GENDER RIGHTS VS PERSONAL LAWS: ISSUES AND CHALLENGES communal assertions changing the political climate in the country. In these assertions, gender justice is often sidelined at the altar of community identity, to allay the perception of communities being threatened. It is always women’s rights that stand to be sacrificed at the altar of community survival and integrity. The women’s movements in India have since felt that there was greater necessity to pose gender justice for women outside of the domain of religious identities. It is clear that the positions taken on the need for a common civil code or seeking reforms within personal laws cannot be seen in isolation from the context in which these debates are conducted (Sunder Rajan, 2003). For the women’s movement this meant that there needs to be caution as to how gender justice might be hijacked by a liberal agenda of uniformity or communitarian or fundamentalist agenda. In the subsequent years, diverse positions emerged on the common civil code among different women’s groups, sometimes resulting in sharp divisions. While gender justice was the objective following the realisation that all religious personal laws were gender discriminatory, some preferred the route of reforms within personal laws, while others chose to tread a path that distinguished equality of rights from legal uniformity – from common code to a gender just law. Lived realities of women should guide the changes in law. Nivedita Menon (1998) catalogues these varied positions but broadly demarcates these as: legal reforms within the communities versus a gender just law, both driven by feminists. Autonomous women’s organisations as well as those organisations that have been working with communities, or conducting campaigns for gender justice have attempted to dialogue and campaign for family laws. Over the years, however, an understanding of the pursuit of both paths travelling alongside each another is evident. For instance, in 2016, when Shayara Bano went to court challenging the triple talaq or talaq-e-biddat, among the petitioners were Bharatiya Muslim Mahila Andolan, that prefers reforms from within the community and Bebaak Collective, that strives for a gender just law (SC Observer n.d.). 3. Imagining Families What constitutes gender justice within the terrain of the family and intimate relationships? Even though questions such as these were earlier dealt with when structures of family and 93