Haq

HAQ becomes a better film once it ends. The Suparn Verma directorial feature is based on the landmark 1985 Shah Bano case, where a Muslim woman won her right to alimony. Although personal, her fight assumed big proportions because it revealed the knotty relationship between Muslim Personal Law, where a husband is entitled to provide maintenance during the iddat period after divorce, and the Indian secular law. In this particular case, the Supreme Court ruled in favour of Bano; later, the then-Congress government offset the judgment by sanctioning women to receive “reasonable and fair provision and maintenance" for three months after the divorce; Haq concludes by mentioning this, applauding, in the same breath, the current government for criminalising triple talaq and passing the Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Marriage) Act, 2019.

In 1978, Shah Bano, an elderly Muslim woman from Indore, filed a petition seeking maintenance that her estranged husband, Mohammed Ahmad Khan, had abruptly ceased paying. What began as a private plea for sustenance evolved into one of India’s most seminal legal battles. The litigation culminated in a historic 1985 Supreme Court judgment—Mohd. Ahmad Khan v. Shah Bano Begum—which upheld a divorced Muslim woman’s right to maintenance under Section 125 of the Criminal Procedure Code.

There’s a scene in “Dhoom Dhaam” (2025) where Yami Gautam’s character goes off on a rant about patriarchy. It felt to me a moment written for the express purpose of being able to share on social media as a ‘mic-drop monologue’—which is exactly what Netflix did a few days after the release. I was reminded of this by a scene in Haq , where Gautam’s Shazia Bano, accosted in the marketplace, exhorts onlooking women to really read the Quran and not submit meekly to their husbands. Another mic-drop, I guess, but one complicated by the subject, the times, and the actor.

आज़ाद भारत की अदालतों में पेश हुए उल्लेखनीय मुकदमों में शामिल रहा है इंदौर की शाह बानो बेगम का वह केस जो उन्होंने अपने शौहर मौहम्मद अहमद खान के खिलाफ किया था। मुख्तसर बयानी यह कि अहमद ने पहला निकाह शाह बानो से किया जिससे उन्हें 5 बच्चे हुए। 14 साल बाद अहमद ने दूसरा निकाह कर लिया जिससे उन्हें 7 संतानें हुईं। इसके कई साल बाद जब अहमद ने शाह बानो को तलाक दिया तब शाह बानो की उम्र 62 साल थी। शाह बानो गुज़ारे भत्ते के लिए अदालत गईं। मामला सुप्रीम कोर्ट तक पहुंचा और वह जीतीं भी। लेकिन इस फैसले को मुस्लिम पर्सनल लॉ में दखल मानते हुए इसके खिलाफ देश भर में आंदोलन होने लगे। तब तत्कालीन राजीव गांधी सरकार ने 1986 में संसद में एक कानून बना कर सुप्रीम कोर्ट के फैसले को बेअसर कर दिया। यह फिल्म ‘हक़’ उसी केस पर पर आधारित है।

The film starts off in 1967 in a town in Uttar Pradesh. Shazia Bano (Yami Gautam Dhar), a young girl full of life, gets married to the lawyer Abbas Khan (Emraan Hashmi). She is happy with choosing him as her life partner. She gives birth to two children and is pregnant with the third. This is when Abbas goes on a three-week visit to Pakistan to settle some property dispute in their ancestral place.

It’s often said that if men were the ones to menstruate or give birth, the rules of the world would have been entirely different. Much has been written about women’s strength and multitasking abilities. Hindi cinema itself coined the famous line, “Woh stree hai, woh kuch bhi kar sakti hai.” But can we step aside from these mock-consolations for a moment and ask why women need such reaffirmations in the first place? Director Suparn S. Varma’s Haq is a harrowing tale of a woman who reaches the highest court of the nation seeking what is rightfully hers as a wife, a mother, and a woman.

Until two prolonged and pointed courtroom soliloquies are staged in quick succession late in the film – one is delivered by Emraan Hashmi, the other by Yami Gautam Dhar, with both actors acquitting themselves to perfection – Haq opts for sustained restraint even in its most dramatic passages. It is this temperance that defines the film. It is rare for a Bollywood film these days not to froth at the mouth when talking about India’s principal minority community and summarily stereotyping it. Directed by Suparn S. Varma and written by Reshu Nath, Haq tackles an emotive and sensitive topic. It could easily have gone overboard. That it does not is the film’s greatest strength.