Amar! Akbar! Anthony! Equal sons of India and their mother. But divided by the personal laws of this country.

Religious personal laws shape citizens of India - unequally. Quite the opposite of what the Constitution of India guarantees us. Our rights to marry, divorce, inheritance - are shaped not by constitutional values of equality and liberty, but our religious ones, which far from being divine are inherently gender and caste unjust.

In this episode of The Longest Constitution, listen to the story of the man who argued that making bigamy illegal for Hindus was not fair because his Muslim friends could have four wives. And what the court said and why it matters. As well as, what's unconstitutional about the criminalization of triple talaq.

To find out more about personal laws, marriage and divorce, see the very readableFlavia Agnes, (2011), Law, Justice, and Gender: Family Law and Constitutional Provisions in India, New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
On the long shadow of the Narasu Appa Mali judgment, see Krishnadas Rajagopal, “With Sabarimala verdict, ‘Ghost of Narasu’ is finally exorcised”, Available at: ( https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/justice-chandrachud-ends-the-unchallenged-reign-of-a-bombay-hc-verdict/article25074175.ece )
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Till death do us part?Or one could file for divorce! But Indian laws of marriage and divorce make it easy to marry, but hard to divorce. Because to the state, the institution of marriage is more important than the people in it!
And that's why laws insist one must have a “ground” or a reason to want a divorce, such as cruelty, adultery and desertion, amongst others. That’s the “fault theory”.

And yet, marital rape is still not one of those grounds.That goes against what the constitution of India guarantees us: of equality, liberty and the right to life.
In this episode of The Longest Constitution, delve into why the divorce “fault theory” needs to go.
To find out more about personal laws, marriage and divorce, see the very readableFlavia Agnes, (2011), Law, Justice, and Gender: Family Law and Constitutional Provisions in India, New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
On the present status of marital rape, ( https://www.firstpost.com/india/why-it-is-time-for-india-to-join-150-countries-in-criminalising-marital-rape-9876111.html )
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Not everyone. Just bar dancers. Singing and dancing are our fundamental rights to freedom guaranteed by the Constitution of India. And yet at various points, governments have regulated women singing and dancing. Even at the cost of women’s passions, professions and those dependent on them. Every dance is a performance and to make arbitrary moral distinctions is unreasonable. Public morality may be the state’s mandate but what we do with our private lives, is our business!

Tune in and find out more!
Want to read more on this?
Bhatia, Gautam, “A Constitutional Muddle: The Supreme Court’s Bar Dancers Judgment”, Available here: ( https://indconlawphil.wordpress.com/2019/01/22/a-constitutional-muddle-the-supreme-courts-bar-dancers-judgment/ )
On the Usha Uthup case, see ( https://indiankanoon.org/doc/583552/ )
You can follow Priya on social media:Instagram: ( https://www.instagram.com/naik.priya/ )Twitter: ( https://twitter.com/fundamentallyp )Linkedin: ( https://www.linkedin.com/in/priya-mirza-73666310/ )
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If you can make money with the application of your mind, why not your body? Anti-prostitution laws are a problem. In India, that is the Immoral Traffic (Prevention) Act, 1986. Not only because this law criminalizes sex workers and pimps, but not the men who visit sex workers. But also because our Constitution grants us the right to practice our trade. So how come, sex workers, cant work? And how was this challenged in court?

For a general understanding of sex work in India, see Prabha Kotiswaran, 2011, Dangerous Sex, Invisible Labor: Sex Work and the Law in India, Princeton University Press. More interested in Husna Bai? Have a look at Chapter 4, “The Case of the Honest Prostitute: Sex, Work, and Freedom in the Indian Constitution” in Rohit de, 2018, A People's Constitution: The Everyday Life of law in the Indian Republic, Harvard University Press.
You can follow Priya on social media:Instagram: ( https://www.instagram.com/naik.priya/ )Twitter: ( https://twitter.com/fundamentallyp )
Linkedin: ( https://www.linkedin.com/in/priya-mirza-73666310/ )
You can listen to this show and other awesome shows on the IVM Podcasts app on Android: https://ivm.today/android or iOS: https://ivm.today/ios, or any other podcast app.

