mid-day editorial: Let's divorce all discrimination against women

A happy community story dispelled the Monday morning blues yesterday. The Haji Ali Dargah Trust told the Supreme Court yesterday that they would grant women access to the sanctum sanctorum of the shrine on par with men.

In this way, the Trust agreed to implement the Bombay High court order of August, allowing women to enter the inner sanctum. The Trust sought four weeks to make the requisite infrastructural changes.

This should give equal opportunity activists reason to cheer. There was much drama when the Haji Ali issue was simmering. A forum called ‘Haji Ali Sabke Liye', comprising men and women brought a semblance of organisation to the fight for equal access to women. There was a blaze of publicity when activist Trupti Desai joined the fight, but she then had a fall out with the forum over her modus operandi.

We want to see the same happy result in the fight against triple talaq. The practice needs to be abolished to level the playing field between men and women in the community. Activists have taken this up as the next challenge, citing a number of Muslim countries that have stopped this practice.

Let us desist from trying to communalise this as a Hindu-Muslim issue, like those opposing the Haji Ali access were trying to do. The triple talaq fight needs to be fought on the equality plank. There is gross misuse of the triple talaq, because of its many grey areas and loopholes.

Let us see more men, especially Muslim men, take up this fight. While there are a number of men already pushing to abolish triple talaq, we need more numbers to truly send a signal that this is about equality in society, not about women, or the Shariat used for years to subdue them. With Haji Ali won and done, it is time to tackle the triple threat.