Uniform Civil Code and the Personal Law Debate

India has one criminal law for everybody and several civil laws depending on whom one was born to. That asymmetry is the whole subject. Article 44 has asked the state to secure a uniform civil code for seventy-six years without being obeyed, while the personal-law systems it addresses were reformed piecemeal, tested in court, criminalised in part and, since 2025, displaced outright in a growing list of states. The question is no longer whether personal law should change but whether uniformity is the instrument that changes it well.

What Personal Law Actually Governs

PSIR Optional Notes {PDF}

Complete Notes Package (Paper I & II) | 1500+ Pages | Instant Download

Discounted Price | Buy Now @ ₹1000 →

Personal law is the body of rules that decides a person’s family and property relations according to the religious community into which that person was born or converted. It is not a set of religious injunctions applied by priests; it is state law, enforced by state courts, whose content is drawn from a community’s tradition.

• The domain it covers is narrow but consequential — the parts of life where the state’s writ meets the family.
  • Marriage — capacity, age, prohibited degrees, ceremony, registration, monogamy or polygamy.
  • Divorce and judicial separation — who may seek it, on what grounds, and whether it may be pronounced out of court.
  • Maintenance and alimony, both during marriage and after its dissolution.
  • Adoption and guardianship — who may adopt, who is the natural guardian of a minor.
  • Succession, inheritance, wills and gifts, including the shares of sons and daughters.
  • Religious endowments — wakf, Hindu religious trusts, church property.
• Everything outside that list is already common to all Indians, which is why Ambedkar could say the country was nearly uniform already.
• The plural half is not a two-way split between “Hindu law” and “Muslim law” but a dense field of systems and sub-systems.
  • Hindu law governs Hindus, and by statutory definition also Sikhs, Jains and Buddhists — a definitional annexation that those communities have periodically resented.
  • Within it, the Mitakshara school (most of India) and the Dayabhaga school (Bengal and Assam) differed fundamentally on when a son acquires an interest in ancestral property; the Marumakkattayam and Aliyasantana systems of Kerala and coastal Karnataka were matrilineal.
  • Muslim law divides into Sunni (predominantly Hanafi in India) and Shia (Ithna Ashari, Ismaili) schools that differ on inheritance shares, the validity of forms of divorce and the law of wills.
  • Christian and Parsi law rest on separate colonial-era statutes, and Jewish personal law survives for a very small population.
  • Tribal customary law applies to Scheduled Tribes, who are expressly kept outside the Hindu Succession Act by its own Section 2(2).

The Indian anomaly is not that civil law is plural. It is that the plurality is drawn along religious lines and enforced by a secular state.

The Colonial Manufacture of Personal Law

The arrangement is usually defended as immemorial. It is not. The religious classification of civil law was an administrative decision of the East India Company, taken for convenience, and the bodies of doctrine now called personal law were substantially produced by colonial courts working from translated texts.

The Hastings Plan of 1772

• Warren Hastings‘s Judicial Plan of 1772 set the template. Its famous regulation provided that in suits regarding inheritance, marriage, caste and other religious usages or institutions, the laws of the Quran would be applied to Muslims and those of the shastra to Hindus.
  • The category was created by the exception, not discovered. Everything not on that short list was open to Company regulation from the beginning.
  • The plan initially attached pandits and maulvis to the courts as expert assessors, whose opinions the English judge then applied.
• By the early nineteenth century the assessors were dispensed with and replaced by translated digests — Halhed’s Gentoo Code, Colebrooke’s translations of the Mitakshara and Dayabhaga, and for Muslims the Hidaya and the Fatawa-i-Alamgiri.
  • Judges trained in English common law then applied these texts with the doctrine of precedent, which is alien to both traditions.
  • The result is what scholars call Anglo-Hindu law and Anglo-Muhammadan law: neither a faithful rendering of the tradition nor a secular statute, but a hybrid frozen at the moment of translation.
  • Werner Menski‘s point about this history is that the colonial state converted living, locally variable customary orders into a fixed textual law and then called the product religion.
• The practical effect was to privilege the scriptural over the customary. Local usages that had actually governed most people were rejected in court as deviations unless separately proved, which was expensive.

Codification of the public sphere, not the private

• The Queen’s Proclamation of 1858 promised non-interference in religious belief and observance, and the promise was read expansively to cover family law.
• Everything else was codified with speed and confidence. The Indian Penal Code 1860, the Code of Criminal Procedure, the Indian Evidence Act 1872, the Indian Contract Act 1872 and the Transfer of Property Act 1882 applied to all subjects alike.
  • Macaulay‘s draft penal code deliberately abolished religious differentiation in punishment, and no community was consulted about its consent.
  • Alladi Krishnaswami Ayyar would later make exactly this point in the Constituent Assembly: nobody had objected when a uniform criminal law was imposed.
• The exception carved out for family law was therefore never a principled recognition of religious autonomy; it was a political decision not to disturb the classes whose collaboration the Raj needed.

