Haq arrives on Netflix quietly, without the chest-thumping marketing that usually accompanies films dealing with faith, gender and law. That perhaps works to its advantage.
Directed by Suparn Verma (The Family Man), the film takes inspiration from the landmark Shah Bano case of 1985 and Jigna Vora’s book Bano: Bharat Ki Beti, but chooses to tell the story through a fictionalised lens. What emerges is not a courtroom thriller alone, but a grim reminder of how a simple plea for dignity can be weaponised into a communal prestige battle.
At its heart, Haq is the story of Shazia Bano (Yami Gautam), abandoned by her lawyer husband Abbas (Emraan Hashmi) through a casual, verbal utterance of talaq. What should have been a straightforward question of maintenance turns into a prolonged legal and social struggle, dragging religious bodies, self-appointed guardians of faith and political interests into the fray.
A personal battle made political
The film’s most unsettling insight is how quickly a woman’s survival becomes secondary to institutional ego. Shazia’s demand is modest – maintenance to feed herself and raise her children. Yet the case is inflated into a test of religious authority, with the Muslim Personal Law Board stepping in, not to protect a deserted woman, but to defend its turf.
Even when Shazia eventually wins in the Supreme Court and is awarded a paltry monthly alimony, Haq deliberately stops short of showing what followed in real life – the nationwide protests, the political capitulation, and the legislative rollback engineered to appease vote banks.
Knowledge as resistance
One of Haq’s most effective narrative choices is to arm Shazia not with slogans but with scripture. Her strength lies in her reading of Islamic religious texts – particularly the emphasis on Iqra, the command to read, to learn, to understand. She does not reject faith but challenges its distortion.
In a powerful courtroom sequence, Shazia cites Quranic principles with greater clarity than her advocate-husband or the ulema in the courtroom. Their discomfort is telling. The film exposes how selective interpretation is often used to keep women compliant and dependent.
Polygamy, desertion, and convenient morality
Haq also touches, without sensationalism, on polygamy and the ease with which men can abandon wives and children if a woman resists multiple marriages. A verbal talaq – unregistered, unwitnessed, spoken in anger – can leave a woman stranded: religiously divorced but legally married, socially blamed but legally unsupported.
The consequences are devastating. Children suffer from custody disputes, documentation issues and social stigma. The imbalance of power is stark. For men, talaq becomes a threat, even a tool of control. For women, it is a sentence pronounced without appeal.
Performances that hold the line
Yami Gautam delivers one of her most restrained and effective performances, particularly in the climactic court scenes where anger gives way to controlled resolve. Emraan Hashmi plays Abbas with an unsettling ease, embodying entitlement without slipping into caricature. Their confrontations are ideological as much as emotional, and that is where the film scores.
Suparn Verma handles the sensitive terrain with composure. There is no attempt to mock faith or demonise belief. The critique is directed squarely at those who manipulate religion to preserve male privilege.
The propaganda tag, once again
Predictably, Haq has been dismissed in some quarters as propaganda, bracketed with films like The Kashmir Files, The Kerala Files and Dhurandhar. One critic even suggested that only a Muslim filmmaker could have handled the subject authentically – a curious argument that, if taken seriously, would render large sections of Indian cinema unemployable overnight. Art, thankfully, does not require a religious certificate. Sensitivity lies in intent, not identity.
The real Shah Bano judgment of 1985 was a watershed moment. The Supreme Court upheld a Muslim woman’s right to lifelong maintenance under Section 125 of the CrPC, a secular provision applicable to all citizens. It reopened the debate on equality before law and a Uniform Civil Code.
The political backlash was swift. In 1986, the government reversed the spirit of the verdict through legislation, limiting maintenance to the iddat period – just 90 days. It took another 33 years for course correction, with the criminalisation of triple talaq in 2019 by the Modi government.
Haq is a reminder of that long detour. It pays tribute to women like Shah Bano, Bai Tahira, Fuzlunbi, and others who challenged both patriarchal custom and political cowardice.
A quiet but firm assertion
Ultimately, Haq is not an attack on Islam. It is a defence of justice – of rights granted to Muslim women as early as the seventh century, and denied by later, man-made interpretations. The film shows with unsettling clarity how communities silence women in the name of protection, and how faith itself is often the first casualty of such guardianship.
