Author: Manoj Mitta
Publication: The Indian
Express
Date: December 26, 2000
It's a Christmas gift
for which several women's rights organizations have been struggling for.
The Government has decided to plug glaring holes in the Christian divorce
law going beyond the Bill it introduced in Parliament last session.
This will give Christian men and women rights comparable to those contained
in Hindu and secular laws.
Speaking to The Indian
Express, Union Law Minister Arun Jaitley said that the ``the very positive
desire for reform'' shown by Christian MPs, women activists and church
leaders played a key role in the Government's decision.
The earlier Bill sought
to remove gender inequality in the 130-year-old Christian divorce law and
provide new grounds of divorce. Now Jaitley has decided to introduce,
among other provisions, the right to divorce by mutual consent. The
plan is to re-introduce the Bill in an amended form in the next Budget
session of Parliament.
The key reforms being
made in the Christian law are:
* Removal of ``adultery''
as an essential condition for dissolving a Christian marriage.
* Removal of the additional
condition imposed on a wife seeking divorce. While a husband can
get divorce just on the ground of adultery, a wife in the same situation
has to prove adultery coupled with incest, bigamy, cruelty or desertion.
* Providing three independent
grounds for divorce to either spouse in addition to adultery. They
are conversion to another religion, cruelty anddesertion.
* Providing a wife with
more grounds for divorce, namely, that the husband has been guilty of rape,
sodomy or bestiality.
* Introducing the option
of ``no-fault divorce'' or divorce by mutual consent.
This package of reforms
is mainly the outcome of a series of meetings Jaitley held during the winter
session of Parliament with representatives of Catholic Bishops Conference
of India (CBSI), National Council of Churches in India (NCCI), Joint Women's
Programme (JWP) and Majlis.
Ironically, these very
groups had reacted adversely when the Government first made a brief announcement
about the Bill on the eve of the winter session. Things changed once
the Government showed the exact provisions of the Bill to them. For
instance, on December 15, the CBSI wrote to Jaitley thanking him ``for
the initiative you have taken in helping to make the dissolution of marriage
among Christians, even though unfortunate and sad, more humane and legally
less painful.''
But, for all the consensus,
Jaitley turned down certain proposals made by the proponents of the reforms
in the Christian divorce law. For instance, the CBSI proposed that
the church be given the authority to declare a marriage null and void.
There was no question
of incorporating such a provision because, as Jaitley said, it would be
``retrograde and contrary to the spirit of the amendments.''