The statutes that built the modern system

• The Muslim Personal Law (Shariat) Application Act 1937 repays close attention because it is the exact opposite of what it is usually taken to be.
  • It was passed at the demand of reformist Muslim opinion to abolish customary law, which in Punjab, the North-West and parts of the south had denied Muslim women the inheritance shares that Quranic law gave them.
  • Section 2 lists the matters where Muslim personal law shall apply notwithstanding any custom — succession, women’s special property, marriage, dissolution, maintenance, dower, guardianship, gifts, trusts and wakfs — while agricultural land was left out, so that landed custom survived.
  • Section 3 allows a declaration to bring further matters within it. The Act is thus a statutory instrument for applying religious law, which is what made the triple-talaq challenge possible eighty years later.
• The Special Marriage Act 1954 replaced the 1872 statute and finally offered a genuinely secular marriage that required no renunciation of faith, though the thirty-day public notice it retained has proved a serious obstacle for interfaith couples.

Article 44 and the Constituent Assembly

The constitutional text is one sentence: “The State shall endeavour to secure for the citizens a uniform civil code throughout the territory of India.” It sits in Part IV, among the Directive Principles, and is therefore governed by Article 37 — not enforceable by any court, yet declared “fundamental in the governance of the country”.

• The placement was contested, not accidental. In the Fundamental Rights Sub-Committee, K.M. Munshi and Rajkumari Amrit Kaur pressed for a uniform civil code as a justiciable fundamental right, and lost narrowly.
  • Kaur, Hansa Mehta and Minoo Masani recorded a minute of dissent arguing that leaving personal law untouched was the principal obstacle to women’s equality and to national unity.
  • Moving it to Part IV converted a right against the state into a duty of the state — enforceable only politically.
• The framers had in any case already granted the operative power elsewhere. Article 25(2)(b) permits the state to make laws for social welfare and reform, and Entry 5 of the Concurrent List places marriage, divorce, infants, adoption, wills, intestacy, succession and joint family squarely within legislative competence.
  • Article 44 therefore adds direction, not authority. Parliament could always have legislated; the article tells it that it should.

The debate of 23 November 1948

Draft Article 35 came up on 23 November 1948, and four Muslim members moved amendments to protect personal law. The exchange that followed is the most substantial argument the Indian state has ever had with itself about this question, and both sides said things their present-day heirs would find awkward.

• Mohamed Ismail Sahib moved a proviso that no group or community should be obliged to give up its own personal law.
  • His ground was that following personal law is itself part of religion and culture, not a separable civil arrangement.
  • He cited Yugoslavia’s minority protections to show that guaranteeing personal law was compatible with a modern constitution.
• Naziruddin Ahmad moved that no personal law be altered without the previous approval of the community concerned, ascertained in a manner the legislature might determine.
  • His argument was pragmatic as much as religious — that civil laws are “inseparably connected with religious beliefs and practices”, and that the British had wisely refrained from touching them.
• Mahboob Ali Baig Sahib Bahadur moved that nothing in the article should affect the personal law of the citizen, arguing that a code that swept away personal law was not a civil code at all.
• B. Pocker Sahib Bahadur made the sharpest objection, questioning the Assembly’s mandate to interfere with the religious rights of communities that had not sent it to do so, and warning that the article would create discontent.

• Munshi‘s reply is the most quoted and the most misread. He denied that personal law is intrinsically religious at all.
  • The very idea that personal law is part of religion, he said, had been fostered under British rule and by British courts — a historical claim, not a theological one.
  • He pointed out that Hindu law was itself already plural — the Mayukha in some parts, the Mitakshara in others, the Dayabhaga in Bengal — so uniformity would disturb Hindus too.
  • He asked how any reform of Hindu society, particularly of women’s rights, was possible if personal law were placed beyond legislation, and he noted that no advanced Muslim country treated minority personal law as sacrosanct.

“Religion must be restricted to spheres which legitimately appertain to religion.” — K.M. Munshi

• Alladi Krishnaswami Ayyar answered the disharmony argument directly: differing systems of inheritance and family law were themselves among the factors keeping Indians apart, and a common code would build amity rather than destroy it.
  • He added the historical point about the uniform criminal law having been accepted without protest.
• Ambedkar‘s reply, closing the debate, conceded far more than either side now admits.
  • He observed that India already had a uniform code of laws covering almost every aspect of human relationship — contract, property, transfer, sale, crime, procedure — and that only marriage and succession remained outside it.
  • He noted that the article contained no obligation to act: the state “shall endeavour”, and Parliament might never use the power.
  • He suggested that a future Parliament might begin by making the code purely voluntary, applying only to those who declared themselves willing to be bound by it.
  • He punctured the claim that Muslim personal law had always been immutable in India by pointing out that up to 1935 the North-West Frontier Province was not subject to the Shariat at all and followed Hindu law in succession, and that it was the legislature that changed this only in the 1930s.

“We have in this country a uniform code of laws covering almost every aspect of human relationship.” — B.R. Ambedkar

• The amendments were negatived and the article adopted. What that vote settled was narrow: it settled that the Constitution would express a preference for uniformity while declining to impose one.

