Earlier this week, the ghost of Shah Bano, lurking in the shadows for close to four decades, popped up again. A Supreme Court ruling that all women, including Muslim women who marry under their personal religious law, are entitled to maintenance, once again took on the old question of whether Muslim women can claim maintenance beyond what is mandated by their personal law.
The answer is a resounding yes.
The two-judge bench of justices B.V. Nagarathna, slated to become India’s first woman chief justice in 2027, and Augustine George Masih, was hearing an appeal against a Telangana high court order granting maintenance to a divorced Muslim woman under a section of the Code of Criminal Procedure that provides for maintenance. It was the man’s contention that his personal law did not oblige him to pay beyond three months.