Haq: We Don’t Need A Shining Star

Sometimes love is not enough. You need your self-respect to stay alive.

As Yami Gautam Dhar mouthed the dialogue in Haq while addressing her ex-husband’s new wife, I looked around for reactions from the seven people sitting in the dark theatre. There were two Muslim couples. The young couple seated in the back row had clearly bought tickets to enjoy the darkness. There were two other women, who probably wandered into the theatre while shopping in the mall. One of them left during the interval and the second one was asleep when the credits rolled.

The “crowd” seemed unimpressed with the courtroom drama. The moment begged speculation about the target audience. I wondered why PVR would take the trouble to screen the movie just for me. I could have watched it on OTT a couple of weeks later, but obviously there are things about the movie business that a laywoman cannot understand.

Haq, starring Emran Hashmi and Dhar, released on November 7 and is struggling to stay afloat. It is a legal drama based on the life of Shah Bano, a Muslim woman who dragged her estranged husband to court demanding maintenance, over and above what many believed is promised by Muslim Personal Law.

The Shah Bano judgement is amongst the most controversial judgements passed by the Supreme Court. The court ruled in favour of the aggrieved woman, but most Muslim organisations believed that the judgement stood in conflict with Islamic Law.

Opposition against the 1985 judgement within the Muslim community was so severe that the Rajiv Gandhi government enacted a law in 1986 to nullify it. Before we examine the intricacies of the 40-year-old judgement, subsequent political interventions and their fallout, there is a more pressing question that needs to be addressed.

Was the release of Haq timed with the Bihar Assembly elections or was it simply a happy coincidence, like the release of Article 370 and The Kerala Story ahead of the 2024 General Elections and the release of The Kashmir Files in March 2022, when Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Goa, Manipur and Punjab went to the polls?

Film releases are preceded by discussions on prime-time television and a substantial amount of fanfare on social media. Some films, like The Kerala Story, even get publicly endorsed by the Prime Minister. We seem to exist in an era of happy coincidences where popular culture seamlessly promotes the government’s agenda, colours historical narratives, aligns it with majoritarian ideology and manages to successfully create a big splash in election season. The innocence of these happy accidents restores my faith in our vibrant democracy.

Haq falls in the genre of propaganda films that show Muslims as terrorists, anti-nationals or simply untrustworthy. Like The Kerala Story, the antagonist here is also a Muslim man who is an embodiment of ‘evil’ Islamic practices and the victim is again a woman, hopelessly in love with the demonic male. It is interesting how the Hindutva brigade’s loathing for Muslims is mostly limited to the male of the species. Muslim women are usually viewed more sympathetically. At the heart of the love jihad narrative depicted in The Kerala Story is a fear of the Muslim man’s sexuality and the indulgences his religion provides for. Social media is flooded with hateful comments about the meat-eating, circumcised Muslim man, who is legally allowed to keep four wives. Questions of physical strength and increased virility float around the internet.

The unanswered questions, laced with suspicion, anxiety and insecurity, then surface in the form of a twisted hero complex that compels members of the Hindutva brigade to jump to the rescue of women from the lustful Muslim men. The entire narrative of love jihad denies any agency to Hindu women who are seen as guileless victims of a vile predator. The case of Muslim women is slightly different. They need to be saved from the men of their own community, especially their husbands, who might take advantage of them within the confines of their homes. Nobody feels the need to ask Muslim women whether they want to be saved.

The Prime Minister’s own hero complex vis-à-vis Muslim women is a topic of discussion within the Muslim community. He began his endeavour to save Muslim women in 2016 when he waded into the debate over the legality of triple talaq. The Supreme Court was hearing arguments in Shayara Bano versus Union of India, where Shayara had been divorced by her husband using triple talaq. In 2017, the SC declared the practice as unconstitutional, thereby nullifying the pronouncement of instant talaq.

Rushing to claim credit for the SC ruling, the government enacted the Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Marriage) Act in 2019, which criminalised the pronouncement of triple talaq. The need to criminalise a practice that had already been deemed as null and void arose out of a devious idea to push the fight against Muslim men inside their marital homes. To plant the seed of suspicion within a marriage is not an easy ask but this is not a government that shies away from challenges. The Prime Minister has since claimed credit for rescuing Muslim women and receiving blessings from them. Muslim women now have a hero they never asked for. Is the government not aware that its divisive practices against Muslims also affect the lives of Muslim women or is it simply trying to create a micro constituency within the Muslim vote bank. My heart bleeds for Bilkis Bano.

As the curtains came down on Haq, title cards appeared which placed the legal drama in a historical context. The real protagonist was identified as Shah Bano, the woman who had waged a lonely battle against religious and patriarchal institutions to secure maintenance from her estranged husband in the early 1980s. We are then told that the 40-year-old issue was finally resolved when the BJP government enacted a law to criminalise instant triple talaq in 2017.

Haq rides on the recall value of the Shah Bano judgement but details of the case are sketchy. Shah Bano was a Muslim woman who married an affluent lawyer, Mohammad Ahmad Khan, in Indore in 1932. She was 16. They had five children together. After 14 years of marriage, Khan took in another wife with whom he fathered seven children. He lived with both wives under the same roof for 32 years. After 46 years of marriage, when she was 62, Khan reportedly threw Shah Bano and her children out of the house. When he stopped giving her the Rs 200 monthly maintenance he had promised, she filed a criminal suit against Khan under Section 125 of the Code of Criminal Procedure (CrPC), now known as the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita (BNSS). The section puts a legal obligation on the man to provide maintenance for his wife during marriage and after divorce, if she is unable to fend for herself.