The Hindu Code Bill and the Reform That Stopped

The first attempt to act on Article 44 was not a uniform code at all. It was a reform of Hindu law alone, and its fate explains most of what has happened since.

• The project predated independence. The Rau Committee, chaired by B.N. Rau, was appointed in 1941 and reconstituted in 1944 to draft a comprehensive Hindu code covering marriage, succession, minority, guardianship, adoption and maintenance.
• Ambedkar, as Law Minister, took the draft into the Constituent Assembly acting as legislature and became its public face — which meant that opposition to the Bill and hostility to Ambedkar reinforced each other.
• The Bill’s substance was radical for its time and was resisted for exactly that reason.
  • Monogamy made compulsory for Hindus, ending the legality of polygamy.
  • Divorce introduced into a system that had treated marriage as a sacrament.
  • Inheritance rights for daughters in the father’s property.
  • Abolition of caste as a bar to marriage, and legal adoption of daughters.
• Opposition came from within the governing party, not only outside it.
  • Congress conservatives, the Hindu Mahasabha and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh organised public agitation, presenting the Bill as an attack on Hindu civilisation and asking why only Hindus were being reformed.
  • Rajendra Prasad, as President, threatened to withhold assent and to act on his own judgement, a constitutional crisis resolved only when M.C. Setalvad, the first Attorney-General, advised that the President was a nominal head bound by ministerial advice.
  • Nehru, facing the first general election of 1951-52, calculated that the Bill would cost him more than it gained and allowed it to be truncated.
• Ambedkar resigned from the Cabinet in September 1951, and the Hindu Code Bill was the reason he gave most prominence in his resignation statement.
  • His complaint was not only that the Bill had been dropped but that it had been dropped after being allowed to consume years of parliamentary time.
• Nehru returned to it after the election and passed it in four separate pieces between 1955 and 1956, a legislative strategy designed to lower the political temperature of each.

• The unfinished business was substantial and lasted half a century.
  • The coparcenary — the joint property in which male descendants acquire an interest by birth — was preserved intact, so a daughter inherited only her father’s separate share while sons held a birthright.
  • The Hindu Undivided Family survived as a legal person, and survives today as a tax entity available to no other community.
  • Section 14 did make a Hindu woman’s limited estate absolute, which was a genuine and large advance in property terms.
• Two later moves closed part of the gap.
  • The Hindu Succession (Amendment) Act 2005 made a daughter a coparcener by birth in her own right, on the same footing as a son, and repealed the dwelling-house restriction.
  • Its retrospectivity produced conflicting benches — Prakash v. Phulavati (2016) required the father to have been alive on 9 September 2005, while Danamma (2018) went the other way.
  • Vineeta Sharma v. Rakesh Sharma (2020) settled it: coparcenary is an unobstructed heritage acquired by birth, so the daughter’s right does not depend on the father being alive on the commencement date. Phulavati was overruled.

The irony that shaped everything after

• The reform reached only the majority community, and the promise made at the time — that the others would follow — was never kept.
  • Muslim, Christian and Parsi family law was left substantially where the colonial statutes had put it, and was reformed only in fragments and mostly by courts.
• The political consequence was the opposite of what was intended. Having been reformed alone and against resistance, the majority acquired a grievance of asymmetry, which is now the emotional engine of the UCC demand.
• The minority, watching a code drafted by the state applied to one community first, acquired a corresponding fear of sequence — that reform in India means reform of somebody else, then of you.
• Flavia Agnes presses a further point that cuts against the majoritarian reading: the Hindu Code Bill itself had to be diluted to pass, so it is not evidence that legislated uniformity produces gender justice. It is evidence that legislation produces compromise.

The Hindu Code Bill did not make a uniform civil code easier. It made it harder, by turning a question of gender justice into a question of who gets reformed first.

Narasu Appa Mali and the Immunity of Personal Law

Everything in the courtroom half of this subject runs through one Bombay High Court judgment of 1952, which has never been overruled and which most constitutional lawyers now think is wrong.

