The uniform civil code debate in India, stated in terms both sides accept

Few phrases in Indian public life carry as much charge, and as little agreed content, as the uniform civil code. One side hears in it the completion of the Constitution: a single law of marriage, divorce, maintenance, adoption and succession under which a citizen’s rights would depend on citizenship alone and not on the community of birth. The other side hears in the same phrase a threat to the Constitution’s own promises: that the law of the family, which for many Indians is an obligation of faith and an inheritance of community, would be rewritten by a majority legislature in its own image. Both sides invoke the Constitution. Both sides quote the Constituent Assembly. Both sides quote the Law Commission. And both sides point to the same two territories, Goa and Uttarakhand, as proof of opposite propositions.

This article maps the debate rather than joining it. It states what Article 44 of the Constitution actually requires and what it does not require. It reconstructs what the Constituent Assembly decided on 23 November 1948, including the amendments that were moved and rejected. It sets out the Law Commission’s record with the precision that record is usually denied, distinguishing a consultation paper from a report and quoting the operative sentences in full. It separates what the Supreme Court has decided from what judges have observed in passing, because nearly everything the Court is quoted as commanding on this subject was an observation rather than a direction. It then gives the case for a code and the case against a code at full strength, in the terms their holders use, before testing the two codes that actually exist in India against the standard of uniformity itself. The descriptive finding that emerges is the one the evidence supports on any reading: neither existing example is uniform, and the real argument has always been about which differences a code would keep.

A reader who wants the architecture of the personal law system itself, the entries, articles and doctrines within which this argument proceeds, will find it in the complete guide to personal laws in India, which owns that ground. This article owns the argument.

A word on vocabulary, because the debate’s central phrase misleads in translation. In the civil-law tradition from which the phrase descends, a civil code is the systematic private law of a country, the book that governs persons, property, obligations and succession for everyone; the Goan code examined below is a surviving specimen of that kind. In Indian usage the phrase has narrowed: a uniform civil code means, in almost every mouth that uses it, a common family law displacing the personal laws, and not a recodification of the whole of private law, most of which is common already. The narrowing matters because arguments slide between the two senses. The grandeur of the first sense, one civil law for one nation, is borrowed to commend a proposal that is, in the second sense, a family law statute of defined and limited subjects; and the modesty of the second sense is borrowed in reply, to present as technical housekeeping a proposal that would in fact rewrite the legal identity of communities. This article uses the phrase in its Indian sense throughout, a common law of marriage, divorce, maintenance, adoption, guardianship and succession, and notes the places where the wider sense is doing argumentative work on one side or the other.

What Article 44 says, and what it does not say

Article 44 stands in Part IV of the Constitution, among the directive principles of state policy, and it reads in full: “The State shall endeavour to secure for the citizens a uniform civil code throughout the territory of India.” Every word of that single sentence has been fought over, and the sentence repays a slow reading, because most public statements about it get at least one element wrong.

The first element is the address. The article speaks to “the State”, and Article 36 of the Constitution provides that in Part IV the expression bears the same meaning as in Part III, where Article 12 defines it to include the Government and Parliament of India, the government and legislature of each state, and all local and other authorities under governmental control. Article 44 therefore does not bind Parliament alone, whatever the debate’s national framing suggests. A state government is as much an addressee of the directive as the Union government, a point of more than verbal significance once the distribution of legislative power is examined, because the Constitution separately gives state legislatures competence over the very subjects a civil code would cover. When a state enacts a code of its own, as Uttarakhand has done, it is not borrowing Parliament’s mandate; it is acting on a directive addressed to itself, through a competence the Seventh Schedule grants it.

