The recent move to set up a separate All India Muslim Women's Personal Law Board at Lucknow may be welcomed with cautious optimism by the Indian feminist movement. For some years now, and particularly since the Bharatiya Janata Party and its allies successfully annexed the demand for the introduction of a uniform civil code in the name of rescuing the Muslim woman from the tyrannies of Muslim patriarchy, the Indian feminist movement has had to revise and distinguish its position from that of fundamentalists of both communities.

It did this by steadfastly focusing on the problems of women in India, who continue to live under personal law, and the reformed Hindu code of the Fifties did not escape its scrutiny. There has been a growing recognition among all sections of feminists that the communalized public sphere, and ambiguous victories and decisive setbacks in the courtroom, called for a revision of earlier positions. In particular, some organizations called for a strategy of supporting moves for gender justice that came from women within these communities themselves.

This is at last what the new board represents in its avowed intention of focusing on the rights of women under Muslim personal law. The move is richly ironic, for what else do personal law boards adjudicate if not the position of women, on whose dominated status the identity of the community is built? The new personal law board does not purport to move out of the realm of the community but claims a space within it, and on its own terms.

But coming, as the move of the Muslim feminists does, after similar challenges to the law board's authority from such segments as the Shias and the Barelvis, it may have the unfortunate consequence of providing a rallying point for a new patriarchal unity. Already, as the reports have it, the Shias have dismissed the move as an act of an international conspiracy.

The All India Muslim Personal Law Board has dismissed it as a "joke", which, we may note, is quite a different response from the more accommodating tone adopted vis à vis the Shias and the Barelvis. These are surely the easiest ways of discrediting any movement for political change in India. There will be inevitable questions about the representativeness of this new board, though clearly the original board, which includes two dozen women among its 200 members, has never thought fit to introspect on this question so far. They may even find some evidence of participation in such efforts of, what older feminist activists have regarded with some dismay, "9 to 5 feminists" who profess well-paid beliefs as employees of an NGO.

Yet the new women's board has already declared what the Shariat says are the rights of women, and therefore has rejected triple talaq as a legitimate form of divorce. Its intention is to interpret the religious law in the spirit of gender justice, and draw away the women who are flocking to the family courts for relief.

Still, it may be too early for feminists to take heart from the long-overdue changes that are under way. There is nothing as yet to guarantee that this assertion of independence will not be crushed or at least contained, for we may soberly recall the closure of ranks that occurred, in the wake of the Mary Roy judgment, among the various factions of the Kerala church, which proclaimed that the community, and more properly Syrian Christian families, were in danger from the retrospective application of the Indian Succession Act among Christians of Kerala. Moreover, there will be legions of other women who will willingly lend their faces to this effort of building a "new community solidarity".

In this, the stand taken by the state will be crucial. Yet, as Rajeswari Sundar Rajan's recent work has pointed out, there is a paradox in the ways in which the state responds to women's demands. It displays none of the alacrity with which it may concede political power to questions that involve women's economic rights, particularly within the family. The pragmatics of women's participation in politics is crucially dependent on a party system still controlled by men. Political representation, in all likeness, is still subordinated to a party system that is largely controlled by men, whereas economic rights within the family may challenge the very patriarchies on which the state depends.

But there is no doubt at all that these developments are an effect of long years of rallying around the question of women's rights within communities and the long and contradictory relationship that women have with the state. Shuttling between the community and the state, women under personal laws are wary of placing all their confidence in either of these forces, preferring to build pressure from within rather than seek the intervention of a state ever-willing to concede to the demands of assorted patriarchies.

Organizations such as Awaz-e-Niswan in Mumbai, or COVA in Hyderabad have advocated piecemeal and steady reforms without antagonizing the religious beliefs of the women in these communities. The demand that women be given the freedom to worship in mosques is thus as important in such a charter as the demand for equal rights to property and the ban on triple talaq in marriage.

But there are many signs that the news of the board has to be treated with caution, for we simultaneously hear of a judge of the Allahabad high court who has upheld a lower court judgment for the payment of maintenance to a Muslim woman estranged from her husband. He has done it in the name of the justice guaranteed to all Indians under the Constitution, from which Muslims are not exempt.

This assertion of the notion of citizenship is at variance with the constitution of the new board which will embrace, rather than repudiate, the community. Feminists have learned to treat with caution the words of Indian judges pronouncing on women's rights, especially in a charged public sphere where no opportunity is missed to deal out lessons to Muslims in modes of correct citizenship, using the dubious norms of Hindu reformed law. The pursuit of gender justice has been used as the ruse to rebuke the Muslim community generally or Muslim men in particular, and as Flavia Agnes has shown for the period following the Bombay Riots of 1993, even castigate the community for acts of violence against women.

Feminists have thus learned to be wary of reading such ready condemnation of Muslim men by assorted (and usually Hindu) men of the bar. But these new developments are definite signs that neither the campaigns for the uniform civil code, nor the setbacks in court and legislature have been in vain for they have surely informed the moves made by the Muslim activists. In this important sense, this is a victory for Indian feminism.