Column | Is UCC A Majoritarian Exercise Or National Necessity, asks Mahesh Jethmalani

With the Uniform Civil Code (UCC) already having become a law in four Bharatiya Janata Party-ruled states—Uttarakhand, Assam, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh—and Goa, being governed by the Portuguese Civil Code, 1867, even before India secured Independence from British rule, a civil code common to all religious denominations is already a reality in five Indian states.

A UCC Bill is also already on the anvil in Maharashtra and West Bengal. The implementation of the law in the five states has neither caused discontent nor discord. The theoretical opposition to the law seems not to have resonated with those whose cause the Opposition claims to espouse. It is time, therefore, to revisit the for and against arguments for a UCC and evaluate their relative strengths.

The Constituent Assembly debates on Article 44 substantially reflect the core issues that separate those who support and oppose the Bill. In a nutshell, the need for a uniform code was spearheaded by K.M. Munshi, Alladi Krishnaswamy Iyer and B.R. Ambedkar, who founded their case predominantly on national unity, gender equality and a rationalised legal system. The fiercest opposition to the UCC emerged from three Muslim members of the Assembly—M. Muhammad Ismail, Mahboob Ali Baig and Naziruddin Ahmad.

The proponents of a UCC in the Constituent Assembly urged that it should be enacted immediately. Prior to British Colonial Rule, members of almost all religious groups were governed in matters pertaining to marriage, divorce and succession by practices based on custom.

To advance the twin objects of more convenient administrative efficacy and fostering a distinct religious identity pursuant to the pernicious policy of divide and rule, the colonial regime codified Hindu and Muslim law without any rational, underpinning and based more on select religious texts rather than on prevailing custom.

Thus, while pre-colonial issues pertaining to marriage, divorce and succession were based on amorphous and fluid usages to the extent that these usages cut across religious identities, distinct codes for Hindus and Muslims were crafted by the British with a view to creating a distinct Muslim identity—which was the seed for communal electorates and later for the Muslim League’s doctrine of Muslims constituting a separate nation.

The demands for an immediate enactment of the UCC in the Constituent Assembly was because of the felt need for a national identity that enhanced nation building and countered separatist tendencies. A second Partition was undoubtedly the evil to be avoided at all costs as far as UCC proponents were concerned.

Moreover, for the proponents, a compelling good to be promoted by the UCC was gender equality. During colonial rule, Hindu reformists had already succeeded in abolishing anti-women customs such as sati and the prohibition of widow remarriage. For them, there remained many more steps to attain the ideal of gender equality in matters of family law and succession. There was, however, a strong pushback against the UCC from the Muslim members of the Assembly in particular.

Opposing UCC

The UCC was opposed predominantly as an attack on Muslim identity, buttressed by the argument that the Quran contained prescriptions for every aspect of life, including civic life, and therefore, interference with polygamy, talaq, halala, maintenance, adoption and inheritance, as prescribed by Quranic injunctions, was to undermine Muslim identity.

An adjunctive argument to this was that a secular state was not merely one that proclaimed no official religion but also one that protected the practices of all religions; i.e. a state that promoted multiculturalism. In effect, this view rejected the concept of a national identity and gender equality as envisaged by all non-Muslims and redefined the meaning of the word “secularism” from that universally accepted.

In the light of the diametrically opposed views in the Constituent Assembly, the sagacious Ambedkar prevailed upon the proponents of an immediate UCC not to press their claims and fashioned the compromise that became the Directive Principle of Article 44 that the “State shall endeavor to secure for the citizens a uniform civil code throughout the territory of India”.

It should be pointed out that Ambedkar, along with Jaipal Singh Munda, also ensured that in view of the fact that India’s multifarious tribal groups, which practiced diverse customs regarding marriage, divorce and inheritance that did not align with mainstream religious personal laws, would remain outside the purview of any uniform civil code and should be given the space to democratically decide if, when and how they wanted to alter their long entrenched customary laws.

Secularism, in its pristine sense, pervades the Constitution through Articles 15, 16 and 25 to 30. Article 25 inter alia guarantees to all persons the right to freely profess, practice and propagate religion. However, Article 25(2) provides that nothing in Article 25 shall prevent the State from making any law regulating or restricting any economic, financial, political or any secular activity which may be associated with any religious practices.

The argument that issues pertaining to marriage, divorce and inheritance are Quran-ordained and therefore immutable is specious. Religion is chiefly concerned with belief in prayer to and worship of one’s creator. In a bygone era, Islam permitted child marriage, but with the passage of time and increasing taboo attached to such marriages, very few Muslims today indulge in the practice. Morality and religion are distinct; morality evolves over time, and such evolution dilutes one’s entrenched religious practices. The argument, therefore, that Quranic law is immutable is belied by historical experience.