• State of Bombay v. Narasu Appa Mali arose from the Bombay Prevention of Hindu Bigamous Marriages Act 1946, challenged on the ground that it prohibited polygamy for Hindus while leaving Muslims free, and so violated Articles 14, 15 and 25.
• Chagla CJ and Gajendragadkar J upheld the Act, and in doing so laid down a proposition of far wider reach: personal laws are not “laws in force” within Article 13 and therefore cannot be tested against fundamental rights at all.
  • Their textual argument rested on the structure of the Constitution. If personal law were already void for inequality, Article 17 abolishing untouchability and Article 25(2)(b) empowering social reform would have been unnecessary.
  • Entry 5 of the Concurrent List was read as evidence that the framers regarded personal law as something to be altered by legislation, not by judicial review.
  • The two judges divided on custom and usage: Chagla CJ thought custom was testable against Part III, Gajendragadkar J thought it was not.
• The doctrinal consequence is stark.Uncodified personal law occupies a zone of constitutional immunity — a court may interpret it, but cannot strike it down for violating equality.
  • The Supreme Court declined to disturb this in Ahmedabad Women Action Group (1997), holding that the sweeping challenges to several personal laws raised questions of state policy with which courts would not deal.
• The judgment has been doubted at the highest level twice, without being displaced.
  • In Shayara Bano (2017), Nariman J noted that Article 13’s definition of law is inclusive, and questioned whether part of Narasu remained good law — while expressly declining to decide the point.
  • In the Sabarimala judgment (2018), Chandrachud J‘s concurrence called Narasu’s reasoning doctrinally unsustainable, held that the immunity of personal law from constitutional scrutiny cannot be justified, and asked for reconsideration in an appropriate case.
• Until a larger bench acts, the position is that statutory personal law is reviewable and customary personal law is not — an accident of which parts of a tradition happen to have been written down by a colonial legislature.

The Case Law Spine

Shah Bano and its doctrinal afterlife

• Mohd. Ahmed Khan v. Shah Bano Begum (1985) was not decided under Muslim personal law at all. It was decided under Section 125 of the Criminal Procedure Code, a secular provision obliging a person of adequate means to maintain a wife unable to maintain herself.
  • Chandrachud CJ held that Section 125 applies irrespective of religion, that the payment of mahr on divorce does not discharge the obligation under Section 127(3)(b), and that there was in any case no conflict with the Quran.
  • He went further and lamented that Article 44 had remained a dead letter, urging a common civil code as an instrument of national integration — an observation which had no bearing on the outcome and enormous bearing on the politics.
• The Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Divorce) Act 1986 followed, framed as restoring the position under Muslim law.
  • Section 3 required the husband to make a reasonable and fair provision and maintenance within the iddat period; Section 4 shifted the residual obligation to relatives and then to the State Wakf Board; Section 5 allowed the parties to opt into Section 125 by joint consent.
  • Arif Mohammad Khan, who had defended the judgment in Parliament, resigned from the government over the Act.
• Danial Latifi v. Union of India (2001), a five-judge bench, rescued the substance while upholding the statute.
  • It read Section 3 to mean that the provision made within the iddat period must be sufficient to extend beyond it, for the divorced wife’s whole life until she remarries.
  • The technique matters as much as the result: the Court preserved the Act by reading it so as to avoid unconstitutionality, rather than striking it down and reopening the political wound.
• Mohd. Abdul Samad v. State of Telangana (10 July 2024) completed the arc almost four decades on.
  • Justices B.V. Nagarathna and Augustine George Masih held that the 1986 Act does not displace Section 125; a divorced Muslim woman may proceed under either, and the secular remedy is additional, not alternative.
  • The Court framed maintenance not as charity but as a right flowing from equality, and Nagarathna J added a separate note on the unrecognised economic contribution of homemakers.
  • The practical effect is that the compromise of 1986 has been emptied of its restrictive content by judicial construction — a demonstration that reform can reach a community without a uniform code.

Conversion, bigamy and the judicial exhortations

• Sarla Mudgal v. Union of India (1995) addressed Hindu men converting to Islam to take a second wife while the first marriage subsisted.
  • Kuldip Singh J held that conversion does not by itself dissolve a Hindu marriage, so the second marriage is void and the husband is liable for bigamy under Section 494 IPC.
  • The judgment contained a strongly worded appeal to the government to act on Article 44, which was widely reported as a direction.
• Lily Thomas v. Union of India (2000) affirmed the bigamy holding and made a careful correction: the Court clarified that it had issued no direction to enact a uniform civil code, and that the earlier observations were just that.
  • The pair together establish the doctrinal point that matters — religious conversion cannot be used to escape the obligations of a subsisting marriage.
• John Vallamattom v. Union of India (2003) struck down Section 118 of the Indian Succession Act, which had restricted the power of Christians to bequeath property for religious and charitable purposes.
  • Khare CJ recorded his regret that Article 44 had not been given effect, and it is worth noting what the case actually did: it removed a colonial disability imposed on a minority, which is the opposite of the direction the UCC debate is usually assumed to run in.

