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Legislation to reform personal laws on non-religious basis favoured

Special Correspondent

Memorial lecture on `Law and religion in independent India'

HYDERABAD: Historian and Vice-Chancellor of Jamia Millia Islamia Mushirul Hasan has said that State legislation to reform personal laws would have to provide a non-religious justification.

Delivering the Justice Umamaheswaram memorial lecture on `Law and religion in independent India' organised by the Alladi Memorial Trust at the Administrative Staff College of India here on Sunday, he said that it was possible to offer a non-religious ground for State intervention by deciding the matter of discrimination as an equality issue, based on a model of substantive equality.

Equality principle

He said the equality principle enshrined in Article 14 had been complicated by the opposition to reforming personal laws through State legislation, as that interfered with religious freedom and any attempt at using the State as the agency of reform violated the principle of separation of State and religion.

Political impasse

"There is no way out of this political impasse within the contours of religion.

To reconfigure the problem, we need to locate it on a different conceptual ground. State legislation to reform personal laws will have to provide a non-religious justification," he observed.

He said that although Supreme Court judgments had used a formal conception of equality, the dominant trend had been in favour of substantive equality, "above all when it involves equality among castes.

"This approach needed to be extended to other social inequalities to take forward the constitutional agenda of social transformation.

Historic necessity

In a brief chat with reporters later, he said that a secular State "like ours" had to orient itself and its policies within a non-religious frame. Affirmative action for religious minorities was a historic necessity "but religious minorities can't be the principal unit around which policy decision can be taken."

Replying to a question on reforming personal laws, he said it was for Muslim community to reflect and decide whether it wanted to reform them.

Aloke Bhalla of the Central Institute of English and Foreign Languages presided.

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