Continuing our work, we will legislate a bill to prohibit and eliminate practices such as Triple Talaq and Nikah Halala… Ensure justice for Muslim women by enacting the law against triple talaq.

The 2019 manifesto makes this promise in two places. In the women's section: "Continuing our work, we will legislate a bill to prohibit and eliminate practices such as Triple Talaq and Nikah Halala." In the list of milestones: "Ensure justice for Muslim women by enacting the law against triple talaq."

On triple talaq itself, the promise was kept quickly. The Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Marriage) Act, 2019 was passed by Parliament and received presidential assent on 31 July 2019, less than three months after the election. It declares the pronouncement of talaq-e-biddat void and illegal and makes it a cognisable offence punishable with imprisonment of up to three years, with provision for subsistence allowance and custody of minor children for the woman.

Two things the record does not support.

The first is nikah halala. The manifesto sentence names it alongside triple talaq as a practice to be prohibited and eliminated. The 2019 Act does not mention it. No separate legislation on nikah halala has been enacted, and petitions on it remain before the Supreme Court. Half of that sentence was delivered.

The second is enforcement, and here the answer is more striking than any figure would have been. Asked in the Lok Sabha for "the number of cases registered since the Triple Talaq law is passed in the country, year and State-wise", the Ministry of Minority Affairs replied on 12 March 2025: "No such data is maintained centrally." It adds that "'Police' and 'Public Order' are State subjects under the Seventh Schedule to the Constitution of India" and that state governments are competent to deal with offences under the Act.

That is a correct statement of constitutional responsibility. It is also an admission that nearly six years after criminalising a practice in order to protect a specific group of women, the union government cannot say how often the law has been invoked, how many prosecutions followed, how many convictions resulted, or whether the women concerned received the subsistence allowance the Act provides for. The National Crime Records Bureau compiles state-reported figures for other central legislation; nothing equivalent is published for this Act.

A law promised and passed, a companion practice left untouched, and no measurement of whether the law achieved what it was for. Our verdict is partly accurate.