The Uniform Civil Code: legal and Social Implications

Introduction

Uniform Civil Code (UCC) refers to the enforcement of a single code of secular civil law applicable to all Indians irrespective of religion, caste, and community. Civil laws encompass matters in relation to marriage, divorce, adoption, inheritance, and succession. They are currently regulated by religion-based practice and tradition-based personal laws, which would be vastly heterogeneous and the cause of inconsistency in the judicial system.

Comment: The issue is still sub judice in the Supreme Court, and the issue remains controverted and decided.

The concept of UCC is the result of Article 44 of the Directive Principles of the State Policy of the Indian Constitution, which states: “The State shall endeavour to secure for the citizens a uniform civil code throughout the territory of India.” Though these directives are not judicially enforceable, they are good examples of good legislation and good governance.

The actual intent of the UCC is to introduce constitutional values of secularism, equality, and justice by applying a uniform civil law to all citizens in order to erase legal pluralism and discrimination. UCC law is a politically sensitive and contentious issue in India as India is religiously diverse, culturally sensitive, and has fears that minorities will lose their personal laws and identity.

Historical Background and Constitutional Mandate

Uniform Civil Code (UCC) in India is pre-Constitutional, and the idea was present even prior to British colonial rule. Personal law of religious communities was not touched by the British government, and thus, the system of civil law was not uniform. Indian reformers such as Raja Ram Mohan Roy, Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar, and others had experimented with uniform laws, particularly to improve the status of women.

UCC was controversial during the Constituent Assembly debates. Although some of them, like Dr. B.R. Ambedkar, firmly felt the necessity of a codified common civil code for achieving equality and national integration, some others were of the opinion that the code would infringe on the cultural and religious rights of the minorities. Consequently of such compromise, Article 44 has been grafted into the Directive Principles of State Policy, which states: “The State shall endeavour to secure for the citizens a uniform civil code throughout the territory of India.” Because Directive Principles are non-justiciable, it caused an incongruity between the constitutional ideal and reality.

Time and again, this issue has been raised by way of path-breaking Supreme Court judgments. In Shah Bano (1985), the Court reaffirmed the right of a Muslim woman to maintenance under Section 125 of the CrPC and addressed the issue of a UCC in the context of enforcing national integration. In Sarla Mudgal (1995), the Court expressed regret over the exploitation of personal laws for the purpose of encouraging polygamy and reaffirmed that there has to be a UCC. Then, as the Court noted, followed Jose Paulo Coutinho (2019), where the Court was impressed with Goa’s uniform civil code as India’s prototype.

Even in judicial approbation, however, the UCC is not implemented because it is politically aggressive in nature, religious groups protest, and the sovereignty of culture will be lost. The conflation is constitutional secularism will have to be set against pluralist practice.

Legal Implications

1. Harmonisation of Personal Laws.

India is currently governed by a plural legal system, based on which personal law is dependent on religion. For instance, Hindus are governed by the Hindu Marriage Act, 1955, the Hindu Succession Act, 1956, the Hindu Adoption and Maintenance Act, 1956, and the Hindu Minority and Guardianship Act, 1956. Muslims are governed by Shariat-based and customary uncodified personal laws, half-odd codified by the Muslim Personal Law (Shariat) Application Act, 1937. Christians are governed by the Indian Christian Marriage Act, 1872, and the Indian Divorce Act, 1869, and Parsis are governed by the Parsi Marriage and Divorce Act, 1936.

This heterogeneity of personal law generates conflicts and variations in marriage, divorce, succession, guardianship, and adoption areas. Conflict of Laws.

.For instance, polygamy is permitted under Muslim law but not permitted to Hindus and Christians. Hindu law daughters have sole coparcenary rights (altered in 2005), while Muslim law daughters have no shares compared to sons. This discrimination creates confusion as much as the law and differential treatment of the law are concerned.

The UCC envisions unification of the laws into a consolidated code civil in its mission to put an end to differences and to grant the law to be followed by all citizens a harmonized legal regime in the public interest of legal certainty and greater consistency.

