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| Wednesday, 10 March 2004 |
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Uproar prompts Indian Kashmir to backtrack on women marriage bill JAMMU, Tuesday (AFP) The ruling party of Indian Kashmir's offered to amend a controversial law that threatens to strip locally-born women of their permanent residency if they marry men from outside the disputed Himalayan state. The move on International Women's Day came in the face of a growing national uproar over the step, labelled "retrograde" by Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee's Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Mehbooba Mufti, president of the region's ruling People's Democratic Party (PDP), said she was ready to rid the draft law of issues perceived as thorny. "The PDP is willing to amend the bill to remove the gender anomalies in its present form. The bill is gender-specific and this might be its shortcoming.... It needs to be amended but we cannot allow to change the identity of the state," she said. Earlier Monday, Kashmir Deputy Chief Minister Mangat Ram Sharma said the bill, passed by the state assembly Friday, was being referred to a legislative committee which will re-examine it on March 11. The bill threatened to prevent Kashmiri women from owning and inheriting immovable property and securing state government jobs and benefits if they marry "non-state subjects." Non-Kashmiris are banned from buying such assets or land in the Himalayan region, but parties such as the PDP argues the age-old restriction is flouted through back-door measures such as marriages of convenience. Similar bans exist in several Indian states such as Himachal Pradesh and Jharkhand, but women there have the liberty to marry men of their choice and still inherit holdings and keep government jobs. Sharma, however, had argued that most women in Kashmir, India's sole Muslim-majority state, would be insulated against the draft measure because they are already affected by federal law for Muslims on inheritance. Sharma belongs to India's main opposition Congress party, which is a junior partner in the coalition led by state Chief Minister Mufti Mohammed Sayeed's PDP. Officials in New Delhi said both Vajpayee and Congress party leader Sonia Gandhi earlier Monday advised Sayeed and Sharma respectively to resolve the controversy. Kashmir has been in the throes of an Islamic rebellion against Indian rule since 1989. |
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