Supreme Court Ruled for Muslim's Right to Adopt

The Supreme Court of India in a landmark order indirectly pushing for the Constitution-suggested Uniform Civil Code, on Wednesday ruled that personal law prohibition against adoption would not bar a Muslim from adopting a child if he chose the secular Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act route. By this ruling the minority community can take care and protection of children as adoptive parents and not as a guardian as was earlier.

Giving the judgment on a PIL filed by Shabnam Hashmi  nine years ago, a bench of Chief Justice P Sathasivam and Justices Ranjan Gogoi and S K Singh said the JJ Act was a secular law which gave prospective parents the option to adopt a child. "A Muslim was always free to exercise his option either to adhere to the personal law prohibition against adoption or choose JJ Act route to take a child into his/her family," the bench said, adding "To us, the Act is a small step in reaching the goal enshrined by Article 44 of the Constitution." 

Article 44 of the Constitution says, "The State shall endeavour to secure for the citizens a Uniform Civil Code throughout the territory of India." The bench said, "The vision contemplated in Article 44 of the Constitution, that is a Uniform Civil Code, is a goal yet to be fully reached." 

However, the Muslim Personal Law Board had opposed Hashmi's plea for a uniform adoption law that would prevail over all religious prohibitions. The board gave their elaborate arguments against permitting Muslims to adopt children.

The board had said that Islam did not recognize an adopted child to be treated on a par with a biological child. The Islamic law professes 'kafla' system under which the child is placed under 'kafil' who provides for the well-being of the child, including financial support, and this is legally allowed to take care of the child though the child remains the descendant of his biological parents and not of the 'adoptive' parents.

The muslim board attempted to give legal recognition to its religious 'kafla' system by informing the court that even United Nation's Convention of the Rights of Child recognized it as an alternative to child care contemplated under the JJ Act. The court, however, refused to restrain a Muslim if he/she chose to take JJ Act route to adopt a child on the grounds that the faith did not permit it.

Justice Gogoi said, "An optional legislation (JJ Act) that does not contain an unavoidable imperative cannot be stultified by principles of personal law which, however, would always continue to govern any person who chooses to so submit himself until such time that the vision of Uniform Civil Code is achieved. The same can only happen by the collective decision of the generation(s) to come to sink conflicting faiths and beliefs that are still active today.

"The conflict in thinking fuelled by dictates of religions was also the reason why the court felt the time was not ripe to lift the statutory right to adopt to the level of a fundamental right. It said, "Conflicting viewpoints prevailing between different communities as on date on the subject makes the vision contemplated in Article 44 of the Constitution, that is a Uniform Civil Code, a goal yet to be fully reached and the court is reminded of the anxiety expressed by it earlier with regard to the necessity to maintain restraint. All these impel us to take the view that the present is not an appropriate time and stage where the right to adopt and the right to be adopted can be raised to the status of a fundamental right and/or to understand such a right to be encompassed by Article 21 of the Constitution," the court said.

Why Geniuses are different.....

Human life is a journey of interaction with different kinds of people, all of whom we can not retain in our memory all the time. But there are some people whom we can not forget, how hard we try. Why does this happen? Perhaps these guys are different from others. These are not normal people yet they are among the normal people. They behave differently and some times they act strangely. In fact interaction with these guys may happen through their genius prowess which translates their pain and agony, joy and happiness into the form of poetry, music, painting, story or novel, and films. They may be the genius who makes great strides in Science, Technology and Mathematics.

However, it is very difficult to define what a genius is. Even geniuses of the highest order such as Albert Einstein, WolfGang MoZart, D.H.Lawrence, Henry Moore, and many others found it difficult to answer the question of the self, and perhaps the observation of themselves in search of these answers have led them to the achievements.

According to Puzant Kevork Thomajan, "True genius sees with the eyes of a child and thinks with the brain of genie”. But, it is for definite that a genius breaks the boundaries of common thought to take our sensibility or technology to new mindscapes, resulting in a giant leap of the mankind as a whole.

The problem actually occurs when a whole community of ‘commons’ find it hard to understand, relate and communicate to these special people. Scientists have been striving to correlate mental illness with eminent creative individuals, who have a much higher rate of manic depression, or bipolar disorder, than does the general population.

They found artists to be more similar in personality to individuals with manic depression than to healthy people using personality and temperament tests. The results have been ground breaking, as the thinking and reaction patterns of genuinely creative people and the depressive maniacs were almost similar, while it differed from the healthy people in all accounts.

The life history of John Nash, the schizophrenic mathematician who won Nobel Prize for his revolutionary studies in game theory, is a perfect example of the off track characteristics often depicted by a genius written in his biography “The beautiful mind”. The kind of seclusion they face is revealed by the inner stories from the Nobel committee, which had delayed his recognition for the sole reason that he was mentally unfit. There are instances by shocked classmates saying that they had totally kept away from the "The Ghost of Fine Hall” as he was called those days, and were only able to understand his passionate language of numbers and equations many years later.

There are umpteen number of stories written about several geniuses and have become the part of the human history, yet common human is unable to understand and regard these special people in the society. It is only when these people gets recognize we rise above our commonness to show our gratitude towards these special people. We do not know how many geniuses in our society among ourselves without recognition face dejection when they are not able to communicate like one of the commoners. Society always treats these superlative geniuses as an odd and sub human beings.

But in fact, this is what they are. Even if they try hard they can not behave as the normal human being as the society more often expects them to be. It is for the society to understand them and treat them equal in their early life. Else many more geniuses will have to see the disgrace.

Meanwhile Science is striving to decode these minds that keep on creating miracles. It is time the society should learn this new language to accept the super brains and adapt to the incomprehensible and ever changing world ruled by them.