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What's a judge doing telling a wife to go back home to her husband, even if she doesn’t want to? Unfortunately, that’s what the law says. Under Section 9 of the Hindu Marriage Act, 1955 the restitution of conjugal rights allows one party to appeal to the court to ‘restore’ his or her conjugal acts. Unsurprisingly, more men have used it than women. This episode of the Longest Constitution is about the long and ongoing struggle to strike section 9 of the Hindu Marriage Act down.

( https://indianexpress.com/article/who-is/who-was-rukhmabai-raut-4949058/ )Section 9, HMA Kavitha Rao, Lady Doctors: The Untold Stories of India’s First Women in Medicine, Westland: 2021.
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Bringing the Constitution home? That’s been a difficult journey.

Not the book, but the values and morality the constitution upholds.
Are the great values of our constitution meant to be talked about by great men but not lived? In this episode, we look at why the constitution is meant to transform every space - including the home and redefining family. It has meant asking the question: does being ‘at home’ mean the same thing to everyone, men and women. This has meant recognizing controlling institutions like patriarchy and the many kinds of violence inflicted on women, within marital and natal homes.
Article 14 and 21Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act, 2005 1) ( https://indiankanoon.org/doc/191703/ )2) ( https://www.newindianexpress.com/nation/2021/feb/04/india-no-country-for-women-heres-what-the-national-family-health-survey-reveals-2259593.html )
Indira Jaising and Pinki Mathur Anurag, Conflict in the Shared Household: Domestic Violence and the Law in India, (Oxford University Press: 2019).
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What is pornography and what does our Constitution have to do with it? The right to privacy and to receive information is a fundamental right as much as expressing ourselves. This episode of The Longest Constitution looks at how consuming pornography in the privacy of our homes, is constitutional, but sending sleazy messages to other people is not.

Sonali Verma, ‘Route 67: How the IT Act's Section on Obscenity is Being Misused to Violate Digital Freedom’: ( https://thewire.in/gender/victorian-censorship-research-finds-section-67-act-grossly-misused )
Vallishree Chandra & Gayathri Ramachandran, ‘The Right to Pornography in India: An Analysis in Ligh of Individual Liberty and Public Morality’, Available at: ( http://docs.manupatra.in/newsline/articles/Upload/B5199E8C-C07E-4E05-A379-30FF49C77B0C.pdf )
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Nobody can say for sure! Though Section 292 of the (IPC) which defines obscenity is vague, it has been used against writers and artists like Ismat Chughtai to Saadat Hasan Manto, AIB and more recently, when Milind Soman ran naked on the beach. What is it all about? And what did a man named Cockburn have to do with it? Find out in this episode of The Longest Constitution!

Gautam Bhatia, ‘The Supreme Court discards the Hicklin test’, Available at: ( https://indconlawphil.wordpress.com/2014/02/07/obscenity-the-supreme-court-discards-the-hicklin-test/ )
Shruti Sundar Ray, ‘Explained: What is the measure of ‘obscenity’ in India?’, ( https://indianexpress.com/article/explained/explained-milind-soman-obscenity-in-india-6998750/ )
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Do children have rights? The constitution of India grants equality to every ‘person’, and children are persons and have a right to a safe childhood, free of sexual predators. In this episode of The Longest Constitution listen in to what took so long to draft the first law to penalize child sexual abuse, why this law was made gender-neutral and why just laws are not enough to prevent such crimes.

Pinki Virani, Bitter Chocolate: Child Sexual Abuse In India, Penguin, 2000. ( https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/bombay-hc-judgement-child-sexual-abuse-pocso-act-7169159/ )
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The answer is: quite not!

The word queer or sexual orientation does not exist in the constitution. Does that mean the constitution doesn’t see the queer? And even though Section 377 of the IPC (1860), which criminalized sodomy convicted very few people, does it mean that sexual minorities should be discriminated against? The Constitution grants everyone equality, queer or straight. And everywhere, at home or the streets. Listen in! To the struggle for sexual autonomy and against moral policing in this episode of The Longest Constitution.
Section 377 1) [ https://indiankanoon.org/doc/168671544/ ]2) [ https://indconlawphil.wordpress.com/2018/09/10/guest-post-navtej-johar-v-union-of-india-what-remains-of-section-377/ ]
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