Haq Ending Explained And Movie Recap: Is This Based On A True Story?

“Haq” is a word of Urdu origin that translates to “right.” While rights often come naturally for the privileged class, they have to be earned by minorities through blood, sweat, and tears. Suparn Verma’s “Haq” is one such testament that portrays a woman putting her foot down to claim her rights, raising her voice against first a man who she once fell in love with, and then against the entire system that conspires to favor and protect men. Starring Emraan Hashmi and Yami Gautam in its lead roles, this courtroom drama stays loyal to its historical roots—a case fought by Shah Bano against her husband, Ahmad Khan, to earn her right to maintenance post-divorce. This decade-long case raised questions about the conflict between the secular law system and the Sharia law system, sparking many debates about the rights of women who remain the minority even among minorities. The oppression of women is two-fold—not only are they oppressed on the basis of religion, but they are twice as oppressed for their gender, which dehumanizes them and alienates them from their rights. In this article, let’s take a look back at the Shah Bano lawsuit and how the film adapts it.

Spoilers Ahead

Shazia Bano’s case against her lawyer husband, Abbas Khan, in the film takes its inspiration from the Shah Bano case against Ahmad Khan. Shah Bano married Ahmad Khan in 1932 in Indore, Madhya Pradesh. After over four decades of marital life with five children, in 1978, Ahmad Khan decided to “talaq” Shah Bano. Shah Bano was sixty-two years old at that time, and she demanded two hundred rupees worth of alimony, to which Ahmad Khan assented. Despite agreeing to pay the alimony, Ahmad did not continue paying it, and Shah Bano lodged a legal suit against her husband. She fought this case for over a decade under Section 125 of the CrPC on the grounds that all women and children, irrespective of their religion, have a right to maintenance, which came in close conflict with the Muslim Personal Law, that claims that the divorced woman would be the responsibility of her relatives or the waqf board. Shah Bano did win this case, with the Supreme Court’s verdict that made it mandatory that section 125 be unilaterally implemented. Chief Justice Chandrachud stated that the Universal Civil Code supersedes the personal law and dismissed the appeal that Ahmad Khan brought in favor of the Sharia Law. However, just a year after the verdict was passed in 1985, the Rajiv Gandhi government collapsed under political and religious pressure, and a bill was passed in 1986 that said that the Muslim women retain rights to maintenance only for a period of 90 days post the divorce. This bill was largely considered anti-women, and a dark spot in the secular constitution of India. Although the victory was short-lived and redacted later, Shah Bano’s case, along with Tahira Bi’s and Fuzlunvi’s, laid the foundation for the verdict that came out in 2019 supporting women’s rights to alimony post legal separation. While the road to justice was long and difficult, the victory that arrived at the end of it serves countless women with their rights and autonomy that were long oppressed under a misaligned legal system. 

The film follows the case pretty closely, except that it makes some changes for the sake of fictionalizing the account to make it more palatable to the audience, like changing Shah Bano to a much younger character that makes the save-the-Muslim-woman urge stronger than it would have worked for a sixty-two-year-old woman. Shah Bano is renamed as Shazia Bano, and Ahmad as Abbas Khan, with the couple having a marriage that lasts some seventeen years with three kids. While Abbas was completely in love with Shazia Bano, he later married his first love, Saira, and divorced her without even informing his wife. Shazia Bano was shocked by Saira’s arrival, but her husband initially said that he did it to repay some old debts and that Saira would help her around the household. However, soon she learned that Saira was whom her husband intended to marry from the beginning, but when her marriage was fixed somewhere else, Abbas ended up marrying Shazia. This hurts Shazia’s ego—she had made Abbas’ house a home in all the years and was pregnant with their third child when Abbas married Saira. Even then, she tried to coexist in the same household with Saira, but Abbas’ attention was completely diverted from Shazia. On their wedding anniversary, Shazia made mithai and took it to Abbas’ office, hoping that they would go for a film in the evening, but Abbas rudely shut the door in her face in front of his colleagues after an argument. After this, Shazia left Abbas’ house with their children and went to live at her father’s house. Abbas, at first, sent in four hundred bucks for the maintenance of the kids, but soon that stopped too. Additionally, Shazia was feeling this deep sense of injustice. Her father, an Islamic teacher, took her a few times to resolve things with Abbas, but he would not budge. On their last encounter, Abbas uttered the “talaq” word thrice, which annuls a marriage according to Sharia law. 

