Hindus and Muslims: The true picture of divorce
4 min read . Updated: 25 Jul 2017, 04:16 PM IST
Yugank Goyal
The differential impact of divorce across gender, while higher for Muslims than Hindus, and higher for women than men, is also higher in poor regions than in rich ones
Topics
mint-india-wire HindusMuslimsdivorce ratestriple talaqmarriageHindu womenMuslim womenDivorce rates in India
The judgement on triple talaq will be out soon. The debate in the past few months has starkly posed issues related to gender justice, secularism and the uniform civil code. And yet, there is practically no sound analysis based on data, despite how central empirics could be, to resolve such an issue.
Of the little bit that people have written, the data is dangerously misrepresented. For example, the oft-cited claim (including by Kapil Sibal on 26 May 2017 in this article) that 68% of all divorced women are Hindus while only 23.3% are Muslims, is flimsy and meaningless. Hindu women outnumber Muslims by five times, so it is only logical that the share of Hindu women in the divorced women population will be higher.
Some media reports have also suggested that the divorce rate among Muslims is lower than among Hindus (PTI, India Today, 8 April 2017). This is, again, plainly incorrect, as I show below. This claim was made by the women’s wing of the All India Muslim Personal Law Board (AIMPLB) and the data used comes from self-selected 16 family courts in a country with 439 family courts (as on May 2016), which gives a hugely incomplete and distorted picture. Flashed in the form of big, bold headings, incorrect data is a recipe for uninformed judgement.
I pulled out data from Census 2011 to see divorce rates in the two communities. Divorce stock ratio can be defined as the total number of divorced persons in a community to the total number of married persons in that community (I don’t call it divorce rate because rate is a flow, and the census only tells us stock, but analogically, it’s the same as divorce rate). This ratio is 2.0 for Hindus and 3.7 for Muslims. This means that for every 1,000 married Hindus, 2 are divorced, and for every 1,000 married Muslims, 3.7 are divorced (for India, this value is 2.4). Across gender, the disparity is wider (most men remarry but women can’t, hence the disparity). For every 1,000 married Hindu women, 2.6 are divorced, while for 1,000 married Muslim women, 5.6 of them are divorced. As for men, the ratio is almost the same (1.5 for Hindu men and 1.6 for Muslim men). This implies that population and marital status adjusted, Muslims are more likely to be divorced than Hindus, and Muslim women take up almost the entire burden of this difference. About 78.7% of Muslim divorcees are women; for Hindus, this figure is 64.2%.
4 min read . Updated: 25 Jul 2017, 04:16 PM IST
Yugank Goyal
The differential impact of divorce across gender, while higher for Muslims than Hindus, and higher for women than men, is also higher in poor regions than in rich ones
Topics
mint-india-wire HindusMuslimsdivorce ratestriple talaqmarriageHindu womenMuslim womenDivorce rates in India
The judgement on triple talaq will be out soon. The debate in the past few months has starkly posed issues related to gender justice, secularism and the uniform civil code. And yet, there is practically no sound analysis based on data, despite how central empirics could be, to resolve such an issue.
Of the little bit that people have written, the data is dangerously misrepresented. For example, the oft-cited claim (including by Kapil Sibal on 26 May 2017 in this article) that 68% of all divorced women are Hindus while only 23.3% are Muslims, is flimsy and meaningless. Hindu women outnumber Muslims by five times, so it is only logical that the share of Hindu women in the divorced women population will be higher.
Some media reports have also suggested that the divorce rate among Muslims is lower than among Hindus (PTI, India Today, 8 April 2017). This is, again, plainly incorrect, as I show below. This claim was made by the women’s wing of the All India Muslim Personal Law Board (AIMPLB) and the data used comes from self-selected 16 family courts in a country with 439 family courts (as on May 2016), which gives a hugely incomplete and distorted picture. Flashed in the form of big, bold headings, incorrect data is a recipe for uninformed judgement.
I pulled out data from Census 2011 to see divorce rates in the two communities. Divorce stock ratio can be defined as the total number of divorced persons in a community to the total number of married persons in that community (I don’t call it divorce rate because rate is a flow, and the census only tells us stock, but analogically, it’s the same as divorce rate). This ratio is 2.0 for Hindus and 3.7 for Muslims. This means that for every 1,000 married Hindus, 2 are divorced, and for every 1,000 married Muslims, 3.7 are divorced (for India, this value is 2.4). Across gender, the disparity is wider (most men remarry but women can’t, hence the disparity). For every 1,000 married Hindu women, 2.6 are divorced, while for 1,000 married Muslim women, 5.6 of them are divorced. As for men, the ratio is almost the same (1.5 for Hindu men and 1.6 for Muslim men). This implies that population and marital status adjusted, Muslims are more likely to be divorced than Hindus, and Muslim women take up almost the entire burden of this difference. About 78.7% of Muslim divorcees are women; for Hindus, this figure is 64.2%.
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