Triple talaq

• Shamim Ara v. State of U.P. (2002) was the quiet precursor, holding that a talaq must be pronounced for reasonable cause and preceded by an attempt at reconciliation by arbiters, and that a mere plea of talaq in written pleadings does not dissolve a marriage.
• Shayara Bano v. Union of India (2017) decided the validity of talaq-e-biddat — instantaneous, irrevocable divorce by triple pronouncement — by 3:2, and the majority reached its result by two distinct routes that were never merged.
  • Nariman and Lalit JJ held that because Section 2 of the Shariat Act 1937 statutorily recognises talaq, the practice is “law in force” under Article 13, and being capricious and irrevocable it is manifestly arbitrary and void under Article 14. This route deliberately sidestepped Narasu by finding a statute.
  • Kurian Joseph J took a theological route: triple talaq is not part of Islamic law at all, being contrary to the Quran’s requirement of reconciliation, and “what is bad in theology is bad in law”.
  • Khehar CJ and Nazeer J, dissenting, held that talaq-e-biddat is personal law protected by Article 25, injuncted its use for six months and directed Parliament to legislate.
• The Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Marriage) Act 2019 then criminalised the pronouncement.
  • Talaq-e-biddat is declared void and illegal; pronouncing it is punishable with up to three years’ imprisonment and a fine.
  • The offence is cognizable only on information given by the wife or a person related to her by blood or marriage, compoundable at her instance, and bail may be granted only after hearing her; the Act also provides subsistence allowance and custody of minor children to the wife.
• The criminalisation is where informed opinion divides, and the objections are legal rather than sentimental.
  • A pronouncement declared void has no legal effect, so the marriage subsists — which makes it conceptually odd to punish a man for an act that changed nothing.
  • Imprisoning the husband defeats the maintenance the same Act provides, since a man in jail earns nothing.
  • Desertion within a subsisting marriage is not a crime for any other community, so the provision creates a criminal liability that attaches only to Muslim men.
  • The counter-argument is that the practice persisted despite being void, that the deterrent has substantially ended it, and that the safeguards on cognizance and compounding leave the wife in control of the prosecution.

The constitutional-morality line

• K.S. Puttaswamy (2017) established privacy as a fundamental right and, more usefully here, the proportionality test that any invasion must satisfy — legality, legitimate aim, rational connection and necessity.
• Shafin Jahan v. Asokan K.M. (2018) held that the choice of a partner lies within the core of personal liberty, and that neither the state nor the family may supervise it.
• Navtej Singh Johar (2018) and Joseph Shine (2018) decriminalised consensual same-sex conduct and adultery respectively, and did so on a shared premise: constitutional morality overrides social morality, and a law resting on the subordination of one class of persons to another cannot survive Article 14.
• Shabnam Hashmi v. Union of India (2014) held that the Juvenile Justice Act provides a secular route to adoption available irrespective of religion, while declining to declare a fundamental right to adopt — and described the uniform civil code as an unaddressed constitutional expectation.
• Githa Hariharan v. Reserve Bank of India (1999) read down the word “after” in Section 6(a) of the Hindu Minority and Guardianship Act so that a mother could be natural guardian during the father’s lifetime — a model of reform by interpretation.
• Supriyo v. Union of India (2023) points the other way and is therefore instructive. The Court declined to read marriage equality into the Special Marriage Act, holding that redesigning the institution of marriage is for Parliament, not the judiciary.
• Jose Paulo Coutinho v. Maria Luiza Valentina Pereira (2019) held that the Goan civil code governs the succession of Goan domiciles even for property held outside Goa.
  • The Court described Goa as a “shining example” of a state with a uniform civil code, and recorded that no attempt had been made to frame one for India despite repeated judicial exhortation.

The Goa Exception, and Why It Proves the Opposite

Goa is the standing answer to the objection that a uniform civil code is impossible in India. It is a weaker answer than it looks, because the Goan code is not uniform and never has been.

• Its source is the Portuguese Civil Code of 1867, extended to Goa in 1870 and continued in force after liberation by the Goa, Daman and Diu (Administration) Act 1962.
  • It is therefore a colonial code, in Portuguese, drawing on the Napoleonic tradition rather than the common law — which is why the state has had to fight over the accuracy of its official translation.
  • Goa’s own Succession, Special Notaries and Inventory Proceedings Act 2012 re-enacted parts of it in modern statutory form.
• Its distinctive content is genuinely progressive, and mostly in ways that Indian UCC advocates rarely propose.
  • Communion of property — spouses jointly own all assets held before and acquired during the marriage, so each takes half on divorce or death, and neither may dispose of property without the other’s consent.
  • Compulsory civil registration of every marriage before the civil registrar, whatever religious ceremony accompanies it.
  • Forced heirship — a parent may not disinherit children; at least half the estate must pass to them in equal shares, sons and daughters alike.
• Its non-uniform features are equally real, and they follow religious lines.
  • The Code of Usages and Customs of Gentile Hindus of Goa 1880 permits a Hindu man a second marriage in defined circumstances — where the wife has borne no child by the age of twenty-five, or no male child by thirty.
  • Under the same customary annexe, a Hindu husband’s grounds for divorce were narrower, historically confined to the wife’s adultery.
  • Catholics who marry in church after obtaining a no-objection certificate are governed for annulment by canon law, with ecclesiastical decrees confirmed by the civil courts, and are excluded from the civil divorce regime.
  • Conversely, the Shariat Act 1937 was never extended to Goa, so Muslims domiciled there are governed by the code and cannot practise polygamy — a uniformity achieved by non-extension rather than by consent.
• The honest description is that Goa has a common civil code with community-specific annexes, one of which permits polygamy for the majority community.

The Law Commission’s Two Answers

The Law Commission of India has addressed the question twice in five years and given incompatible answers, and the disagreement is about method rather than about goals.