1. Equality Before Law

One of the strongest constitutional bases of a UCC is the right to equality under Article 14 of the Indian Constitution. Article 14 embodies equality before the law and equal protection of the law, which differential religion-based and sex-based personal law systems do not offer.

One of the big problems is gender justice. Personal laws, and more particularly so in the case of marriage, divorce, and inheritance, contain gender discriminatory provisions. Muslim personal law itself had already legalized unilateral and instant divorce (triple talaq), which was criminalized only in 2019. Also, discriminatory rights of inheritance, lack of provision for maintenance under some of the personal laws, are violative of constitutional guarantees to women.

A UCC can surmount such disparities by depersonalizing the gender-based and religion-based law and treating all the citizens equally under the personal law and thus attaining substantive equality and empowering women.

1. Effect on Judicial System

Multiplicity of personal law is the causative factor for the development of complex legal problems and judicial delay. The courts typically have the burden of interpretation and enforcement of the majority of religious practices, which typically involves the management of conflicting precedents. This is a problem of sowing doubt and delay in the dispensation of justice.

It would legitimize legal law in a way by removing the amount of litigation, for property and family alike. It would make legal interpretation simple with the judiciary giving judgment from a single civil code and not interpreting religious faith or tradition. Uniformity would make court hearings an easy process, make courts more effective, and reduce the court’s workload.

Second, codification of the UCC would remove scope for subjective impression and make it possible to achieve predictability and consistency of judicial decisions.

1. Religious Freedom issues

One of the strongest of the UCC arguments against is that it would be violative of freedom of religion under Article 25 of the Constitution to grant a right to all to practice, profess, and propagate religion. The UCC stands on the grounds against religious life and code, and the introduction of uniform code amounts to state interference in religious liberty.

But the Supreme Court has clearly held that religious practices indispensable on faith are within the ambit of Article 25 and not such terrestrial ones as succession or marriage. The problem is how to reconcile freedom of religion with requirements of social reform as well as constitutionally-permissible concepts of justice and equality.

An effective UCC must tread the middle ground between pluralism and constitutional morality. Homogenisation should not be at the cost of pluralism, but would need to ensure that rights are not curtailed in the name of personal law.

Social Implications

1. Social Integration and National Unity

The dominant social justification for adopting a Uniform Civil Code is national integration and harmony of society. In the diversity of society that prevails in India, where religion, caste, and area control so widespread a part of public life, a uniform civil law can be an integrating law. Through the abolition of religion-based personal laws in favor of a uniform law, the UCC tries to imbue a sense of citizenship transcending religion.

Nowadays, there are various communities based on various personal laws, and these continuously generate religious bifurcations and divisions even in the secular world. The UCC, by using a single corpus of law for everyone, attempts to treat everyone equally before the law, even if there are various people with various religions. This will validate patterns of disintegration and produce social harmony, particularly in a plural nation such as India, where uniformity of the law can contribute towards national integration.

1. Gender Justice and Women’s Rights

UCC is very much feasible as a tool of gender justice, i.e., equality of women at all stages of life. Indian personal laws that are patriarchal in nature are biased in the highest degree against the interests of women in matrimonial matters, divorce, inheritance, guardianship, and adoption.

For instance, even the now-abolished practice of triple talaq permits a Muslim husband to give one divorce to his wife, from discrimination in the right of inheritance in the first instance to to which women were never extended access. The majority of codes’ rules of inheritance are bound to give women fewer rights than men, i.e., from Muslim and even previous Hindu governments before the Hindu Succession Act was modified in 2005.

Adoption of a UCC would guarantee equal protection of women’s rights, and discriminatory practices hitherto would become a thing of the past. It would create a code of equal opportunity law in which religion would not dictate a woman’s rights. That much, UCC is not a law reform but a social justice movement, specifically for minority or orthodox women.

