The Uniform Civil Code is being sold as an unfinished promise of the Constitution of India,an instrument of equality,gender justice and national integration. But India’s UCC experiment is beginning to reveal a very different story.
India does not have one UCC; it is acquiring several. Uttarakhand implemented the first post-Independence UCC in January 2025; Gujarat, Assam and Madhya Pradesh have since passed Bills, while Rajasthan has introduced one. Maharashtra, West Bengal and Chhattisgarh are working towards their own versions. Goa, often cited as the model, has a much older Portuguese-era civil-law regime with significant historical and community-specific exceptions.
The irony is hard to miss. Article 44 envisages a UCC ‘throughout the territory of India’, yet India is producing different State-specific codes. Is this really the constitutional pursuit of uniformity and justiceor a political project to reshape the personal laws of religious minorities?
Article 44 Cannot Override the Constitution
Article 44 is a Directive Principle, not a Fundamental Right. It directs the State to endeavour towards a uniform civil code, but does not authorise it to override Articles 14, 25, 26 and 29 or the Constitution’s commitment to religious and cultural pluralism. The Constituent Assembly deliberately placed the UCC among the Directive Principles and neither mandated the immediate abolition of personal laws nor prescribed a timetable for replacing them.
That distinction matters. The Constitution seeks to reconcile equality with diversity, individual citizenship with community rights, and national unity with religious and cultural pluralism. Any legislation pursuing Article 44 must therefore remain subject to Fundamental Rights, proportionality, necessity and constitutional morality.
If gender justice is genuinely the objective, the State should identify specific injustices, establish their extent through evidence, consult those affected and adopt the least restrictive remedy. There is no constitutional principle that women’s rights require the wholesale abolition of a religious personal-law framework.
The Paradox of State-Specific UCCs
The State-level UCCs expose a striking contradiction: they invoke the same idea of “uniformity” while adopting materially different frameworks. Uttarakhand regulates marriage, divorce, succession, inheritance, adoption and live-in relationships, with mandatory registration, a ban on polygamy and exemptions for Scheduled Tribes and protected customary groups. Gujarat broadly follows this architecture, including regulation of live-ins. Assam mandates live-in registration, including for Assam residents living outside the State, with penalties for non-compliance. Madhya Pradesh combines rules on marriage, divorce, inheritance, adoption and live-ins with penalties for non-declaration and provisions concerning already-married persons; its tribal population is excluded. Rajasthan’s 399-page Bill adds its own framework for marriage, divorce, succession, wills and live-ins, including provisions applicable to persons born in Rajasthan even if they reside elsewhere.
The pattern becomes even more interesting because Justice Ranjana Prakash Desai, who headed the Uttarakhand and Gujarat UCC committees, has subsequently been appointed to head the UCC committees in Rajasthan, Maharashtra, West Bengal and Chhattisgarh. Yet even under this recurring leadership, the States are developing their own legislative processes and frameworks, while Assam and Madhya Pradesh have followed separate routes.
These are not merely drafting variations. They reveal the central contradiction: if the constitutional objective is one uniform civil code, why are States producing different UCCs with different scopes, exemptions, procedures and penalties? And if Article 44 is the justification, how can a proliferation of State-specific codes be presented as its straightforward fulfilment?
The emerging reality is therefore less ‘uniformity throughout India’ than selective uniformity shaped by State-level political priorities. The UCC label is common; the laws aren’t.
Uttarakhand: Administrative Success, Social Claims Still Unproved
Uttarakhand is the only genuine post-Independence test case because its UCC has been operational since January 2025. Its experience should therefore be judged by evidence rather than political claims.There are genuine administrative gains. The State’s official portal records more than 470,000 marriage registrations, along with thousands of will and succession-related registrations. The government has presented digital registration as a major improvement in convenience and legal certainty, claiming that certificates can be issued within days. These may be legitimate benefits, particularly because reliable registration can strengthen documentary proof and access to legal rights.
But administrative efficiency is not social transformation. There is still no convincing independent evidence that Uttarakhand’s UCC has substantially reduced domestic violence, abandonment, economic inequality or other forms of gender injustice. Nor is there evidence of the sweeping transformation of women’s lives sometimes implied in political rhetoric. Administrative statistics demonstrate utilisation of the law; they do not establish its broader social impact.
When the State Regulates Life Outside Marriage
A striking feature of the emerging UCC framework is the legal recognition and regulation of live-in relationships. Uttarakhand pioneered compulsory registration of such relationships, requiring registration and regulating their termination while collecting significant personal information. The publicly available provisions and highlights of Gujarat, Assam, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan similarly bring live-in relationships within the ambit of family law, though their procedures and penalties differ. What began as a feature of one State’s UCC is thus becoming a recurring element of the wider UCC model.
The issue is significant irrespective of religion. In India’s predominantly religious society, marriage remains the recognised framework for legitimate sexual and family relations, while sexual cohabitation outside marriage is regarded as illegitimate by virtually all major religious traditions – variously described as vyabhichar, adultery or zina – and unequivocally haram in Islam. Marriage also creates a structured framework of commitment and responsibilities towards spouses, children, property, maintenance and dissolution. Why, then, should a State that claims to strengthen marriage simultaneously create a parallel legal framework for relationships outside it?
