Why the clamour for a UCC has renewed

The Rules of Uniform Civil Code Uttarakhand, 2025 passed by the state Assembly in January this year propelled the Uniform Civil Code (UCC) into the spotlight, triggering nationwide debates on its potential implementation. The UCC has been a contentious issue in India for decades. The question at the heart of this debate is whether religion-based personal laws should be continued or a UCC should be instituted. Even as there is agreement in the women's movement and liberal democratic circles that religious personal laws are discriminatory towards women and must, therefore, change, there are disagreements over the means to achieving this objective.

A UCC entails enforcing a uniform code in matters of marriage, property inheritance and adoption. It would apply to all citizens of India, replacing the current personal laws that vary by religion. The Muslim religious and political leaderships have opposed it, insisting that personal laws are an intrinsic part of their religion, and, therefore, the state should not legislate on it. The Hindu right and the Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) have vigorously pushed it to counter what, they say, are regressive personal laws of Muslims.

The party's manifesto says there cannot be gender equality till such time as India adopts a UCC. However, its push is not just about the rights of women. The Hindu right holds a grouse against the selective use of state power since the 1950s as it intervened to reform Hindu personal laws. As per its supporters, leaving Muslim law untouched implies unequal and asymmetrical treatment, which is tantamount to appeasement and pandering to Muslims for electoral gains.

The BJP's assertive stance on the UCC in the 2024 election campaign and since then, reflects its longstanding promise to abolish personal laws, along with the construction of the temple in Ayodhya and abolishing the special status of Kashmir. Now that the Ram temple has been built and the government has revoked Article 370, attention has moved to the UCC. But the BJP hasn't moved forward on this front despite leading a majority coalition at the Centre.

Instead, various BJP-led state governments have chosen to go ahead with the promulgation of state-wise UCCs. The Uttarakhand rule, which seeks to provide uniformity in civil laws comes with key exemptions. It does not extend to tribal groups. If, indeed, this law is for women's equal rights, why should women of any community be left out?

There are two other notable problems — extra-territoriality and invasion of privacy. One issue is its applicability to all residents of Uttarakhand, regardless of wherever they live. It covers even those who have lived in the state temporarily and even Central government servants who have been transferred to the state.

The other is a disdain for individual choice and liberty. The rules aiming to formalise live-in relationships through registration contradicts the Supreme Court's 2017 right to privacy judgment, which holds that the right to privacy is protected as a fundamental right under Articles 14, 19, and 21 of the Constitution.

After Uttarakhand promulgated the UCC, a few other BJP-ruled states decided to follow suit. Gujarat has set up a committee to draft its code. Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and Assam have also moved for similar laws. The question is whether individual states can adopt their own UCCs. Besides, different civil codes in the states are antithetical to the very idea of uniformity, which is the underlying principle of the UCC.

The Law Commission has not presented or circulated a draft. But it started gathering views from the public on a UCC without any blueprint for it. We do not know whether UCC will apply to all parts of the country and to different communities, including the North-East and to the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes. The Hindu Undivided Family (HUF), created to save on taxes by pooling family assets, will have to be stopped once the law on the subject merges with a unified code.

In other words, framing a UCC is a complex enterprise which does not concern the Muslim community alone. It will affect the Hindu majority and the rights of many other groups. It remains to be seen whether any regime would be willing to adopt such a course that would antagonise powerful groups or would it simply target some communities and exempt others.

The need for legal reforms of personal laws is indisputable but, unfortunately, this project has made no significant progress in the last 70 years. Efforts to reform personal laws have reached an impasse because of its entanglement with minority protections guaranteed by the Constitution. However, some personal laws are indeed discriminatory; they violate the principles of gender justice and equality. This is certainly true of Muslim personal laws which deny equal rights to Muslim women in several domains. In the event, UCC is desirable and more specifically legal reform, but it is not a panacea for the problems Muslim women face.

The socio-economic status of Muslim women is dismal. Their deprivation stems from a shortage of three essentials — knowledge (measured by literacy and average years of schooling), economic power (work and income) and autonomy (measured by decision-making and physical mobility) — and not necessarily from personal laws.

In the current political context, the debate on UCC sounds somewhat static. It is based on the assumption that not enacting a UCC is a concession to Muslims as they frame their identity entirely around personal laws. However, developments on the ground over the last decade have made these assumptions largely irrelevant. Muslim women's groups, which have emerged as an important voice in recent years, are not averse to legal reform. In fact, they are campaigning for it. Their demand for the abolition of triple talaq is a case in point. But, more importantly, Muslim women's groups seek to promote equal citizenship rights pertaining to all fundamental rights guaranteed in the Constitution, and not just those concerning personal laws. Their active participation in the campaign against the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), 2019 echoed this sentiment vividly.

The problem with the UCC debate from the beginning has been its excessive emphasis on uniformity, which should be no more than an incidental consequence of equality. Uniformity is not a guarantee of equality, which can be achieved through multiple approaches and procedures, most notably by pushing for equal rights within communities. The way forward is to ensure reform of all personal laws while at the same time expanding the scope and application of secular laws.