1. Backlash from Minority Communities

Although UCC is an equalitarian movement, its wish has never been to be for all minorities as they felt that it was being done at the cost of their religious and cultural identity. Resistance to majoritarianism is not the cause but fear of majoritarianism—the fear that a UCC would become fixated on the values and mores of the majority community (of course, assumed to be Hindu) and impose them on minorities.

They all understand that the UCC would undermine cultural sovereignty and appropriate the indigenous people’s traditions and custom. Muslims, Christians, and Parsis, for instance, would view the UCC as a stealthy attempt to replace their respective laws with one code, unifying unrelated religious traditions into one secular but culturally colored law.

This brings us to a simpler argument: Is the UCC secular at all? There is a reason to think that Indian secularism can never be one law of all religion living side by side but never the same. Others also believe that it is only a secular state that can have a uniform law for all on a religious basis. The UCC is therefore one such field of contradiction between the land of homogeneity and the plural forum.

1. Political Will and Public Perception

Political will and the public perception also become necessary for the effective enforcement of a Uniform Civil Code. Politically, UCC has been a controversial issue in the past and the political parties have been opposing the UCC on different sides based on the political alignment of the parties and the constituencies.

Support and opposition to the media form an integral part of building public opinion. Some construct the UCC as liberal reform for equality’s sake and because of modernization, and some others construct it as an encroachment on religious freedom. Civil society, women’s groups, and intellectuals all contribute his/her share to the history of UCC.

Inadequacy of glamour has been the inadequacy of political will to pass the UCC. With each since 1950 suspended under the Constitution, the post-colonial state was always pushing it to later on grounds of the grounds that the matter is controversial. It is an election manifesto on which one can talk freely but never act.

There must be open and honest trust-restoring discussion and social general agreement between and among societies, if UCC is to be achieved. In the absence of social general acceptability and soft political management, social unrest and further social fragmentation will ensue if any attempt is made to ram through the UCC.

Comparative Perspective

All the countries of the globe, including liberal democracies, have succeeded in having one and the same civil code for all their citizens, irrespective of religion or ethnicity. France, for instance, has an entire Napoleonic Civil Code for all Frenchmen. Turkey also, under Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, inherited a Swiss-modelled Civil Code in the 1920s as a replacement for Islamic codes, a secular one. These reforms were milestones towards legal uniformity, gender equality, and national integration.

Even in India, its state of Goa is a model and precedent in work in the sense of its Portuguese Civil Code of the colonial period and even still in existence even after India’s independence. The Goa Uniform Civil Code will apply uniformly to all Goans regardless of religion and will include matters relating to marriage, divorce, inheritance, and adoption. It has been welcomed with open arms by the Supreme Court in Jose Paulo Coutinho (2019) as a model of good work, Uniform Civil Code.

The goan model demonstrated how legal pluralism and religious liberty might coexist with a universal civil code, provided it was guided prudently. International and domestic precedents are thus useful to de-arrest apprehensions and propose the way to think about and implement an equilibrated UCC which would be fair to constitutional ethos and cultural sentiments.

Government Initiatives and Law Commission Reports

Uniform Civil Code application in India has largely been steered by Law Commission discussions and endeavors in recent times at the government level.

India’s 21st Law Commission, in 2018, released a consultation paper where it declared that a UCC was “neither necessary nor desirable at this stage.” The Commission further declared that although a solution to discrimination in personal laws is required, uniformity is not the best solution to the same. It suggested reform of the current personal laws in such a way that discrimination can be ended, and continued to believe that diversity in personal laws does not necessarily mean discrimination.

Alternatively, the issue was also disturbed by the 22nd Law Commission in June 2023 when it released a public notice calling for comments from the masses and religious communities on the UCC. The move generated public interest nationwide as over 19 lakh inputs were received and national interest was once again generated in the matter.

At the state level, Uttarakhand was the first state to enact the Uniform Civil Code of Uttarakhand Act, 2024. The act is bringing everyone’s law of marriage, divorce, succession, and live-in relationships under one umbrella based on religion, except Schedule Tribes. The above can be followed by other states who are enacting legislation on the same lines.