The 21st Commission, 2018

• The Consultation Paper on Reform of Family Law, released on 31 August 2018 under the chairmanship of Justice B.S. Chauhan, concluded that a uniform civil code was “neither necessary nor desirable at this stage”.
• Its reasoning rested on a distinction it stated plainly.

“Most countries are now moving towards recognition of difference, and the mere existence of difference does not imply discrimination.” — Law Commission of India, Consultation Paper on Reform of Family Law

• It warned that cultural diversity cannot be compromised to the point where the urge for uniformity itself becomes a threat to the country’s integrity.
• Its preferred method was codification of each personal law, so as to limit ambiguity in interpretation, combined with the removal of the specific provisions that discriminate.
• The reforms it proposed were detailed and cut across every community.

• The commission’s implicit claim is that this list would deliver more gender justice, faster, than any code that must first be negotiated with every community at once.

The 22nd Commission, 2023, and after

• The 22nd Law Commission, under Justice Rituraj Awasthi, issued a public notice on 14 June 2023 reopening the question and inviting views from the public and from recognised religious organisations.
  • It gave as its reason the passage of time since 2018 and the relevance of subsequent court orders, and it drew a very large volume of responses — reported in the millions, and heavily organised on both sides.
  • Critics objected that a consultation with no draft attached could not be a consultation at all: respondents were being asked to endorse or reject an idea, not a text.
• The commission never produced the report. Awasthi resigned in March 2024, and in the absence of a chairperson no report could be submitted; the commission’s term ended on 31 August 2024 with the UCC work incomplete.
• The 23rd Law Commission was constituted on 1 September 2024 for a three-year term to 31 August 2027, with the uniform civil code among the subjects before it.
• The reversal should be read for what it is. Both commissions accepted that the personal-law systems contain indefensible discrimination. They disagreed about whether the cure is one code or many amendments.

The Case For

Gender justice, across systems rather than within one

The strongest argument is not that Muslim personal law discriminates against women. It is that every uncodified or partly codified system does, and that the state has no coherent reason to tolerate any of them.

• The tribal row of that table is the one usually left out, and the Supreme Court has now filled it.
  • In Ram Charan v. Sukhram (2025), Justices Sanjay Karol and Joymalya Bagchi held that where no custom either including or excluding daughters can be proved, there is no rational basis for confining succession to males, and Article 14 supplies the default.
  • The reasoning inverts the usual evidentiary burden, which had required a tribal daughter to prove a custom of inclusion.
  • The Rajasthan High Court in 2025 went further and asked Parliament to amend Section 2(2) itself.

The other four grounds

• National integration. Alladi’s argument, that differing systems of family and inheritance law are among the things that keep a population from becoming a people, and that the criminal law’s uniformity was accepted without damage to anyone’s faith.
• The directive-principle obligation. Article 37 calls the Directive Principles fundamental in the governance of the country and imposes a duty to apply them in making laws; seventy-six years of non-compliance is not a constitutional position but the absence of one.
• The internal logic of Article 25. The right to freely profess, practise and propagate religion is expressly subject to public order, morality and health and to the other provisions of Part III — meaning it was drafted to yield to equality, not to override it.
• Secularism as a relation between the state and citizens. If the state deals with people as members of communities in the one area where the family’s power over the individual is greatest, it has effectively delegated a portion of sovereignty to community authority. Ambedkar‘s objection to personal law was fundamentally this.
• Legal simplicity. A single body of family law ends the forum-shopping that produced Sarla Mudgal, removes the need for courts to decide contested questions of theology, and makes the law knowable.

The Case Against

The constitutional objections

• Article 25 guarantees freedom of conscience and free profession, practice and propagation; Article 26 gives every religious denomination the right to manage its own affairs in matters of religion; Article 29(1) protects the right of any section of citizens with a distinct culture to conserve it.
  • Whether personal law falls inside these depends on the essential religious practices doctrine of Shirur Mutt (1954), under which courts decide what is essential to a faith.
  • The test has been criticised for putting judges in the position of theologians, and it produced opposite results in Shayara Bano and in the Sabarimala dissent.
• The federal and tribal objection is the hardest to answer, and it is textual.
  • Paragraphs 3 and 3A of the Sixth Schedule empower autonomous District and Regional Councils in Assam, Meghalaya, Tripura and Mizoram to make laws on marriage, divorce, inheritance and social custom.
  • Article 371A provides that no Act of Parliament shall apply to Nagaland in respect of Naga customary law and procedure or the ownership and transfer of land unless the state legislature so resolves; Article 371G does the same for Mizoram.
  • A genuine uniform civil code would have to override these or exempt them. Overriding them requires constitutional amendment and would reopen settlements that ended insurgencies. Exempting them concedes the principle that plurality is constitutionally protected.