This also raises a larger question about the direction of family policy the UCC aims at. A political establishment that presents itself as a defender of traditional Hindu values is simultaneously promoting a legal framework that gives recognition to relationships traditionally regarded as vyabhichar. Is this really a return to traditional family values, or an embrace of modern individualism in which permanence, duty and social responsibility increasingly yield to personal choice? The possible influence of consumer culture and the market-driven individualisation of social life deserves scrutiny,but the contradiction itself is already evident.
Goa: The ‘Model’ That Is Not Quite Uniform
Goa is frequently invoked as proof that a common civil code works. Its experience does offer an important lesson: common civil rules can provide valuable matrimonial and property protections. Its distinctive community-property regime, for example, can give spouses equal interests in marital assets.
But Goa’s experience proves much less than its political advocates claim. Its family-law regime derives from the Portuguese Civil Code of 1867 and retains historical provisions and community-specific features. It is therefore not the perfectly uniform secular model often portrayed in political discourse.The real lesson is narrower: specific civil-law reforms can advance women’s rights. That does not establish that religious personal laws must be abolished nationwide to achieve them.
Selective Uniformity Reveals the Contradiction
The argument for absolute uniformity is further weakened by the exemptions built into the new UCCs themselves. Scheduled Tribes and certain protected customary communities are excluded. Such exemptions may have sound constitutional and cultural reasons, but they demonstrate that uniformity is not an absolute constitutional value.
This raises a legitimate question: if constitutional law can accommodate customary diversity where historical and cultural circumstances warrant it, why must religious legal diversity automatically be treated as an obstacle to equality?
If the concern is injustice, the State should address the injustice itself rather than treating the identity of the legal system as the problem.
Reform, Replacement and the Politics of UCC
There is a legitimate case for reforming any personal-law provision that demonstrably causes injustice. Marriage registration can be strengthened, maintenance enforced, family courts made accessible, women protected against coercion and abandonment, and children’s rights secured. None of these objectives inherently requires replacing an entire religious framework.
For Muslims, this distinction is particularly significant. Nikah, mahr, talaq, khula, mubarat, iddah and the Qur’anic rules of inheritance are not merely social customs but, for Muslims, part of a religiously grounded system of family obligations. Replacing that system wholesale with State-defined rules is therefore not simply reform; it is normative substitution. The constitutional question is unavoidable: how far can a secular State go in replacing a religious community’s normative framework while claiming neutrality towards religion?
The political character of the present UCC campaign further complicates the claim of reform. Its rhetoric, choice of targets, timing and selective framing have repeatedly placed Muslim polygamy, triple talaq, nikahhalala and inheritance at the centre of the debate, turning Muslim personal law into a political symbol of backwardness, while gender injustice across communities has received far less attention as a justification for comprehensive civil-law change. This allows governments to present themselves as champions of women’s rights and national uniformity while portraying a religious minority as an obstacle to progress. Women’s rights thus risk becoming the language through which majoritarian politics acquires a reformist vocabulary.
The charge of political motivation cannot simply be dismissed as partisan suspicion. The pattern warrants scrutiny, particularly when sweeping legal change is pursued without demonstrating its necessity, proportionality or superiority over less intrusive, community-sensitive reforms. If the stated objective is justice, the remedy must be judged by evidence,not by the political usefulness of the narrative surrounding it.
The Real Test of the UCC Project
The evidence so far does not establish that the UCC is delivering the transformative gender justice promised by its political advocates. Uttarakhand demonstrates that family-law administration and registration can be modernised; it does not demonstrate that religious personal laws had to be abolished to achieve this. Goa shows that common civil rules can provide some matrimonial and property protections; it does not establish that religious diversity must disappear. And the emerging State codes demonstrate that India is not even moving towards a single, uniform law.
For Muslims, opposition to the UCC should not be misrepresented as opposition to equality or reform. Muslim women are entitled to justice, dignity, inheritance, maintenance and protection from abuse – rights already guaranteed within the Islamic legal framework. The real need is to ensure that these rights are properly understood, respected and effectively enforced, not to replace the framework itself.
A genuinely constitutional approach would therefore begin with demonstrable injustice, seek the least restrictive remedy and respect religious freedom and minority dignity. The present UCC project too often begins elsewhere – with the political portrayal of Muslim personal law as a symbol of backwardness and the assertion that uniformity is necessary to solve problems that have not been adequately demonstrated.
The real question is not whether India needs justice. It certainly does. It is whether justice requires uniformity, whether uniformity requires abolishing personal laws, and whether the political pursuit of uniformity is being used to deepen the majority-minority divide.If these questions cannot be answered through evidence, constitutional principle and genuine consultation, the UCC ceases to look like an unfinished constitutional promise.It begins to look less like constitutional reform and more like majoritarian politics dressed in the language of reform.