The Bharatiya Janata Party regarded it as an 'appeasement' of the Muslim community and discriminatory to non-Muslim men and saw it as a "violation of the sanctity of the country's highest court". The 'Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Divorce) Act' was seen as discriminatory as it denied divorced Muslim women the right to basic maintenance which women of other faiths had access to under secular law. Makarand Paranjape sees the overruling of Supreme Court verdict in "Shah Bano case" which happened when the Congress party was in power, as one of the examples of the party's pseudo-secular tactics which allowed "cynical manipulation of religion for political ends". Lawyer and former law minister of India, Ram Jethmalani has termed the act as "retrogressive obscurantism for short-term minority populism". Rajiv Gandhi's colleague Arif Mohammad Khan who was INC member and a minister in Gandhi's cabinet resigned from the post and party in protest.