The arguments from method and from politics

• Uniformity is not equality.Flavia Agnes‘s position is that the objective should be uniformity of rights rather than a uniform law — that a single statute negotiated through a legislature produces compromise, as the Hindu Code Bill did, while secular statutes of general application deliver concrete gains.
  • Her evidence is that the Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act 2005 and Section 125 CrPC have done more for Muslim women than any code, precisely because they operate over the head of personal law without abolishing it.
• Nivedita Menon makes the political argument in its strongest form, and it is worth stating in her own words rather than paraphrasing it away.

“The UCC has entirely to do with a Hindu nationalist agenda, and is right up there with the beef ban and the temple in Ayodhya.” — Nivedita Menon

• Her further point is empirical: Muslim personal law has recognised individual property rights for women since the 1930s, while Hindu law long treated property as familial, so it is not obvious which system a reformer should be uniformising towards.
• Zoya Hasan situates the demand within the politics of minority insecurity — that a reform pressed by a majority upon a minority that has no effective legislative voice will be received as discipline rather than emancipation, whatever its content.
• Werner Menski argues from comparative legal pluralism that plural legal orders are the normal condition of large societies, that official law is only one of several sources of obligation people actually follow, and that a state which legislates uniformity without changing social practice merely drives the practice underground.
• Partha Chatterjee frames the underlying political theory: a democratic politics of difference has to allow communities their own processes of change, and reform imposed from outside forfeits the legitimacy that makes it stick.
• Rajeev Bhargava‘s principled distance supplies the standard by which each intervention should be judged — the state may engage or disengage with a religion, positively or negatively, but the reason must be a constitutional value rather than a uniform rule applied for its own sake.
• The absence of a draft is the plainest objection of all. There is no published Union UCC text, so the national debate has for decades been conducted about a title.
  • The state UCCs have now supplied texts, which is why the argument has become more concrete and more heated at the same time.
• The historical record of the demand cannot be ignored. It moved from a Nehruvian modernising project to a fixture of the Bharatiya Janata Party’s manifesto, paired for thirty years with Article 370 and the Ram temple — a triad that made the code legible as a communal marker rather than a gender reform.
• The strongest version of the case against is therefore not that personal law is sacred. It is that the discriminations are real and the proposed cure is being administered by a party to the dispute.

The case for a uniform civil code is a case about women. The case against is a case about who is making it, and both are true at once.

The State Route: Uttarakhand and After

The debate changed character in 2024, when a state did what the Union had not. There are now four state codes and several more in preparation, and the argument is no longer hypothetical.

The Uttarakhand code

• An expert committee under Justice Ranjana Prakash Desai, a retired Supreme Court judge, was appointed in 2022, held public consultations and reported on 2 February 2024.
• The Uniform Civil Code of Uttarakhand Act 2024 was passed on 7 February 2024, received presidential assent in March 2024, and came into force on 27 January 2025 — the first state civil code in independent India.
• Its content is genuinely uniform in the marriage and succession chapters.
  • A single marriageable age — 21 for men, 18 for women — with compulsory registration within sixty days, and one list of prohibited degrees.
  • Polygamy prohibited, and with it nikah halala and the treatment of iddat as a bar to remarriage.
  • Divorce available only through a court, on grounds common to all communities; extra-judicial pronouncement is an offence.
  • Equal shares for sons and daughters, both parents as Class I heirs, and the abolition of the distinction between ancestral and self-acquired property for succession.
• Its live-in provisions are what made it controversial, and they have no precedent in Indian family legislation.
  • Partners in a relationship “in the nature of marriage” must submit a registration statement to a Registrar, who conducts an inquiry before registering.
  • The Registrar must inform the parents of any partner under twenty-one, and the local police station is intimated of registrations.
  • Failure to register a cohabitation exceeding one month attracts up to three months’ imprisonment or a fine of ₹10,000; higher penalties follow a notice and for false statements.
  • The compensating benefits are real: a deserted woman may claim maintenance, and children of registered relationships are legitimate with full inheritance rights.
• Scheduled Tribes are exempted, along with persons and communities protected under Part XXI of the Constitution.

The criticisms

• The liberty objection is that the Act regulates rather than liberates. Registration of an intimate relationship, with police intimation and parental notice for adults aged eighteen to twenty, is difficult to reconcile with Puttaswamy proportionality or with Shafin Jahan‘s holding that the choice of a partner is beyond state supervision.
  • Harsh Mander‘s formulation is that the code promises equality and delivers surveillance, and that its practical burden falls hardest on interfaith and inter-caste couples who become locatable by hostile third parties.
  • A subsidiary point is doctrinal: a void or unregistered act need not be a criminal one, and criminalising a civil default is disproportionate.
• The incompleteness objection is that the code takes from the minority traditions without giving. It bans polygamy and halala but does not adopt mehr or the nikahnama as a contractual model, and it leaves the Hindu Undivided Family untouched as a tax and property form.
• It recognises live-in relationships only between a man and a woman, so same-sex couples left unprovided for by Supriyo remain unprovided for here.
• The exemption objection is the most damaging analytically. If Scheduled Tribes may keep their customary law, then the state has accepted that legal plurality is legitimate where a community’s identity requires it — and the only question left is which communities qualify.
  • The exemption also removes from the code’s protection precisely the women whom Ram Charan found to be least protected.
• The Act is under challenge in the Uttarakhand High Court, where writ petitions filed from February 2025 raise privacy under Article 21, religious freedom under Article 25, the arbitrariness of the tribal exclusion and the ban on iddat; notice was issued and the matter remains pending.
• An amendment ordinance promulgated in early 2026 made a series of changes to the Act, and their direction is revealing.
  • Taken together the amendments are administrative and penal rather than substantive — they tighten registration machinery and enforcement, making the apparatus work better without addressing the liberty objection at all.

