The Politics Of Muslim Identity And The Personal Laws: Safeguarding The Rights Of The Internal Minorities

Abstract

Any discourse regarding the advancement of minority community could not be carried out successfully in the absence of taking up concerns of its own internal challenges and issues of intra-group equality. Muslim Personal Law is one such important challenge that continuously reframes the discourse of politics of Muslim identity. It is obvious that almost all personal laws relegate position of women and are discriminatory in nature, even though over the time, a lot of reforms have been done in personal laws of the Hindu, Christian as well as in Parsi communities. Although these reforms in personal laws are not entirely gender sensitive, but somehow they have progressed and transformed considerably towards an effective course of action. On the contrary, the same developments are still remaining to happen in case of the Muslim Personal Laws. On account of this, dominant groups of the society insist on corresponding reformative measures to remove such anomaly and demand homogenous and uniform personal laws in India. The Muslim women, focus of our study, face the similar situation at the hands of their own community by imposing various gender-biased personal laws. These personal laws violate the basic individual rights of women in the name of community values. Therefore, a comprehensive assessment of these personal laws needs to be done. This article analyse the challenges of the internal minorities within minority groups and corresponding measures to ensure them just and equable rights. It will further explore the conflict that occurs between internal minority and her cultural group and demonstrates the perils of multicultural accommodation in a liberal democratic society.