Section 1: India Set for Law Reforms

Pre-reading questions:

1. Is the official name of India the Republic of India (Hindi Bharat)?

2. What do you know about the past and present of this country?

The prudish spirit of India's former empress, Britain's Queen Victoria, lives on, embodied in Section 377 of India's Penal Code. Try committing suicide in India and you could go to prison. Accepting a bribe is not considered corruption unless taken by a government servant.

And if you have plans of hijacking an aircraft, there is no law under which you can be prosecuted – hijacking is a crime but attempted hijacking is not. And nearly 50 years after the constitution declared them equal to men, a woman still cannot be the legal guardian of her child until a court declares her fit.

Prime Minister Inder Kumar Gujral has vowed to overhaul some 1, 500 irrelevant laws, some of which were written in the 19th century. «The effective delivery of services and benefits under various welfare schemes to the public is frustated by rigid procedures and archaic laws», the Department of Administrative Reforms and Public Grievances recently admitted. It is working closely with a panel of legal experts charged with reviewing some federal and state laws of India.

A few social activists are working to introduce a Freedom of Information Bill which will provide 930 million people with the right to information about the functioning of government.

Law in India is further complicated by separate regulations for each of its religious groups – Hindus, Moslems, Parsis, Christians and other communities. Each is covered by different civil laws. These complex distinctions are a sensitive legal area that the government dare not touch for fear of offending religious leaders, who fiercely defend their right to be different.

Constitutionally secular, but mostly Hindu, India has the world's second largest population of Moslems. According to civil law drawn from the Koran, a Moslem can divorce his wife merely by uttering the word «talaq», or divorce, three times in front of two witnesses. Moslem women were granted the right to seek divorce in 1939, but a Moslem woman's share in ancestral inheritance is still half of her brother's.

Most official forms in India ask the applicants to fill in their father's name – unless the applicant is a married woman, in which case she is supposed to write her husband's name. The Sanskrit word for husband, «pati», means owner.

It is considered disrespectful for a woman to utter her husband's name, and Election Commission officials say their reluctance to provide that vital detail is the reason why many women are not included in voters lists.

Lawyer Sona Khan, who in 1986 won a landmark ruling that granted Moslem women the right to maintenance, says Indian laws still have a tenuous link with justice. «We borrowed the judicial system from the colonial power», she says. «It was meant to administer a colony».