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Reacting to the Supreme Court's judgment that Muslim women are entitled to seek maintenance from their husbands after divorce, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on Wednesday invoked the controversial Shah Bano case in their attack on the Congress, saying the Rajiv Gandhi government gave primacy to Sharia over the Constitution.
In 1985, the Supreme Court allowed Shah Bano's plea for alimony from her husband after she was divorced. However, the then-Congress government passed a law in the Parliament to overrule the verdict.
Sudhanshu Trivedi, a BJP spokesperson and Rajya Sabha MP, today said the Supreme Court ended one of the biggest threats to the Constitution.
“Whenever the Congress has been in power, the Constitution was under threat. It (the Rajiv Gandhi government's) was a decision which gave primacy to Sharia over the Constitution. The prestige of the Constitution which was crushed during the Congress government has been restored by this order. The verdict has ended one of the big threats posed to the Constitution,” he said.
He said the Supreme Court's verdict shouldn't be seen from the point of view of religion. He said it was an issue of equal rights.
He claimed that there was no secular state where Sharia provisions like halala, triple talaq and Haj subsidy were allowed.
Trivedi said the Congress government had turned India into a partial Islamic state.
The Supreme Court on Wednesday ruled that a Muslim woman can seek maintenance from her husband under Section 125 of the CrPC and said the "religion-neutral" provision applies to all married women irrespective of their religion.
The Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Divorce) Act, 1986 will not prevail over the secular law, a bench of justices B V Nagarathna and Augustine George Masih said, stressing that maintenance is not charity but the right of all married women.
