After a brief hiatus, we are back for this week's Politics to Policy edition. Today, we're going to talk about the Uniform Civil Code debate in India, where supporters view the reform as a vital step toward gender equality and national integration. At the same time, critics argue it infringes on religious freedom and threatens cultural diversity. So let’s get to it.

India's Uniform Civil Code debate has a rhythm to it. It goes quiet for years, and then, reliably, it resurfaces as elections approach. The questions that animate the debate, whether a single civil law governing marriage, divorce, inheritance, and adoption should replace India's religion-based personal laws, are genuine and complex. The timing of when those questions get elevated to national prominence is considerably less coincidental.

The 2026 assembly elections in West Bengal, Assam, Tamil Nadu, and Kerala have brought the UCC back with full force. The BJP's manifesto for West Bengal, released ahead of polling, led with a promise to implement the UCC within six months of forming government. Modi addressed rallies in Muslim-majority Murshidabad, framing the UCC as an end to "appeasement politics." Amit Shah tied the promise to demographic anxieties, asserting that the BJP would "not allow Bengalis to become a minority in the state." The pattern is familiar. The context illuminates how a constitutional aspiration gets deployed as an electoral instrument, and what that deployment does to the quality of the policy debate.

Article 44 of the Constitution places the UCC among India's Directive Principles of State Policy. Unlike Fundamental Rights, which are justiciable, DPSPs are aspirational: they direct the state to endeavour toward certain goals without creating enforceable obligations. The placement of the UCC as a DPSP rather than a Fundamental Right was itself the product of intense debate in the Constituent Assembly, settled by a 5:4 majority vote. B.R. Ambedkar, often invoked by UCC supporters, did favour a uniform civil code in principle but argued that it should remain "purely voluntary" in the initial stages.

The Supreme Court has returned to the subject multiple times, from Shah Bano in 1985 to Sarla Mudgal in 1995 to John Vallamattom in 2003, repeatedly observing that Article 44 has remained "a dead letter" and calling for its implementation. Each time, the court stopped short of issuing a directive to Parliament, acknowledging that law-making falls within the exclusive domain of the legislature. The judicial prodding, consistent as it has been, has produced no legislative action at the national level for seven decades.

The 21st Law Commission in 2018 issued a consultation paper that remains the most serious official examination of the question in recent years. Its conclusion was categorical: a uniform civil code was "neither necessary nor desirable at this stage." The commission argued that the focus of reform should be the elimination of discriminatory provisions across existing personal laws rather than an attempt to impose uniformity. It emphasized that diverse means of governing marriage, divorce, inheritance, and adoption could coexist provided they were stripped of discriminatory elements. The 22nd Law Commission, constituted in 2020, reopened public consultation, but its term ended in August 2024 without submitting a formal report. The question was passed to whichever commission comes next.

In January 2025, Uttarakhand became the first state in independent India to enact a UCC, fulfilling a promise made during the 2022 state assembly elections. The law covers marriage, divorce, succession, inheritance, adoption, and live-in relationships. It bans polygamy and triple talaq, mandates equal inheritance rights for daughters, and requires marriage registration across all communities. In January 2026, the state marked the first anniversary with a UCC Amendment Ordinance introducing procedural and administrative reforms.

The implementation offers the clearest available evidence of what a state-level UCC actually looks like in practice, and several aspects of it warrant careful examination.

The most controversial provision is the mandatory registration of live-in relationships, with failure to register carrying a jail term of up to six months. The state requires couples entering or already in live-in relationships to submit a 16-page form, Aadhaar-linked OTP verification, registration fees, a certificate from a religious leader confirming eligibility to marry, and details of previous relationships. Third parties can file complaints if they believe a live-in relationship violates UCC provisions, creating a mechanism for social surveillance and moral policing that critics argue directly violates the Supreme Court's recognition of the right to privacy in the Puttaswamy judgment.