The second element is the verb. The State shall “endeavour to secure” a code. The directive principles were drafted as instructions for governance rather than as obligations of result, and Article 37 states their legal character without ambiguity: the provisions of Part IV “shall not be enforceable by any court”, although the principles are “nevertheless fundamental in the governance of the country” and it is the duty of the State to apply them in making laws. An endeavour clause in a non-enforceable chapter cannot be read as a command with a deadline. No court can issue a writ directing a legislature to enact a uniform civil code, and none has; nor can a citizen sue for its non-enactment. Equally, Article 37 forecloses the opposite error of treating the directive as decoration. The framers placed the principles in the Constitution as instructions that governments were to apply in legislation, and Article 44 has been a stated commitment of the republic since 1950, pressed by some governments and deferred by others, but never deleted and never converted into an enforceable right.

The third element is the object: “a uniform civil code”. The Constitution does not define the phrase, does not list the subjects such a code would cover, and does not say whether uniformity means one text for all citizens on every subject of family law or a common floor of rights beneath differing rules. That silence is itself one of the debate’s central facts. The subjects conventionally gathered under the phrase, marriage, divorce, maintenance, adoption, guardianship, succession and inheritance, come not from Article 44 but from Entry 5 of the Concurrent List, the entry that distributes legislative competence over the field. A code could in principle be comprehensive across those subjects or selective among them; it could abolish community rules or codify each community’s rules to a common standard of rights; the constitutional text chooses none of these designs. Arguments that proceed as though Article 44 specified a draft are arguing about a document that does not exist.

The fourth element is territorial: “throughout the territory of India”. The phrase contemplates a code of national extent, and it sits in visible tension with the Constitution’s own distribution of the subject to the states as well, and with the special protections the same Constitution builds around tribal areas and two north-eastern states. A code enacted state by state would produce, for a time and perhaps permanently, exactly the territorial variation the phrase aspires to remove. That tension is not a debating point invented by either side; it is written into the constitutional scheme, and any serious treatment of the subject has to hold both ends of it.

What Article 44 does not do is equally important to the record. It does not override the fundamental rights. The freedoms of religion in Articles 25 and 26, the cultural right in Article 29, and the equality guarantees in Articles 14 and 15 all stand in Part III, enforceable in court, and a code enacted tomorrow would have to survive challenge under them like any other statute. The Supreme Court’s settlement of the relation between the two Parts, in the Minerva Mills case discussed below, is that neither Part has primacy over the other; the Constitution rests on their harmony. Article 44 is therefore best understood as a direction of travel recorded in the constitutional text, addressed to every legislature in the country, justiciable nowhere, and dependent for its fulfilment entirely on political choice. Everything in the debate that is worth disputing lies downstream of that understanding, and a great deal of what is said on the subject fails before it starts by describing the article as either a command or a nullity. It is neither.

The placement of the article was itself a considered choice, and both camps draw on it. The directive principles as a device were adapted from the Irish Constitution of 1937, whose directive principles of social policy the Constitutional Adviser, Sir B. N. Rau, had studied at first hand in the course of his travels before the drafting began, and Article 44 keeps that company in Part IV: it stands among directives on a living wage, on village panchayats, on the welfare of weaker sections and on the promotion of international peace, instructions addressed to governments about the kind of society they should build. To read the article in its Part is to read it as the framers classed it, a direction of policy to be pursued by legislation when a legislature judges the moment right, and not as an entitlement that ripens with time. Supporters answer that a direction is still a direction, and that generations of legislative silence are not what keeping a principle in view was meant to look like. Opponents answer that the Part’s other directions, on livelihood, on health, on the distribution of material resources, stand equally unfulfilled, and that a government sequencing its instructions does not thereby defy the Constitution. Both answers are available precisely because the classification settles the forum, the legislatures, and nothing else.

