Alimony, Maintenance And Adoption
- IJLLR Journal
- 1 hour ago
- 2 min read
Akshat Meshram, Jagran Lakecity University
ABSTRACT
The Indian law of alimony, maintenance and adoption reflects an ongoing dialogue between individual faith based customs and the constitutional principles of equality and dignity of humans. The three areas, in as much as they appear to be different, jointly determine the duties of State and society towards individuals, which are post-marital and filial. This research paper examines the evolution of these concepts in the doctrines and their development over time as religious controlled norms to become a tool of socio-economic justice based on constitutional interpretation and statutory revision.
The paper will start by looking at the early judicial attempts to balance religious law with fair values especially in A. Yousuf Rawther v. Sowramma (1970) in which Justice V.R. Krishna Iyer developed a more humanistic interpretation of Muslim matrimonial law that stressed equity instead of strictness. It subsequently places the historic ruling in Shayara Bano v. Union of India (2017), the greater constitutional movement which abolished the practice of talaq-e-biddat, and as such affirmed that the personal laws may not be used to counteract the basic principles of equality, liberty, and dignity. The legislative changes especially the Dissolution of Muslim Marriages Act, 1939 and the Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Marriage) Act, 2019 are all examined to provide a comparative understanding as to how the Parliament increasingly incorporated secular and rights-based reasoning into that which was once seen as a domain of religious adjudication.
Moreover, the study examines the current concept of adoption as a secular legal right and not a religious right and compares the individual law limitations of the past with the non-discriminatory provisions brought in by the Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act, 2015. Such change of lineage of rituals to child welfare helps highlight how India is slowly moving towards international norms like the Convention on the Rights of the Child and the Hague Convention on Intercountry Adoption.
The paper conceptually approaches alimony, maintenance and adoption as interrelated manifestations of the welfare obligation of the State each one of which is an adaptation of the law to the mediation of the balance between individual conviction and the justice of the people. With a doctrinal and comparative approach, it also claims that the Indian legal system features a kind of a constitutional convergence, and plural personal laws are beginning to be increasingly aligned with international human rights values. Finally, the paper argues that the contemporary Indian paradigm of family law has ceased to be a set of individual religious codes and represents a constitutional space in which the principles of equality, insecurities and compassion are negotiated and reconstitutive.
