SOCIETAL FAULT LINES RAISE QUESTION OF FAIRNESS ON UCC CALL

IN 2002, anthropologist Lila Abu-Lughod raised the question of whether Muslim women needed “saving”.

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Her well-known essay on the subject, published amid rising American rhetoric ahead of the Iraq invasion, echoed scholar Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s reference to the imperialist discourse on sati in India, framed as “white men saving brown women from brown men”.These issues resonate again as the US and Israel attack Iran and, closer home, the discourse in favour of legal equality for women of all communities resurfaces. In a case alleging discrimination against women in Muslim inheritance laws, the Supreme Court observed that it might be better for the legislature to formulate a Uniform Civil Code rather than strike down the existing law and create a legal lacuna.