What securing a code would involve is the second piece of shared ground, and it repays statement at the level of mechanics, because the debate’s abstractions can make the enterprise sound smaller than it is. A code that did the work its name promises would have to legislate, in one instrument or a connected set of them, the capacity to marry and the forms of marriage for every citizen, the prohibited degrees and the effect of custom upon them, registration, the grounds and procedure of divorce, maintenance during marriage and after it, the custody and guardianship of children, adoption and who may adopt, succession to every estate a personal law presently governs, and the transitional treatment of marriages already celebrated, wills already made and estates already opened. It would have to state expressly its consequences for dozens of standing statutes, among them the four Hindu code Acts of 1955 and 1956, the Indian Christian Marriage Act 1872, the Parsi Marriage and Divorce Act 1936, the statutes that apply Muslim personal law, and the Indian Succession Act 1925, which already governs the succession of Christians, Parsis and others. The drafting of such an instrument is the work of years, and its consultation, if the consultation is to be real, is the work of years more. Supporters treat that scale as the measure of the reform’s importance. Opponents treat it as the reason the reform cannot be rushed: a code drafted at speed will be drafted out of the materials nearest to hand, which in practice means the majority’s codified law and the general statutes, so that the flattening the opponents predict will have occurred in the drafting room before any floor debate begins.

The Constituent Assembly record: what was actually decided on 23 November 1948

The provision came before the Constituent Assembly as draft Article 35, in the chapter of draft directive principles, and it was debated on 23 November 1948 with the Vice-President, H. C. Mookherjee, in the chair. The debate is the most frequently invoked and most frequently misdescribed episode in the entire controversy, quoted by one side as a founding command and by the other as a founding promise of restraint. The record supports neither simplification. It shows a chamber that heard the consent objection in its strongest form, rejected the amendments that would have written that objection into the text, and adopted a provision whose own terms, a directive to endeavour, committed nobody to a date, a design, or an outcome.

The amendments came first, and they deserve to be stated exactly, because their rejection is the fact each side reads differently. Mohammad Ismail Sahib moved a proviso that “any group, section or community of people shall not be obliged to give up its own personal law in case it has such a law”. Naziruddin Ahmad moved a proviso of a different design, that “the personal law of any community which has been guaranteed by the statute shall not be changed except with the previous approval of the community ascertained in such manner as the Union Legislature may determine by law”. Mahboob Ali Baig Sahib Bahadur moved that nothing in the article should affect the personal law of the citizen. B. Pocker Sahib Bahadur supported the exemption case, and Hussain Imam pressed the practical objection that a single code for a country of India’s diversity was a project of a different order from the other directive principles. The common thread of the amendments was consent: each, in its own mechanism, would have made the application of a future code to a community depend on that community’s agreement, or would have placed personal law beyond the clause altogether. The argument beneath them was stated plainly by their movers. Personal law, they said, was not a body of administrative rules but part of the religion and the way of life of those who lived under it; a majority legislature compelling a minority to surrender it would take by numbers what the Constitution elsewhere promised by right; and a state that had just been partitioned on communal lines should hesitate before writing majoritarian power over family life into its founding text.

Two features of that day’s debate repay attention, because each side’s later literature develops one of them and neglects the other. The first is feasibility, raised by Hussain Imam and never squarely answered on the floor: whether a single code could be framed at all for a country of India’s size and variety, in which the law of daily life differed not only between religions but between provinces and between schools within one religion, so that the drafter’s first task would be to master a plurality inside each system before attempting a plurality between them. The majority’s reply, that the difficulty of a task is no argument against directing the State to attempt it, is a complete answer to an endeavour clause and would have been no answer at all to an enforceable right, which is one reason the clause’s defenders were content with its form. The second feature is the season in which the debate occurred. The Assembly took up draft Article 35 on 23 November 1948, little more than a year after Partition had divided the subcontinent on the question whether religious communities could live under common political institutions, and the minorities who remained in India were accepting a Constitution whose promises were being written in those very months. The consent provisos were framed by men negotiating from that position. Their defeat has to be read alongside what the Assembly simultaneously declined to do: it wrote in no timetable, no mandate and no deadline of its own, so that the day’s work rejected both the safeguard and the hurry, and left the question of consent, like the question of timing, to the politics of the future it was addressing.

