The Hindu : J&K women resent Bill

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Sunday, Mar 07, 2004

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J&K women resent Bill

By Luv Puri

JAMMU, MARCH 6. There is strong resentment among women in Jammu and Kashmir over the Legislative Assembly's vote on Friday to withdraw the Permanent Resident Status (PRS) to women belonging to the State who marry non-permanent residents.

The Bill was originally scheduled to be introduced in the Legislative Council today but has been postponed till Thursday. Several members of the ruling coalition in the Council have opposed the Bill. The Congress MLC, Farida Mir, questioned the logic of the Bill and said that it was "openly discriminating against the women of the State. It goes against the spirit of both the State as well as the Indian Constitution [J&K has its own Constitution] which guarantees equality of both sexes before law, and is against the fundamental rights. No law can be made which is against the basic spirit of the Constitution."

Even the president of the ruling People's Democratic Party (PDP), Mehbooba Mufti, is on record as having said in the Assembly that there should not be any discrimination of law between women and men. She said, "If the women who marry outside the State are deprived of the Permanent Resident Status, the men who marry outside the State should also come under the same ambit of law."

Anita Thakur, general secretary, Jammu and Kashmir National Panthers Party, which is a member of the ruling coalition, has threatened to start a mass campaign against the Bill. In a statement, she said, "Women from all walks of life, university and colleges too will launch a campaign against this draconian Bill."

In the past, the executive order, which debarred women married outside the State from retaining the PRS, had created strange situations within the same household as the order applied differently to two members of a family in similar circumstances. For instance, the wife of the former Chief Minister, Farooq Abdullah, who is a British national, acquired a Permanent Resident Status on marrying him, while the PRS was taken away from his daughter when she married outside the State. A number of women, who were conferred awards by the State Government in fields like literature and music, had to forego their PRS on marrying outside the State. Various women's groups have also objected to the fact that while drafting the Bill, no woman was included in the team which drafted the bill. The team included the Deputy Chief Minister, Mangat Ram Sharma, the Finance, Law and Parliamentary Affairs Minister, Muzaffar Hussien Baig, the Minister for Housing and Urban Development, G.H. Mir, the Revenue Minister, Hakim Yaseen, NC legislators Abdul Rahim Rather and Mir Saifullah and the CPI (M) legislator M.Y. Tarigami.

Talking to The Hindu here today, Mr. Sharma said, "We have our sympathies with the women of the State. But we have kept a clause that on marrying a non-State subject, they would not be deprived of the right to inheritance."

Several men have also joined the women in their protest against the Bill. The former Judge of the Supreme Court, R.P. Sethi, termed it as a hurriedly made Bill by which the women have been legally disqualified to retain the State subject status after marriage to a non-State subject. "I have my doubts that the Constitution has saved the Bill relating to permanent resident," he said. Various human rights organisations, including the State chapter of the People's Union for Civil Liberties, has held the Bill as morally untenable and constitutionally invalid, and threatened to take the matter to court.

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