious differentiation based on religion abounds 55 years after the departure of the British. This is because popularly elected governments have shied away from interfering in personal law, except when criminal or commercial issues are clearly involved or where the concerned communities have themselves demanded change.

For example, succession laws dating back to 1865 prevent a Christian man or woman from bequeathing property to charities or religious institutions while on the deathbed.

Islamic personal law allow males to take up to four wives and this has been targeted by pro-Hindu organisations and political parties like the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) which frequently raises the bogey of an India about to be swamped by a rapidly multiplying Muslim population - although there is little evidence of this.

Said BJP party spokesman V.K. Malhotra: ''What we are demanding is a code that would include the best of all religions whether Islam or Christianity on the lines already adopted by other non- Muslim countries.''

But successive governments have preferred not to tamper with the personal law of any religion and leave it to the courts to settle issues such as easy divorce under Islamic law, where a man can terminate his marriage by just uttering the word 'talaq' three times.

In May, 2002, the Bombay High Court seriously restricted the use of the dreaded 'triple talaq' divorce but this came long after progressive Muslim countries like Turkey, Algeria, Iraq, Iran and Indonesia banned the law which has rendered many a Muslim woman destitute.

Likewise in 1986, the Supreme Court allowed Christian women in southern Kerala state to have an equal share to property left behind by the father, although few women have cared to take advantage of it.

Compared to what the courts have done, government or parliamentary legislation has so far been hopelessly retrograde.

In 1986, when the Supreme Court upheld the right of divorced Muslim women to receive alimony, religious leaders called it interference in their tenets and pressured a professedly secular Congress party government to turn down the ruling through parliamentary legislation.

Earlier, in 1950, the government ordered that Dalits (Hindus on the lowest rung of the hierarchical Hindu social order) who convert to Christianity would lose the right to reservations and privileges meant to uplift groups that have suffered from caste discrimination for centuries.

But the worst piece of legislation was the hopelessly biased Hindu Succession Act of 1956 that the government is now seeking to rectify.

An editorial in widely circulated 'Hindustan Times' summed up the mood in an editorial on Thursday.

''Perhaps the most shameful moment in the history of parliamentary proceedings was when, during a debate on the Hindu Civil Code Bill, the majority of legislators took a stand against daughters inheriting property from their natal families.''

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