The defence of the clause as drafted was led by members of the Drafting Committee and its chairman. K. M. Munshi argued that personal law could not be placed beyond legislative reach merely by being called religion, that the sphere of religion in Indian life had expanded to cover the whole of social existence in a way no modern state could accept as a boundary, and that a common code was an instrument of national consolidation and of the equality of women, whose position under every personal law of the time was subordinate in law whatever it was in affection. Alladi Krishnaswami Ayyar made the complementary argument from experience: civil law in India was already substantially common, in crime, in contract, in evidence and in procedure, without having dissolved the country’s religious life, and a common code of family law, approached gradually, need not be the rupture the amendments feared. B. R. Ambedkar, answering for the Drafting Committee, made three points that between them contain the whole subsequent argument. He observed, first, that it was too late to treat personal law as a field legislation had never entered: with the single exception of marriage and succession, every department of life once governed by religious rules, criminal law, the law of evidence, the transfer of property among them, had already been brought under common codes binding on all communities, and the Shariat Act of 1937 itself had displaced custom for Muslims who came under it. He observed, second, that the clause imposed no obligation of immediate enactment: it armed a future Parliament with a power and a direction, and left the timing and the manner to that Parliament’s judgment. And he offered, third, the mechanism that dissolves most of the debate’s supposed absolutes, in words the record preserves: “It is perfectly possible that the future Parliament may make a provision by way of making a beginning that the Code shall apply only to those who make a declaration that they are prepared to be bound by it, so that in the initial stage the application of the Code may be purely voluntary.” He instanced the Shariat Act itself, under which a Muslim could declare himself willing to be bound and thereby bring himself and his successors under the Act.

Each amendment was put and negatived. Draft Article 35 was adopted, and in the Constitution as enacted it stands as Article 44. The outcome is therefore double, and both halves are facts. The Assembly refused to exempt personal law from the reach of a future code and refused to make a code conditional on community consent; the aspiration was adopted over the consent objection, not in ignorance of it. And the Assembly equally refused to make the aspiration enforceable, to fix its content, or to set it in motion; it adopted an endeavour clause in a non-justiciable chapter, defended by its own draftsman on the express ground that a future legislature could begin voluntarily if it wished. A debater who quotes the rejection of the amendments as a mandate for imposition has read half the record. A debater who quotes Ambedkar’s voluntary beginning as a promise that no code could ever bind an unwilling citizen has read the other half. The record contains both because the Assembly decided both.

Why do both sides of the debate quote the same Constituent Assembly debate?

Because the debate of 23 November 1948 genuinely contains both sides’ founding materials. It records the consent amendments and the arguments for them, and it records their rejection. It records the aspiration’s adoption, and it records Ambedkar’s assurance that adoption imposed no immediate obligation and that a voluntary beginning was possible. Each camp quotes the half that is really there.

The Assembly’s other encounter with family law reform supplies the sequel that the next decade wrote. The comprehensive Hindu Code Bill, which would have codified and reformed the personal law of the majority community in a single instrument, stalled in the provisional Parliament and cost the government its Law Minister; the reform was eventually enacted in pieces, as the four Hindu code Acts of 1955 and 1956, a history told in full in the legislative history of the Hindu Code Bills. That sequel matters to the present debate for a reason neither camp can monopolise. It shows that codification of a community’s law by a legislature drawn largely from that community was itself a bruising, decade-long enterprise that succeeded only when disaggregated; and it shows equally that reform of personal law by legislation, against determined religious opposition, was accomplished within the Constitution’s first decade and has never since been treated as constitutionally suspect. The precedent cuts in both directions, which is why both directions cite it.

Who may enact a code: Entry 5 and the federal route

The second persistent error in the debate is the assumption that a uniform civil code is something only Parliament can enact, so that the argument is necessarily an argument about a single national statute. The Constitution’s distribution of legislative power says otherwise, and on this point the text is not ambiguous at all.