Challenges and the Way Forward

This will most certainly not be a piece of cake in enacting a Uniform Civil Code into law-gorilla-battered, politics-scarred, and society-groaning India. The biggest legal hurdle is the potential clash between Articles 25 and 26 which carefully safeguard religious sensitivities and sensitivities and Article 44 which enunciates a uniform civil code. They do not wish a parliament-imposed code because it will violate their religious and cultural freedom, most significantly in relation to marriage, inheritance, and adoption coming from deeply religious education.

Politically, UCC is contentious to the extent that it has been seen as a majority imposition rather than a secular reform. The compromise has to be constructed across groups, i.e., there has to be political will and not electoral compulsions. In terms of interaction, confidence building, and policymaking through participation, only can the resistance be breached.

Socially, the task is huge. Large sections of society are illiterate and not sensitive to the contents and implications of the UCC. An honest campaign on legal literacy, public hearings, and publicity to society as a whole, thus, has to be undertaken so that fallacies are removed and acceptability is generated.

A pragmatic solution is incremental implementation. Codification and simplification of the current personal laws may be an initial step to reforms, and ensuring uniformity in the first instance. The UCC of Uttarakhand and the Goa Civil Code may be pilot steps to establish that religious tolerance and uniformity are not mutually contradictory goals.

For a larger duration, mass education, the transformation of outdated mores, and the acceptance of cultural pluralism in a secular state are needed. Never coercive uniformity must be tried, but equal and just civilian law protecting individual rights, minority and women’s rights, and protecting India’s pluralistic complexion.

Conclusion

Uniform Civil Code is the most controversial post-colonial Indian legal reform. The UCC, according to Article 44 of the Constitution of India, attempts to implement uniformity in civil law irrespective of religion and therefore constitutional principles of justice, secularism, and equality. It is gender justice and legal certainty to one, and cultural and religious sovereignty to the other.

In the spirit of controversy, there has to be a balanced reply, one upholding balance between personal freedoms and constitutional requirements. And far from being a code ordained by fiat, the UCC has to be so formulated through consultation, participation, and piecemeal amendment as to reflect the pluralist ethos of India.

Though it should have a democratic and thoughtful application, the UCC can be a visionary and trail-blazing law reform liberating the weaker sections, i.e., women and facilitating national integration. But politicized or rushed, it will have a tendency to polarize cultures and increase social cleavages.

It is now time to shift the debate away from communal binarism and towards constitutional, legal, and human rights aspects of the reform. A civil, deliberative, and rights-based discourse will bring India closer to the promise of equality in the constitutional culture.

 

References

• Constituent Assembly Debates, Vol 7, 1949 (Debates on Uniform Civil Code and Article 44) https://indiankanoon.org/doc/1798770/ accessed 19 May 2025.
• Constitution of India 1950, Article 44, Directive Principles of State Policy.
• Shah Bano Case (Mohd. Ahmed Khan v Shah Bano Begum) AIR 1985 SC 945.
• Sarla Mudgal v Union of India AIR 1995 SC 1531.
• Jose Paulo Coutinho v Union of India (2019) 9 SCC 530.
• Law Commission of India, ‘Uniform Civil Code – Issues and Concerns’ (21st Law Commission Report, 2018) https://lawcommissionofindia.nic.in/reports/Report_269.pdf accessed 19 May 2025.
• Law Commission of India, Public Consultation on Uniform Civil Code (2023) https://lawcommissionofindia.nic.in/consultation.htm accessed 19 May 2025.
• Uniform Civil Code of Uttarakhand Act, 2024 (India) https://www.uttarakhand.gov.in/legal/civilcode2024 accessed 19 May 2025.
• Mulla, D.F., The Principles of Hindu Law (22nd edn, LexisNexis 2017).
• Mary Ann Glendon, Rights Talk: The Impoverishment of Political Discourse (Free Press 1991).