Shah Bano filed the case in 1978, when she was still married to Khan. Ten months later, Khan divorced her using instant triple talaq. He then argued that since Shah Bano had ceased to be his wife, he was not obligated to give her maintenance, except for three months of iddat, which is the waiting period post-divorce, after which a woman is allowed to re-marry under Islamic Law.

Along with three months maintenance, the woman is also entitled to receive her mehr—an amount fixed at the time of marriage. In what was seen as a moral victory for Shah Bano, the lower court, in 1979, ordered Khan to pay Rs 25 a month as maintenance to her. The win was real, but the amount was too paltry. She filed a revision application before the Madhya Pradesh High Court and in 1980, the court increased the maintenance amount to Rs 179.

Khan challenged the HC order in the SC, claiming that the HC was overstepping the provisions of Muslim Personal Law, which prescribe that a husband is not liable to provide maintenance for more than three months after divorce. In April 1985, a constitutional bench of the SC upheld the HC order. The apex court concluded that there was no conflict between provisions of CrPC Section 125 and those of the Muslim Personal Law on the question of a Muslim husband’s obligation to provide maintenance for his divorced wife. Recognising the Quran as the greatest authority on Muslim Personal Law, the SC held that the Quran imposed an obligation on the Muslim husband to provide maintenance for his divorced wife.

The verdict was widely criticised by the Muslim community and leadership who took to the streets in protest. The movement gained such traction that the Rajiv Gandhi government enacted a law in parliament to overturn the judgement. The Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Divorce) Act, 1986, restricted the liability of the Muslim husband to maintenance during the period of iddat or only 90 days, and placed the responsibility of a divorced woman’s upkeep on her relatives or the state waqf board.

Nullification of the SC judgement, which had asked for a discussion on the Uniform Civil Code, backfired for Gandhi. Historians claim that it was not just conservative and fundamentalist Hindus who got upset with the government, but even liberal opinion started turning against him. The Congress government was accused of minority appeasement, a tag it desperately tried to fight off. Some claim that the doors to the Babri Masjid were reopened in 1986 to appease Hindus and to divert attention from the Shah Bano case. The rest is history.

In Haq, Dhar repeatedly reiterates that the Quran provides for the rights of Muslim women, but its interpretation by the Muslim clergy and intellectuals has been manipulated to suit the interests of men. She is not wrong. Despite what the Muslim leadership may have argued at the time to get the SC verdict nullified by the government, the Quran does clearly state—a woman cannot be given instant talaq and should not be forced out of her marital house and she should be adequately compensated by her husband according to his means.

The question of ‘reasonable compensation’ is also dealt with. The treatment meted out to Shah Bano by her husband stood in violation of Islamic Law and should ideally have been dealt with by the local clergy and relevant waqf board. Shah Bano should not have been thrown out of her home, should not have been given instant triple talaq and should not have been denied maintenance. There would have been no need for a legal intervention if the Muslim clergy had come to Bano’s rescue while interpreting the teachings of the Quran. It has laid down guidelines that ensure safety and justice for women. Bano was forced to knock on the doors of the court because institutions and systems that are meant to safeguard the interests of Muslims are dominated and governed by men and Muslim men, like men of all other religions, prefer to interpret religious texts to suit their interests.

Unfortunately for the propagandists, Haq might not be able to generate as much islamophobia as The Kerala Story. Unlike the Hindu victims of The Kerala story, the Muslim woman in Haq has the tools needed to fight evil Muslim practices. Ironically, for the Hindutva brigade, these tools have been provided by the Quran and Sharia. Shah Bano needs to fight male-dominated systems that try to control the practice of Islam and Sharia but not the religion itself. What comes to her aid in the end is not the court, not the government but the Quran itself. Dhar’s character holds up a copy of the Quran at the end of the film and says: “Iqra” (read)—the first word of the Quran as it was revealed to the holy prophet. The film makes a push for the empowerment of Muslim women but does not adequately represent the pitfalls of opening Muslim Personal Law to judicial scrutiny.

Coming at a time when the government is making amendments to the constitution and squeezing the space for the existence of Muslim Personal Law and the practice of Islam, the film raises questions about the motivations of the filmmaker and the timing of its release. If the BJP government’s heart was bleeding for Muslim women, why did it not introduce 50 per cent reservation for women in state and central waqf boards when it was introducing amendments to the Waqf Act? Instead, it introduced Hindu men into waqf boards. Under the guise of empowering Muslim women, the government actions point towards erosion of Muslim law, culture, traditions and practices. Just as the story of Shah Bano needs to be seen in a historical context, so does the film, Haq, and the context is not a flattering endorsement of the filmmakers’ motivation.

In the words of Kylie Minogue, and here I think I speak for all Indian Muslim women:

‘But I don’t need a shining star

And I don’t want to be rescued

No neither frog nor charming prince

Nor my summers barbecued.’

And, astaghfirullah, we do not wish to ‘chiggy-wiggy’ with the Hindu Right Wing. We know how to fight for our rights, and we have the Quran as our shield.

(Views expressed are personal)

Seemi Pasha is an independent journalist and documentary filmmaker. She writes on politics, society and gender.

This article appeared as 'We Don’t Need A Shining Star' in Outlook’s December 1, 2025 issue as 'The Burden of Bihar' which explores how the latest election results tell their own story of continuity and aspiration, and the new government inherits a mandate weighted with expectations. The issue reveals how politics, people, and power intersect in ways that shape who we are—and where we go next.