Entry 5 of the Concurrent List in the Seventh Schedule covers “marriage and divorce; infants and minors; adoption; wills, intestacy and succession; joint family and partition; all matters in respect of which parties in judicial proceedings were immediately before the commencement of this Constitution subject to their personal law”. The entry is at once a list of subjects and a historical sweep clause: anything that was personal law business in 1950 is within it. Its location in the third list means what the third list always means, that Parliament and every state legislature may both legislate on it, neither being excluded by the other’s presence in the field. The fuller account of how the three lists divide competence, and of the doctrines that police their boundaries, belongs to the guide to the Seventh Schedule and its lists; what matters here is the consequence for the code question. There is no constitutional obstacle of competence to a state civil code, and there never has been. The state of the debate, in which a state enactment arrived as a surprise to much national commentary, measures commentary rather than law.

Concurrence has a conflict rule, and the rule shaped the one state code that exists. Under Article 254, where a state law on a concurrent subject is repugnant to a parliamentary law, the parliamentary law prevails and the state law is void to the extent of the repugnancy; but where the state law has been reserved for the President’s consideration and has received the President’s assent, it prevails within that state notwithstanding the conflict, until Parliament chooses to legislate over it. A state code that displaces central family statutes within its territory, as any real code must, therefore travels the assent route as a matter of legal design. The Uttarakhand code was reserved and received the President’s assent in March 2024, and that step was not ceremony: it was the mechanism by which the code’s departures from the Hindu Marriage Act, the Hindu Succession Act and the rest of the central family law were made good within the state. The same route carried the state succession amendments of the 1980s and 1990s, by which Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and Maharashtra made daughters coparceners under the Hindu Succession Act in their territories years before Parliament generalised the rule in 2005. State legislatures have been rewriting family law within their borders, lawfully and consequentially, for as long as the Constitution has run; the code debate is unusual only in the scale of the instrument, not in the level of government wielding it.

The assent, it should be noticed, is not an entrenchment. The proviso to Article 254(2) reserves to Parliament the power at any time to enact a law on the same matter, including a law adding to, amending, varying or repealing the state law that received the assent. A state code therefore lives under a standing parliamentary override, and the two camps read that condition in opposite senses, each textually sound. Supporters treat it as the federal bargain working as designed: the state experiments under a reserve power held at the Centre, and a Parliament that later enacts a national code will displace the experiment by the Constitution’s own mechanism rather than by litigation, so the state road and the national road are stages of one road. Opponents treat the same clause as the measure of what a state enactment proves: a code that exists on presidential assent and parliamentary sufferance demonstrates the politics of one state’s majority, which was never in doubt, and not the durability or the acceptability that a national settlement would need, which is the whole question. The clause decides nothing between them; it merely locates state action, precisely, inside a Union that can always have the last word.

The federal structure creates the debate’s neatest paradox, and it belongs to whichever side cares to use it. A national code under Article 44 is commended, in the article’s own words, as securing uniformity “throughout the territory of India”. A state code achieves the opposite of that stated end even as it fulfils the directive at its own level: it replaces variation between communities with variation between states, so that the law of marriage and succession differs at the border of Uttarakhand as sharply as it ever differed between communities within it. Supporters of state action answer that this is how Indian reform has repeatedly proceeded, by experiment in one jurisdiction and generalisation after, the daughters’ coparcenary amendments being the standing example. Opponents answer that a multiplication of state codes, each with its own exceptions, is not a road to the article’s object but a departure from it. Both answers are faithful to the constitutional text, which grants the competence in one provision and states the aspiration in another and reconciles them nowhere. The reconciliation, like everything else in this subject, is left to legislatures.

Nor was the field virgin when the Constitution opened it. Under the Government of India Act 1935 the family subjects had stood within provincial and concurrent competence, and provincial legislatures had used that competence on personal law before independence: Bombay’s Prevention of Hindu Bigamous Marriages Act of 1946 prohibited bigamy among Hindus in that province years before the Hindu Marriage Act generalised the prohibition, and it was that provincial statute whose validity came before the Bombay High Court in the Narasu Appa Mali case discussed below. Entry 5’s location in the Concurrent List therefore preserved a distribution of power that legislatures had already exercised, rather than inventing one. That continuity matters to how the debate should be read: when a state legislature takes up the family field it is not trespassing on ground the Constitution reserved for a national settlement, and when Parliament legislates across the field, as it did for the Hindu code in the 1950s, it exercises a competence it shares. The argument between the levels of government is about priority and prudence. It has never been about title.