Muslim-majority Countries

The most telling example that alleged Quranic prescriptions are not cast in stone is provided by the sweeping reforms introduced in Muslim-majority Turkey after the fall of the Ottoman Empire. With over 98 per cent of Turkey’s population Sunni Muslim, the secular and reformist Mustafa Kemal Atatürk introduced in 1926 civil laws modelled after the Swiss Civil Code. The thrust of the new code consisted of modernisation efforts to establish gender equality and legal uniformity in Turkey’s new secular republic. Thus, polygamy was banned and made a criminal offence, and only official civil marriages performed by state authorities were accorded legal recognition (although in 2017 President Erdogan’s pushback in favour of a more Islamist regime allowed Muslim clerics to perform legally binding marriage ceremonies). Turkish intestacy laws, though, till today, are entirely gender neutral, with sons and daughters inheriting equal share.

In India itself, Muslim personal law has never been immutable. Until 1935, Muslims in the North-West Frontier Province followed Hindu law in matters of succession. Further, until 1937, Muslim residents in the United Provinces and Central Provinces also followed Hindu law in matters of succession. Muslims of the North-Malabar region (today’s Kerala), right until 1950, followed Matriarchal Marumakkathayam law and not Islamic law.

Reformist Laws

Nor is the UCC “a majoritarian project in egalitarian clothing”, as one critic of the UCC has asserted. In independent India, the majority community has been at the forefront of reformist laws designed to secure gender equality. Some pre-independence state laws prohibiting Hindu bigamous marriages were all subsumed in the Hindu Marriage Act, 1955, and in 2005, the Hindu Succession Act was amended to give equal coparcener rights to females and permit daughters to become kartas of a Hindu Undivided Family.

In fact, far from the UCC being a majoritarian or even political project, calls for complying with Article 44 have emanated no less than from the judiciary from time to time since 1985. In that year, in the landmark case of Shah Bano, while ruling that a divorced Muslim woman is entitled to maintenance under Section 125 of the secular Criminal Procedure Code, the Supreme Court observed that a common civil code would help remove disparate loyalties and aid national integration, urging the state legislative action.

In the same year, in Jorden Diengdeh v SS. Chopra, the court highlighted anomalies and conflicts in existing divorce and marriage laws across different religions, stressing the urgent need for a UCC. In the 1995 case of Sarla Mudgal, while addressing fraudulent religious conversions undertaken solely to bypass monogamy laws and contract a second marriage, the bench strongly nudged the government to implement Article 44. Again, in 2003, the Supreme Court, in John Vallamattom v Union of India, reiterated that a common civil code is necessary to bridge contradictory ideologies and legal disparities found in disparate personal succession laws. Finally, in March 2026, in the yet-pending case of Poulomi Pavini Shukla v Union of India, the apex court, while hearing a public interest litigation challenging portions of the Muslim Personal Law (Shariat) Application Act, 1937, noted that UCC serves as the “most effective answer” to address gender discrimination in inheritance.

The apex court’s calls have also centered on gender justice in tribal communities. In 2022, the Apex Court had directed the Central Government in Kamla Neti (Dead) through LRS v The Special Land Acquisition Officer & Ors. case to examine extending provisions of the Hindu Succession Act to tribal women. This direction from the apex court came in the backdrop of a scheduled tribe woman being denied the right to succession to her ancestral land, whereas her brothers and uncles inherited the property and the compensation thereof.

The Supreme Court, in a 2025 judgement in Tirith Kumar & Ors v Daduram & Ors, urged the central government to bring about legislative reforms to address the gender inequality embedded in tribal inheritance laws. “When the daughter of a non-tribal community is entitled to an equal share in her father’s property, there is no justification for denying the same to the daughter of a tribal family,” it said.

Thus, the attempt to dichotomise the UCC as an exercise by a Hindu majority to diminish minority rights is a fake portrayal. In truth, it is an attempt by a patriarchal clergy that has always held sway over the Muslim community to deny Muslim women gender justice.

Aided by some mainstream political parties competing with each other to capture a considerable Muslim vote bank, that obscurantist clergy has, to some extent, succeeded in demonising the UCC as stifling Muslim religious beliefs, thereby seeking to thwart the achievement of the eminently noble constitutional objective of Article 44. The reverberating theme of nari shakti is an empty shibboleth without gender justice in the area of family and inheritance. More than 75 years since Article 44 envisaged a UCC, the time has surely come for its implementation.

(Views expressed are personal)

Mahesh Jethmalani senior advocate in the Supreme Court and former member of Parliament

(This story appeared in Outlook magazine’s August 31 issue, 'Whose Idea of India?', in which India’s noted public intellectuals, policymakers, cultural practitioners, political leaders, scholars and economists write in detail about the idea of India they believe can best secure the nation’s future as we celebrate 80 years of independence.)