Now, child brides are cast off with triple talaqs over phone

The frail-looking girl peddles away the sowing machine, turning ever so frequently to check on her baby daughter playing at the office room a few yards away.

In reality, Muneera herself is not more than a child, but she became a bride and bore a child to a phoney husband who washed his hands of her with a triple talaq over the phone.

“I was married to a Shaik from Oman when I was just 12,” Muneera says with expressionless eyes and flat, plain voice. “My father had then died and my family needed money.”

The girl, a resident of Moghulpura, explained how the 60-year-old Shaik used to take her to a posh hotel and later drop her back home with her mother.

“I realised I was pregnant a month after the Shaik left for Oman. When I informed him over phone, he asked me to terminate it. I refused and he performed the triple talaq,” she said.

Cared for by an NGO, Muneera is struggling to even prove that she was married to the Shaik. “He took the Nikanamah with me,” she says.  Muneera’s case brings to mind the rescue of Ameena by air hostess Amrita Ahluwalia in August 1991, when the 10-year-old sold to a Saudi Shaik for a meagre $250- was taken to the kingdom to be handed over to her 60-year-old husband.

“We have 388 child bride cases at the only women’s police station here in old city.

We could file FIR in 80 cases as talaqs are not our jurisdiction. So the girls had to run around courts and qazis. It’s the responsibility of the Qazis,” Gandhinagar Station Officer Laxmi Madhavi said.

Madhavi points out that triple talaqs over telephone or other media are not legally acceptable. “We can only accept talaqs that are on paper, duly signed by two witnesses,” she added.

Founder-Director of  Shaheen  Women's Resource and Welfare Association Jameela Nishant explains that a proper talaq entitles women for alimony, while the run-away grooms prefer to wash their hands off with  telephonic pronouncements.

Andhra Pradesh and Telangana state minority commission also opposed the triple talaq system saying it causes untold misery to thousands of women.

Chairman of the commission Abid Rasool Khan wrote to the All India Muslim Personal Law Board (AIMPLB) urging it to change its stand on the issue.

“The triple talaq issue has the potential to escalate and cause eventual de-recognition of Muslim Personal Law and imposition of uniform civil code,” Khan said in his letter to AIMPLB president Moulana Syed Mohammed Rafi Hussaini Nadvi.
DH News Service