The film has quite a realistic portrayal of the lawsuit, with it lasting for a decade, starting at the Aligarh sessions court and reaching the Supreme Court by the end of it all. Abbas is portrayed as a lawyer, and Shazia did not stand a chance at the first session. However, lawyers Bela Jain and Fareez Ansari stepped up to fight her case impromptu and stood by her side till she won the case. At their first win, Shazia was only sanctioned a twenty-two-rupee alimony, a very close one to the twenty-five rupees that Shah Bano had won, but Bela termed it a moral victory. Later, the twenty-two rupees became a one hundred eighty rupee alimony when the case was won at the high court. However, letting Shazia win the case at the high court was only a ploy by Abbas, since he wanted to take the case to the Supreme Court and make it an issue about the cultural identity of Muslims. His argument was that the Sharia law is the one that connects the Muslims of all countries together, and the justice has no right to rob them of their cultural identity. However, his argument was wrong at many levels—in the name of cultural identity, he tried legitimizing a regressive act against women and stealing their autonomy. On top of that, even if Sharia law is concerned, his argument was flawed. A talaq-e-bidat, the one that is uttered under the same breath, mandates a public whipping of the pronouncer, and also says that the man needs to provide for his wife and children. The Mehr cannot be a compensation for the alimony, like Abbas claimed, and so his appeals were dismissed at the Supreme Court. The verdict was passed under the UCC—Unified Civil Code—that Shazia was to receive alimony from her husband. While Abbas fought out of a wounded pride and ego, at the end he realized his misguided endeavour and left the rose from his buttonhole on the court premise as a last token of respect for his ex-wife. The film ends with Shazia earning her daily bread by teaching little children the Quran so that it is never misinterpreted in their lifetimes to oppress them. After all, the first word of the Quran-e-Sharif is “to read.”

While making a film in this political scenario to question the authenticity of religious laws and their existence feels suspicious for all the right reasons, the film at least shows a decent constraint in not becoming a propaganda film. As viewers, it is also our responsibility to look at the film through its gender lens and not the religious lens that may certainly benefit a faction of fundamentalist agenda-holders. Among all the things that this film gets right is how it unapologetically professes the rights of women, but does not divide women in the process of it. It could have fallen into the sensational Bollywood trap of pitting Saira against Shazia, but while a normal bit of envy is shown between the two, the women quietly help each other throughout. Saira, the second wife, repeatedly says that she thinks what Shazia is fighting for is within her rights, and if Abbas is not willing to pay the alimony, she will. Shazia also points it out to Saira once that she would have accepted Abbas’ version of their marriage story and accepted Saira, but she had to make a point of letting Shazia know that she is no “charity case.” Shazia explains that just like Saira did it for her own honor, Shazia has to do it too. On top of everything that the film portrays, the palpable tension that this lawsuit is not being fought between two rivals but two people that deeply loved each other once feels heavy, heightening the sense of injustice that Shazia had to face. Shazia always upheld her knowledge of the Sharia law and the Quran and never let the men misinterpret for her, even in the face of extreme isolation and religious spite that put her safety at risk. Shazia fought for her rights when the Qazis and her community isolated her and her family for taking a stance that was considered un-Islamic, but probably the community did not know that the religion they learned was a weaponized version taught to them to work as a tool of oppression, and not what is written in the Quran. 

In the times of religious divides that try pitting one kind of fundamentalism against the other, ignoring the real concerns of minorities and even more oppressed gender factions within it, a film like “Haq” is important, but only if we are able to filter out the contemporary political gains of saving a Muslim woman through a system that secretly scorns her religious identity. Sure, in the times of “Dhurandhar” and other outright jingoistic narratives, the film at least pretends to provide us a neutral, pseudo-secular lens to look at the discrimination that is often shoved under the carpet while two religions wage war against each other. But the question still remains whether the goal of the film is to empower women or to delegitimize an entire religion by reducing them to one act of injustice. With its feminist core, the film surely stands testament to the power of raising a voice and immortalizes Shah Bano’s courageous act through Shazia’s story, and I sincerely hope the film is read only as such and not the other way round.