India, Nov. 26 -- A significant majority of Muslim women want polygamy outlawed, with 85% saying it should be legally invalid and 87% wanting the application of existing criminal provisions against their husbands if they remarry, a new survey has found.

Around 2,500 Sunni Muslim women across seven states participated in the survey, conducted by the Bharatiya Muslim Mahila Andolan (BMMA), a Muslim women's rights organisation. The BMMA presented the survey report, titled Breaking the Silence: Lived Reality of 2500 Muslim Women in Polygamous Marriages, on Tuesday at the Mumbai Marathi Patrakar Sangh.

The report showed that the support for a ban on polygamy came not from the community's elite, but rather the opposite: 59% of respondents-all...