UCC demands compromise

Consensus rather than majoritarian muscle-flexing needed

In principle, the concept of a Uniform Civil Code (UCC) in a country that is constitutionally secular and vividly multicultural cannot be faulted. In its barest definition, secularism implies that the country has no state religion. But the UCC, which has been simmering in the public discourse since independence, is enshrined in the Directive Principles of State Policy of the Constitution and endorsed by various pronouncements by the Supreme Court. It is generating fierce public debate and opposition again. The spark for this is the 22nd Law Commission’s public notice of June 14, soliciting for over one month public comment on the UCC. This notice comes five years after the 21st Law Commission had opined that a UCC was “neither necessary nor desirable at this stage”.

Part of the disagreement concerns the usual cynical jockeying for minority votes, which is why some so-called secular parties such as the Congress and Trinamool Congress are unequivocally opposing the UCC, though the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) has stated that it supports the code in principle. The UCC had been a key element of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party’s manifesto in 1998 and 2019. One attempt to introduce a Bill for the introduction of the UCC in Parliament was withdrawn after Opposition protest. Indian society in the past few years has faced some fundamental changes that compel minority communities to fear the imposition of a majoritarian template on personal laws on marriage, divorce, and inheritance. The “love-jihad” campaigns, state laws against conversion, and the needless criminalisation of triple talaq, for instance, have all fed into such apprehensions. The precedent of the controversial Citizenship Amendment Act, which sought to define, for the first time, Indian citizenship on the basis of religion has played its role in stoking these fears. The manner in which Jammu & Kashmir’s special status was abrogated has also been seen as an example of a desirable step executed poorly, without public debate or taking the people of the state into confidence. Given this recent history, it is critical that the government spreads the net of consultation as widely as possible and approaches the issue constructively before it frames a code.

Though friction over the final result will be inevitable in a country where religion plays a key role in most Indians’ socio-legal life, the broad idea should be to create a framework that cherry-picks progressive elements from the multitudes of personal laws and makes the code work for Indians regardless of religion, caste, gender, or sexual preferences. There is no doubt that the bewildering array of religious and tribal laws that govern different communities do little to foster the sort of national cohesion that the constitutional creators had visualised. This apart, too many religious personal laws militate against women’s rights and lower castes, oppressions that have been enhanced by the patriarchal quality of religious leadership across the board. A well-framed UCC could do much to catapult India into the comity of the world’s modern societies. That is why the exercise demands constructive sensitivity rather than majoritarian muscle-flexing.