MUZAFFARNAGAR, June 30: About 200 women protested outside a court in India on Thursday against a fatwa prohibiting a rape victim from living with her husband after she was raped by her father-in-law.

“Punish the rapist, not the victim,” the women shouted as the 28-year-old burqa-clad Imrana Bibi met a team from the National Commission for Women (NCW), which demanded justice for her under India’s secular constitution.

“This is a question of the law of the land and the constitution is supreme. We want justice for the woman,” NCW chief Girija Vyas told reporters in Muzaffarnagar, Uttar Pradesh.

“Personal laws should be modified and made gender-just and human rights-friendly. No religion punishes the innocent,” Subhashini Ali, a senior leader of the All India Democratic Women’s Association, told reporters.

Imrana Bibi, a poor rickshawpuller’s wife in the predominantly Muslim town, was raped by her father-in-law, prompting a Muslim village council to decree she had to live as the ‘wife’ of her father-in-law and treat her husband as her son.

As uproar mounted, South Asia’s most influential Islamic theological school waded in with a fatwa saying Imrana, a mother of five, was prohibited from living with her husband under the Shariat.

But it did not endorse the village council’s stand that she had to become her father-in-law’s wife.

“Any Muslim who opposes our fatwa is not a true Muslim and is betraying Islam,” said Mohammad Masood Madani, a scholar at the Darul Uloom Deoband.

“She had a physical relationship with her father-in-law. It does not matter whether it was consensual or forced. She cannot live with her husband.”

The slightly built Imrana, who was accompanied by her husband and sister-in-law, told reporters she would follow the Shariat. Imrana’s father-in-law has been arrested.—Reuters