The Big Story:

The Supreme Court on Thursday decided that it would give an urgent hearing to a batch of pleas challenging the constitutional validity of the Muslim practice of triple talaq, whereby a man can instantly divorce his wife by pronouncing the word “talaq” three times in a sitting. A Constitution Bench of five judges will be set up and hear the case from May 11, even though the court is set to go on its summer vacation on that day. Chief Justice JS Khehar said he is willing to sit through the vacation, even though two other constitutional cases are also slated for hearing then.

The decision to take up the case urgently is welcome. Triple talaq is an anachronism and seems to clearly violate constitutional rights. As many as 22 Muslim countries or their provinces, including Pakistan and Bangladesh, have abolished triple talaq. Several organisation, including Muslim women’s groups have led the campaign to abolish triple talaq, with only the All Indian Muslim Personal Law Board – an NGO that claims to represent all Muslims but is in reality is the voice of one section – defending it.

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Like triple talaq, the court has many other important constitution matters pending that it needs to treat with as much alacrity. If the violation of rights in interpreting personal law has prompted the court to rush into hearing this case, it ought to do the same for the Dawoodi Bohra case, the Sabarimala case and a number of other matters.

Other cases regarding the ongoing violation of individual rights are also pending before the court. In December, the Supreme Court decided to refer questions about demonetisation to a constitution bench, but that hearing will now only matter for future exercises.

Also pending before the court is the question of Aadhaar, India’s unique identity project that has been challenged on questions of privacy among other things. In this case in particular, time is of the essence. The government has expanded the project and forced adoption of Aadhaar across much of the population even though its very constitutionality is in question, and will likely present the project as “too big to fail”, telling the court that since it already exists it cannot be struck down.

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If the court eventually finds that the questions of privacy are valid, then this means it has permitted an ongoing expansion of the surveillance state even as it waits to set up a constitution bench. When the matter was mentioned before the Chief Justice this week, however, he failed to even give a commitment that the court will stick to the April 3 date when the matter comes up. If the Court is, as Justice Khehar says, willing to give up its summer vacation to deal with matters of crucial importance especially regarding individual rights, then Aadhaar should be at the very top of its list.

The Big Scroll

  • If Pakistan and 21 other countries have abolished triple talaq, why can’t India, asks Ajaz Ashraf.
  • It isn’t just Dhoni: UIDAI received 1,390 complaints about Aadhaar agents – but took no legal action, writes Anumeha Yadav.
  • Amid the debate about privacy, the more pressing issue of exclusion has been forgotten, says Prashant Reddy.

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Punditry

  1. “Perhaps one could say that parties in India have been undergoing a long-drawn crisis first shaped by the dominance of the Congress and later shaped by the vacuum created by its decline,” writes Suhas Palshikar in the Indian Express.
  2. Sunil Abraham in the Hindu writes that even as a surveillance project, Aadhaar is poorly designed.
  3. Just as Britain is exiting the European Union, writes Andy Mukherjee in Bloomberg, India is moving towards a single market.
  4. Sriram Srinivasan in the Hindu calls for rules making it mandatory for companies to reveal if customer data has been leaked through breaches.

Giggles

Don’t miss

Nishita Jha asks whether black lives really matter in India’s satellite towns, like Greater Noida, the site of a mob attack this week.

“Soon after she first came to Sharda, Amina discovered that Indian campuses liked to infantilise female students under the guise of ‘protection’ – an experience familiar to most young women in Indian hostels. If she wasn’t in the hostel by 8 pm, she was expected to “find her own accommodation for the night”. If she was, she would be locked in, until the hostel guards released the women from their temporary cages every morning – all of this heightened by the fact that unlike most Indian girls, Amina couldn’t just crash at a friend’s place. Her classmates from African countries were at the mercy of similar whims from landlords and hostel wardens, her Indian friends who still lived with parents didn’t know how to explain bringing a black woman home.

Her experience was familiar to most international students enrolled in any one of India’s many new multi-disciplinary, international higher education institutes, like Acharya Institutes at Soldevanahalli outside Bangalore, or the campus of Lovely Public University on the Jalandhar-Phagwara highway. Everywhere, students would find themselves presented with two options – campus housing (which usually meant restrictive timings, terrible food and behavioural policing) or renting homes in the palatial but semi-deserted housing colonies near the college. On campus, life was limited. Outside it, in the jungle of the vast peri-urban (chosen to accommodate equally vast campuses), it was dangerous.”