3 months ago
53
ARTICLE AD BOX
NEW DELHI: When constabulary successful UP registered an FIR connected Dec 9, 2025, it was not conscionable different ailment nether the 2019 Triple Talaq law. The allegations were shocking and went further, into a grey portion the instrumentality has ne'er squarely addressed: What happens to women aft talaq is pronounced.According to the FIR filed successful Amroha’s Said Nagli, the woman, aft being divorced done instant triple talaq, was pressured by her husband, her brother-in-law and clerics to acquisition “halala” aggregate times truthful she could beryllium returned to the marriage. An objection that permits a divorced Muslim mates to remarry, the signifier of halala often involves planned, short-term marriages — adjacent arranged one-time encounters — to facilitate consummation of the pistillate with different man, enabling the erstwhile mates to reunite.The woman’s ailment elaborate the ordeal. She said she was “gang-raped nether mendacious pretenses of halala carried retired nether threats, intimidation and coercion”.Police person invoked the instrumentality banning instant triple talaq — sections 3 and 4 of the Muslim Women (Protection of Rights connected Marriage) Act, 2019. Multiple provisions and applicable sections of BNS that woody with rape, aggravated hurt, transgression intimidation and transgression conspiracy, person besides been added.
In the archetypal FIR, determination are 3 accused: Her husband, his relative and a hakim (traditional healer.) Since then, constabulary person added much accused to the list.Amroha constabulary told TOI that 1 accused — her hubby — had been arrested truthful far. “The FIR has been registered connected the ground of a written complaint. Further enactment volition beryllium connected corroboration and evidence,” SHO Vikas Sahrawat said. Amroha constabulary are connected the lookout for others connected the run, helium added.This week, based connected Zubaida’s (name changed) property astatine the clip of her marriage, constabulary added aggregate provisions of the Pocso Act to the FIR, expanding its scope. (The move, incidentally, besides brings into absorption an unresolved ineligible grey area, arsenic Muslim idiosyncratic instrumentality is not codified and does not prescribe a minimum age, alternatively linking marriageability to puberty. The contented remains unsettled by the Supreme Court truthful far, with courts successful antithetic states taking conflicting positions.
)The FIR covers respective years of alleged abuse, battle and rape. Zubeida told constabulary she was forcefully joined disconnected successful 2015 astatine the property of 15, and subjected to pronouncements of instant triple talaq doubly — erstwhile successful 2016, and again successful 2021, followed by 3 coerced reconciliation attempts done halala.“I felt similar I was being handed implicit each time. I was excessively ashamed to travel retired with what had happened to me. I didn’t privation my girl to turn up speechmaking astir it,” Zubaida told TOI.
A erstwhile pupil of 1 of Aligarh’s apical schools, Zubaida comes from a household with a past successful nationalist work — her gramps was DSP successful UP constabulary and her begetter a lawyer.After the archetypal triple talaq successful 2016, she said she was told she could instrumentality to her hubby lone aft undergoing halala, a process that, according to her complaint, progressive intersexual battle by idiosyncratic introduced arsenic an “intermediary”. In Feb 2025, she said she was told she would request to travel the halala process doubly arsenic her matrimony had breached down doubly by then.
Zubaida’s ailment said aft years of being a azygous parent and fiscal difficulties, she had erstwhile again fallen for the accused’s mendacious committedness of remarriage. “It was aft a agelong clip that I realised what had happened to maine was wrong,” Zubaida said.With her hubby present down bars, Zubaida said she was struggling to support beingness going for her daughter.Her husband, meanwhile, has alleged that helium was harassed and threatened by Zubaida and her relatives.
In his written complaint, dated Nov 26, 2025, helium claimed that Zubaida “tried to forcibly participate his location and threatened him with mendacious transgression cases”.Earlier successful 2021, according to documents, Zubaida’s divorcement was finalised done a household court’s decree, with the tribunal placing the daughter’s custody with the begetter astatine the time.Halala finds nary notation successful Indian statutory law. The 2019 Muslim Women Act criminalised instant triple talaq, making its pronouncement a punishable offence, but it did not — and does not — recognise halala.According to activists, halala cases seldom permission a insubstantial trail. Fear of stigma, economical dependence and concerns astir children often support victims silent.“In galore cases, women don’t adjacent cognize that what is being done to them is wrong,” said Zakia Soman, Bharatiya Muslim Mahila Andolan founder. “Halala is not mentioned successful the Quran. It survives done misinterpretation, patriarchal power and silence. There is simply a hush-hush astir it.
For a pistillate to travel guardant takes bonzer courage.” Soman added that the signifier survived successful pockets, operating done informal and mostly invisible set-ups. “Triple talaq was criminalised connected paper, but the ecosystem that sustained it was ne'er dismantled. Without regulations, halala survives arsenic an unpoliced, underground arrangement,” she said.Soman cited cases wherever clerics themselves offered to “perform” halala, and others wherever women were passed betwixt men to settee idiosyncratic disputes, household feuds oregon adjacent debts — arrangements that stay mostly hidden unless a pistillate breaks ranks and approaches the police.
Soman said practices specified arsenic halala, kid matrimony and puberty-as-marriage-age thrive successful a ineligible grey zone.Experts constituent to structural gaps that marque specified cases hard to prosecute. One is the lack of mandatory registration of Muslim marriages and divorces. “Nikahs are mostly undocumented,” said Naish Hasan, a Lucknow-based activistic who has worked with halala survivors for implicit 2 decades. “When determination is nary insubstantial trail, the load of impervious falls wholly connected women.”She said the signifier remained alive, peculiarly among mediocre and marginalised women. “For years, cases kept surfacing earlier we adjacent had connection for it,” she said.Hasan said her fieldwork included astir 40 elaborate lawsuit studies from Lucknow territory alone. “Justice should scope each past woman,” she added. Petitions challenging the signifier of halala, including 1 filed by Hasan successful 2021, person been pe-nding earlier Supreme Court.
