To obey, and then to disappear: this is what Imrana Bibi seems to want to do most at the moment. In all the public turmoil over ?personal law? that has been set off by her father-in-law allegedly raping her last month, Imrana?s personhood is precisely the thing that has been most absent and the least heard. Her latest public statements, though cryptic, have been addressed to the clerics and to the media ? she will obey whatever the former deem, and wants to be left alone by the latter. The submission of her will to the interpreted will of the sharia, and then a withdrawal from publicity would determine this 28-year-old woman?s future with her five children, driven out of her home, with her marriage possibly annulled. What emerges most starkly from the aftermath of her rape in an Uttar Pradesh village is that the woman is the one to get most brutally punished by her community for what has been done to her. Immediately after being raped, Imrana was given the talaq by her husband, and ordered out of the village by the local qazi. This was followed by fatwas and conflicting pronouncements by the local panchayat, different schools of Muslim theologians, and the Muslim personal law board. Each had a different opinion about the nature of her defilement, the status of her marriage, and which of the two men (the husband or the father-in-law) she should be spending the rest of her life with.

The personal, in such matters, is always already political. The Samajwadi Party in UP supported the fatwas, the Congressmen distanced themselves (although the women pitched in to ?help?), and the Bharatiya Janata Party has started clamouring for the uniform civil code ? as if brutal and criminal gender injustice in personal law is purely an Islamic evil. Nothing can be more remote from the core of Imrana?s personal suffering than this partisan, opportunistic and communalized political furore. On the one hand, a theological controversy, and on the other, a political agenda ? in both, Imrana?s effacement is total, together with that of her basic human rights, as guaranteed by the Constitution and ideally to be protected by the judiciary.

By allowing the whole idea of a uniform civil code to get identified with the lowest kind of communal politics, the affirmation of a distinctly ?Muslim? identity through a vengefully reactionary interpretation of the sharia becomes the way of asserting a difference threatened by majoritarian interests. In countries where this pressure does not exist, people have begun to interpret and live with the same set of laws in a far more liberal and flexible way. The gradual building up of trust that is required for the formulation of a uniform civil code becomes impossible in such a reactive, and reactionary, climate. Also, will this ?uniformity? automatically guarantee sexual justice and equality for women? The elimination of Imrana?s personhood is essential to the theology as well as the politics of personal law in India.