The Law Commission record, stated exactly

No item in the debate is misquoted as routinely as the Law Commission’s work, and the misquotation runs in both directions: the twenty-first Commission’s consultation paper is described by one side as a report recommending against a code for all time, and by the other as an aberration that a fresh reference has wiped away. The record, stated in sequence with its documents correctly labelled, is more precise than either version and more interesting.

The Government of India had referred the subject to the twenty-first Law Commission, chaired by Justice B. S. Chauhan, a retired judge of the Supreme Court. The Commission opened the exercise with an appeal and a questionnaire dated 7 October 2016, inviting the views of stakeholders and of the public on the desirability and shape of a uniform civil code and on the reform of family law, and it issued further public appeals in March and April 2018 as the work proceeded. The responses ran to tens of thousands, and the Commission consulted political parties, religious organisations, women’s groups and scholars across the country. Its term ended on 31 August 2018, and on that last day it published its product: not a report, but a Consultation Paper on Reform of Family Law, a document of 182 pages.

The distinction between the two instruments is not pedantry, and this article returns to it because the debate’s handling of the paper is the debate in miniature. A report of the Law Commission is the body’s considered advice to the government, numbered in the Commission’s series and laid before Parliament. A consultation paper is a working document, issued to frame discussion and elicit response on the way toward advice. The twenty-first Commission’s term expired on the day the consultation paper appeared, and no report on the subject followed from it. That the Commission submitted no report is not a partisan characterisation; it is the position the government itself placed before Parliament, when the Minister of State for Law and Justice, Arjun Ram Meghwal, answering an unstarred question in the Rajya Sabha on 20 July 2023, recorded that the twenty-first Commission “had issued a consultation paper on Reform of Family Law on 31.08.2018 however, it had not submitted any report”. Any account that promotes the paper into the Commission’s final advice misstates the record; any account that treats the paper as weightless because it was not a report ignores that it remains the most substantial official examination of the subject the Indian state has produced.

What the paper concluded can be quoted, and should be, because the quotable sentences are short and both camps excerpt them. At paragraph 1.15 the Commission wrote: “While diversity of Indian culture can and should be celebrated, specific groups, or weaker sections of society must not be dis-privileged in the process. Resolution of this conflict does not mean abolition of all differences. This Commission has therefore dealt with laws that are discriminatory rather than providing a uniform civil code which is neither necessary nor desirable at this stage.” It added: “Most countries are now moving towards recognition of difference and the mere existence of difference does not imply discrimination but is indicative of a robust democracy.” And it warned, in a sentence quoted less often: “Cultural diversity cannot be compromised to the extent that our urge for uniformity itself becomes a reason for threat to the territorial integrity of the nation.” The paper’s reasoning ran that the absence of consensus on a code made the better course the preservation of the diversity of personal laws alongside a guarantee that no personal law contradict the fundamental rights, and the bulk of its pages were spent on the second half of that programme: detailed proposals to reform discriminatory provisions within each system, on marriage, divorce, custody, adoption, guardianship and succession, including proposals directed at the majority community’s own law, among them the abolition of the coparcenary and of the tax treatment of the Hindu undivided family. Read whole, the paper is not a defence of the status quo wearing a pluralist badge. It is an argument that the equality the code promises is better pursued rule by rule inside each system than by a single instrument, an argument whose merits the debate section below takes up.

What is the difference between a Law Commission consultation paper and a Law Commission report?

A report is the Commission’s final advice to the government, numbered in its series and laid before Parliament. A consultation paper is a discussion document issued during an inquiry to frame questions and gather responses. The twenty-first Commission issued a consultation paper in 2018 and no report, so its conclusions were never its settled advice.

