Two Nations and a Common Problem Called Islam

France is in flames, and the fireworks this Bastille Day are more likely to be on the streets than in the sky. Fireworks have been the weapon of choice in the riots that followed the fatal police shooting of a Muslim teenager on June 27. But the show must go on, and although President Emmanuel Macron has banned the sale of fireworks, he will go ahead with the country’s traditional national day celebrations.

That includes a July 14 military parade in Paris in front of a visiting foreign dignitary. This year the Guest of Honour will be India’s prime minister Narendra Modi. He is in Paris to boost economic ties—and pick up a few French submarines at a steep discount. The word on the street is that Macron has unexpectedly found himself with extra stock.

But Messrs. Modi and Macron will have much more to talk about than business and boats. Much like his beleaguered French counterpart, Mr. Modi governs a staunchly secular democracy with a large and restive Muslim minority. There are 6 million Muslims in France. There are 206 million in India.

As the fires, the barricades and the broken glass draw the world’s attention to the status of Muslims in France, there is an even bigger battle brewing in India. Two weeks ago, Mr. Modi announced he would be reforming India’s colonial-era Muslim civil code. Protests have been muted so far, but with an election due next year, the pot is simmering.

India may be a secular country, but—incredibly—India’s Muslims still live under Sharia law for personal matters like marriage, divorce, and inheritance. That anomaly is a legacy of the British Raj reinforced by Nehruvian socialism. When India’s first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru reformed the civil code for other Indians in the late 1950s, he left Muslim laws intact.

As a result, Indian Muslims have lacked the basic human rights guaranteed to all other Indians for more than six decades. Or at least: Muslim women have lacked those rights. In most areas of India, Muslim girls can legally be married off at age 15. Muslim men can have up to four wives. A Muslim widow with children is entitled to only one-eighth of the family estate. If she has fellow wives, that one-eighth is split multiple ways.

Now reform is finally on the agenda, and the battle-lines are … confusing.

The reformers are a Hindu-dominated political party, Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), led by a prime minister who is routinely criticised for wearing Hinduism on his saffron shirtsleeves. The reactionaries are the Nehru family’s Indian National Congress (INC), the avowedly secular party that purports to defend the interests of Indian Muslims.

In the BJP view of the world, India is a modern, secular nation that should have a single, uniform civil code to cover all of its 1.4 billion citizens. The BJP may not have wanted a secular state, but they inherited one when they took office in 2014, and they have always insisted that if Hindus have to be secular, Muslims should be secular, too.

The BJP seems to figure that there are many Hindu votes in denying Sharia law to Muslims, and many female Muslim votes to boot. Critics have called out the BJP’s newfound feminism as pure electoral posturing. They may be right, but that doesn’t make the policy wrong.

In the INC view of the world, India is a multicultural nation that should respect the religious sensibilities of its minority populations. The state may be secular, but its citizens should be free to be religious. Well, certain citizens. Secular laws for Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Christians, and atheists are fine, but in the INC worldview, the imposition of civil law on Muslims smacks of ‘majoritarianism’.

For decades, INC-aligned intellectuals have insisted that it should be left up to Indian Muslims to reform their own communal laws. In practice, that means leaving it up to conservative male imams. There are some two dozen female imams in all of India—and none of them are accredited by India’s 70 Islamic courts.

The violence in France shows what happens when a secular country closes its eyes to the challenge posed by a radicalised Islamist minority. India has long been alert to the challenge, and in the past has met it by appeasing the Muslim religious establishment. That kept the peace, but at a heavy human price.

Whatever critics might think of the party leading the change, change is long overdue. Indian Muslims should not be forced to live according to the dictates of an unelected religious establishment. In India as in France (or indeed Australia), respecting Muslims means according them the dignity that comes with the equal protection of the law.

Salvatore Babones is an associate professor at the University of Sydney and the executive director of the Indian Century Roundtable