The spread, and the competence question

• All four enacted codes carry the same architecture and the same exemption: monogamy, judicial divorce, equal succession, mandatory registration of marriage and live-in relationships, and Scheduled Tribes left out. In Assam the exemption also protects the Sixth Schedule councils of Bodoland and Karbi Anglong.
• In Gujarat, the Congress walked out before the vote, its objection being the one the exemption invites — that a law which keeps whole communities outside its scope cannot be called uniform.
• May a state enact a uniform civil code at all? The competence exists but the coherence is doubtful.
  • Entry 5 of the Concurrent List covers marriage, divorce, infants, adoption, wills, intestacy, succession and joint family, so a state legislature may legislate.
  • Because such a code displaces central statutes — the Hindu Marriage Act, the Hindu Succession Act, the Shariat Act, the Indian Succession Act — it is repugnant to existing Union law and survives only through presidential assent under Article 254(2), which Uttarakhand obtained.
  • The proviso to Article 254(2) allows Parliament at any time to legislate afresh on the same matter and override the state law, so the arrangement is durable only while the Union chooses not to act.
  • The deeper objection is textual: Article 44 speaks of a code “throughout the territory of India”. A patchwork of state codes, each with its own exemptions, multiplies the number of civil law regimes rather than reducing them, and adds domicile to religion as a determinant of family rights.

What Other Plural Societies Do

• Three lessons carry into the Indian argument.
  • Legislating uniformity does not produce it. Turkey’s experience is the standard evidence: the code was adopted in a single act and the practice took generations to follow, if it followed at all.
  • A secular option matters more than the abolition of religious law. Israel and Lebanon are difficult for women not because religious courts exist but because there is no civil route out of them.
  • Even liberal states cannot exempt selectively. Ontario ended faith-based family arbitration for everyone because it could not defend permitting it for some faiths and not others — the exact problem India’s state codes create by exempting tribes.

Where the Debate Actually Stands

• The most useful distinction in the whole subject is between uniformity and codification, and they are constantly conflated.
  • Codification means writing a system’s rules down, removing the parts that offend equality, and making the rest knowable and litigable. It does not require any community to live under another’s rules.
  • Uniformity means one set of rules for everyone. It is a much larger claim, and almost all the gender-justice gains actually achieved in India — from the 1939 Act to Danial Latifi to Vineeta Sharma to Ram Charan — came from codification and litigation, not from uniformity.
• The optional route already exists and is underused. The Special Marriage Act 1954 offers any two Indians a civil marriage with succession under the Indian Succession Act, and its take-up is small.
  • Its defects are fixable and specific: the thirty-day public notice and objection procedure exposes interfaith couples, which the Allahabad High Court mitigated in 2021 by holding that publication is optional rather than mandatory, and which remains under challenge in the Supreme Court.
  • The reverse-option proposal takes Ambedkar’s suggestion and inverts it: make the secular code the default for every citizen, with religious law available on an express opt-in. It secures uniformity of rights without compelling anyone, and it puts the burden of choice on the person who wants the exception.
• The honest sequence is reform first, uniformity second, not uniformity as a substitute for reform.
  • A code drafted before Muslim personal law has been codified at all will either freeze the present position or replace it with a version of the Hindu Code — and the second is what the state codes have produced.
• The reforms with the clearest constituency should be made regardless of how the larger question is settled.
  • Registration of all marriages; a standard nikahnama stipulating against polygamy; codified Muslim succession with the widow as a Class I heir.
  • Abolition of the Hindu Undivided Family; succession rights for tribal women; a secular adoption law available to everyone.
• The personal-law system as it stands is indefensible, and the uniform civil code as it is currently being enacted is not the remedy.
  • It is indefensible because a state that treats a daughter’s inheritance as depending on her father’s religion has abandoned Article 14 in the one place where it matters most to the people who have least power.
  • The state codes are not the remedy because they exempt the communities where discrimination is most acute, add surveillance where the Constitution requires liberty, borrow nothing from the traditions they displace, and fragment the very uniformity they invoke.
  • What Article 44 asks for is a code “throughout the territory of India” — drafted after the systems it replaces have been codified, and offered first as a default that citizens may leave rather than a command they must obey.
  • That is closer to what Ambedkar proposed in 1948 than anything now on the statute book.

Article 44 has been quoted for seventy-six years and drafted for none of them, and a directive that is never reduced to a text will keep serving whoever finds it useful.