The story resumes with the twenty-second Law Commission, constituted in 2020 under a reference from the Ministry of Law and Justice that included the code. On 14 June 2023 that Commission issued a public notice inviting the views of the public and of recognised religious organisations afresh. Its stated reasons, as the Minister’s answer in the Rajya Sabha recorded them, were that more than four years had lapsed since the consultation paper, and that fresh deliberation was expedient bearing in mind the relevance and importance of the subject and the various court orders touching it. The notice did not disown the earlier paper, adopt a contrary conclusion, or publish any draft; it reopened a consultation, which is all its text claims. The response was very large by any measure of Indian public consultation. The Commission extended its deadline by two weeks in July 2023 in view of the volume and the requests for more time; when the window closed on 28 July 2023, a member of the Commission put the receipts at around eighty lakh responses, and the Law Minister stated publicly the following day that more than one crore suggestions had been received, figures that differ because the count was still being compiled and because representations, organisational submissions and individual responses were not being counted on a single basis. What the figures establish, on any of the competing counts, is scale; what they cannot establish is direction, since the Commission published no analysis of how the responses divided. The twenty-second Commission’s term ended on 31 August 2024 without a report on the subject, and the question passed to a successor Commission. Readers who keep the whole file of this record together, the questionnaire, the appeals, the consultation paper and the notices, as examinable documents rather than as slogans can open the office-format consultation documents with the ReportMedic file viewer and test every quotation in this section against its source.

Two disciplines follow from the record for anyone arguing from it. The first is that the twenty-first Commission’s conclusion was expressly time-indexed by its own words, “at this stage”: it decided that a code was neither necessary nor desirable when it wrote, on the material before it, and it neither claimed nor could claim to bind a successor body facing a changed record. The second is that a successor body’s decision to consult afresh is not a conclusion of any kind. Between a consultation paper that advised against proceeding and a notice that asked the country to write in again, the Law Commission as an institution has delivered exactly one substantive position on a uniform civil code, and it is the position of August 2018. The debate is entitled to move past that position; it is not entitled to pretend the position was something else.

What the courts have said: observations, not directions

The judicial strand of the debate has a fixed structure that commentary routinely flattens. The Supreme Court has never directed any legislature to enact a uniform civil code, and given Article 37 it never could: a direction to legislate on a non-justiciable directive would be a direction to do what the Constitution says no court may enforce. What the Court has produced, across four decades, is a series of observations in cases that were about something else, maintenance, bigamy, succession, testamentary limits, in which individual benches expressed regret at the directive’s non-fulfilment, urged governments to attend to it, or, in two careful counterweights, counselled gradualism and disclaimed any mandate. The observations matter politically, since governments quote them; they matter legally hardly at all, since none binds a legislature and the Court has said so itself. Stating them accurately means stating, for each, what was decided and what was merely said.

The foundational observation came in Mohd. Ahmed Khan v. Shah Bano Begum in 1985, where a five-judge bench led by Chief Justice Chandrachud upheld a divorced Muslim woman’s claim to maintenance under the religion-neutral provision of the criminal procedure code and then turned to the wider field, in the passage that began the modern debate: “It is a matter of regret that Article 44 of our Constitution has remained a dead letter,” the Court wrote, adding that “a common Civil Code will help the cause of national integration by removing disparate loyalties to laws which have conflicting ideologies.” Those sentences were observations on a case about maintenance, and the political storm they raised, the enactment that answered them, and the doctrine’s later reconstruction are the subject of the article on the Shah Bano case and the legislative response, which owns that episode. The same year, in Jorden Diengdeh v. S. S. Chopra, the Court noted the absence of a uniform law of marriage and divorce and the anomalies it produced between communities, again in the course of deciding an individual matrimonial dispute.

