Whether you are a wife, daughter or mother, find out what you are entitled to and how you can claim it.
It has never been a good time to be a woman. Shackled at home, deprived of rights in society, & subjected to gender bias at the workplace, women have borne the brunt of being the weaker sex all through history. Though the skew in rights & treatment hasn’t quite corrected itself, women are possibly in a better place today than ever before. This is because rising awareness, availability of global forums & social media to voice their anguish & angst, changes in laws to empower them, & proactive governments to implement gender neutral laws have all converged to give women a hearing & heft.
Still, there are many areas that can do with a nudge to empower them, one being the succession & inheritance laws. For years, women in India have been discriminated against & denied the right to ancestral property due to various reasons. One, there is no uniformity in inheritance laws, with various religious communities governed by their own personal laws & different state tribals by their customary laws.
Most of these laws discouraged passing on property, agricultural or otherwise, to women for fear of fragmentation of land holding or losing it once the woman got married. “The basic framework for inheritance differs on the basis of religion in India & not on the basis of the nature of asset. While Hindu families & other identified religions have their own inheritance laws, inheritance rights of the remaining groups are governed by the Indian Succession Act, 1925,” says Soumya Rajan, MD & CEO, Waterfield Advisors.
Second, there is low awareness & literacy among women about their own rights and, understandably, they have shown little inclination to contest in courts. Thirdly, strong patriarchal traditions have translated into fear of violence & threat of violation by their male relatives, preventing women from fighting for their inheritance rights. In fact, in several northern & western states, women give up their claim over ancestral property due to the custom of ‘haq tyag’ or voluntary renunciation of rights. This is justified on the grounds that as the father pays dowry & finances the daughter’s wedding, only sons should get the family property.
“Till as late as the formulation of the Hindu Succession Act, 1956, the law was blatantly biased against women,” says Rohan Mahajan, Founder & CEO, LawRato. com. “It was only after the amendment in the Hindu Succession Act in 2005, whereby equal rights were awarded to daughters in their fathers’ ancestral property, that it became more balanced,” says Raj Lakhotia, Founder & Director, Dilsewill.com, an online will-maker.
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