‘Haq’ review: A thin line between justice and judgement
A dutiful housewife, her affluent lawyer husband, two children in quick succession and a third on the way – the Khan family is the picture of contentment. That is, until Abbas Khan (Emraan Hashmi) brings home a second wife, Saira (Vartika Singh).
A shocked Shazia (Yami Gautam Dhar) adjusts to Saira’s presence until she cannot. The final straw is when Abbas refuses to pay Shazia a paltry monthly maintenance.
Shazia’s decision to approach the courts rather than go through the organisations that administer sharia, or religious law, is seen as a monumental betrayal. In a bid to checkmate Shazia’s lawyer Indu (Sheeba Chaddha), Abbas frames Shazia’s petition as an assault on sharia, an attempt to meddle with personal laws that have been protected by the Constitution.
The pious and demure Shazia’s campaign is compared to an act no less divisive than Partition.
The confrontation in Haq of Muslim versus Muslim and observant individual versus secular subject is based on the Shah Bano wrangle of the 1980s. Directed by Suparn S Varma, the Hindi film is adapted by Reshu Nath from Jigna Vora’s 2025 book Bano: Bharat Ki Beti.
In 1978, Shah Bano filed a petition for the maintenance that her ex-husband Mohammed Ahmad had stopped paying her. The litigation culminated in a Supreme...
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