The Uttarakhand UCC also explicitly exempts Scheduled Tribes from its provisions, allowing them to continue following customary laws. This exemption, which was built into the legislation to avoid political complications, fundamentally undermines the universality that the UCC's proponents invoke as its core justification. A "uniform" code that explicitly carves out one constitutional category of citizens raises the question of what uniformity actually means in this context.

Legal experts at Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy noted that the law disproportionately targets Muslim personal law practices, selectively outlawing practices of religious minorities while leaving certain patriarchal provisions of Hindu civil law, including guardianship norms favouring fathers, entirely intact. The Hindu Undivided Family, which provides significant tax advantages to Hindu households, also remains untouched. Asaduddin Owaisi put the critique bluntly: if the UCC is so beneficial to society, why are Scheduled Tribes left out, and why does the Hindu Undivided Family survive it?

Gujarat passed its own UCC in March 2026. Assam's BJP manifesto promised implementation within three months of forming the government. West Bengal's manifesto committed to six months. The pattern is the BJP's deliberate state-by-state approach to advancing the UCC after coalition constraints at the national level made central legislation politically complicated during the current government's term.

The West Bengal deployment is particularly instructive because of how explicitly the UCC has been framed in electoral rather than policy terms. Modi's rally in Jangipur, in Muslim-majority Murshidabad, connected the UCC to demographic anxieties and immigration politics in language that had little to do with gender justice or legal reform. The UCC was positioned alongside the Citizenship Amendment Act as part of a broader identity narrative aimed at specific voter consolidation.

The genuine case for UCC reform is grounded in a real problem. India's personal laws, across all communities, carry significant gender discrimination. Muslim personal law on divorce, Christian personal law on matrimonial causes, Hindu law's guardianship provisions: the discriminatory elements are documented, and their impact on women is measurable. The 21st Law Commission's preferred approach, reforming existing personal laws from within to eliminate those discriminatory elements while preserving diverse frameworks, is technically less clean but politically more achievable and constitutionally less fraught.

The political problem with that approach is that it generates no electoral signal. Amending the Christian Marriage Act or the Hindu Succession Act to make them more equitable does not mobilize voters. Promising a UCC in a Muslim-majority constituency does.

This gap between the genuine reform argument and the electoral instrument is where the UCC debate in India consistently loses its way. When PM Modi frames the UCC as ending "appeasement politics" rather than as securing women's inheritance rights, the policy content recedes and the communal framing advances. When the Uttarakhand UCC mandates live-in relationship registration with jail terms while leaving the Hindu Undivided Family intact, the "uniformity" argument becomes difficult to sustain on its own terms.

The 21st Law Commission's 2018 paper made a point worth revisiting: removing discriminatory provisions within personal laws and establishing overarching norms of equality that all communities must meet can achieve the substantive gender justice goals that UCC proponents invoke, without the constitutional complications that a fully imposed uniformity creates.

The minimum age for marriage is 18 across all communities and genders, which the Uttarakhand UCC sets at 18 for women and 21 for men, maintaining the differential. A "no-fault" divorce procedure available to all communities. Common norms for post-divorce asset division. Equal inheritance rights for daughters across all personal laws. These are achievable reforms within existing frameworks that would produce real improvements in women's legal standing without requiring the wholesale imposition of a single code that then needs tribal exemptions and communal carve-outs to become politically viable.

The point is not that a UCC is inherently undesirable. The point is that a UCC designed primarily to win elections in communally sensitive constituencies is unlikely to produce the carefully considered, constitutionally sound, genuinely uniform legislation that the Article 44 vision requires. Uttarakhand's implementation, with its mandatory live-in registration, its Scheduled Tribe exemption, and its selective targeting of minority personal laws, offers the first real-world evidence of what happens when electoral commitment precedes legislative deliberation.

West Bengal, Assam, Tamil Nadu, and Kerala went to the polls. The UCC was in manifestos and on rally stages. The 22nd Law Commission's report remains unsubmitted. The 21st Commission's careful 2018 analysis sits in a drawer. And the debate continues to renew, election cycle by election cycle, without producing the settled legislation it claims to be working toward.

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Anas Ahmad Tak