Behind the observations stands a doctrinal settlement that limits what litigation can achieve in this field from either side. In State of Bombay v. Narasu Appa Mali, reported at AIR 1952 Bom 84, the Bombay High Court held that uncodified personal law is not “law in force” for the purposes of Article 13, and so cannot be struck down for inconsistency with the fundamental rights; the doctrine has been doubted by judges of the Supreme Court, by Justice Nariman in the triple talaq case of 2017 and by Justice Chandrachud in the temple entry case of 2018, but it has never been overruled, and it means that the discriminatory content of uncodified personal law is largely beyond direct constitutional challenge in court. The relation between the rights and the directive was settled at the level of principle in Minerva Mills v. Union of India in 1980: the Constitution, the Court held, rests on a harmony between fundamental rights and directive principles, and to give absolute primacy to either over the other would disturb that harmony. Article 44 therefore cannot be read as a licence to override Part III, and Part III cannot be read as erasing the directive. And when petitioners asked the Court itself to reform personal law wholesale, in Ahmedabad Women Action Group v. Union of India in 1997, the Court declined, holding that the removal of discriminatory provisions from the personal laws was a matter for the legislatures and that the judiciary could not legislate the field into uniformity. The courts, in short, have closed both judicial roads: no direction to enact a code, and no striking down of the uncodified law that a code would replace. What remains to them is the observation, and the observation has been made repeatedly.

Its high-water mark is Sarla Mudgal v. Union of India in 1995. The case itself decided a point of criminal law with complete orthodoxy: a Hindu husband who converts to Islam does not thereby dissolve his first marriage, and a second marriage contracted while the first subsists is bigamous and void. Justice Kuldip Singh’s judgment then turned to Article 44, remarked that more than four fifths of the country’s citizens had already been brought under codified personal law, urged the government to have a fresh look at the article, and asked the Union to place before the Court an affidavit of the steps taken towards securing a code. Sarla Mudgal is the decision most often cited as a judicial direction for a uniform civil code, and the citation does not survive the sequel. Within a year, in Pannalal Bansilal Pitti v. State of Andhra Pradesh in 1996, the Court counselled the opposite tempo: a uniform law was desirable, but its enactment in one stroke might prove counterproductive to the unity and integrity of the country, reform in a democracy should proceed gradually, and the Sarla Mudgal observations were an opinion and a suggestion rather than a binding direction. In Lily Thomas v. Union of India in 2000 the Court closed the question expressly: the Sarla Mudgal judgment had issued no direction to enact a uniform civil code, its observations on Article 44 were not a mandate, and when and whether to legislate remained with the legislatures. Any statement that the Supreme Court has ordered, required or directed a uniform civil code is, after Lily Thomas, simply false, and it is usually traceable to a reading of Sarla Mudgal that stops before the clarifications.

Has the Supreme Court ever directed Parliament to enact a uniform civil code?

No. Benches of the Court have repeatedly regretted that Article 44 remains unfulfilled and urged governments to attend to it, most strongly in Sarla Mudgal in 1995. But in Lily Thomas in 2000 the Court stated that Sarla Mudgal had issued no direction, that its observations were not a mandate, and that legislating rests with the legislatures.

The observations nonetheless continued, and their tone is part of the political record. In John Vallamattom v. Union of India in 2003, striking down a provision of the Indian Succession Act that restricted Christian charitable bequests, Chief Justice V. N. Khare recorded his regret that Article 44 had not been given effect and repeated the Shah Bano formulation, that a uniform civil code would help the cause of national integration by removing contradictions founded on ideology. In Jose Paulo Coutinho v. Maria Luiza Valentina Pereira in 2019, a bench of Justices Deepak Gupta and Aniruddha Bose, holding that the civil code of Goa governs the succession of persons of Goan domicile even to property outside the state, observed that the founders had hoped and expected the State to endeavour to secure a code, that no action had been taken in that regard although Hindu law had been codified in 1956, and described Goa in the judgment’s most quoted phrase as “a shining example of an Indian State which has a uniform civil code applicable to all, regardless of religion except while protecting certain limited rights”, noting that Muslim men whose marriages are registered in Goa cannot practise polygamy and that the code makes no provision for verbal divorce. The Coutinho passage is worth reading with its own qualifier attached, since the Court itself wrote the exception into the compliment: a uniform code, applicable to all, except while protecting certain limited rights. What those protected rights are, and how far they qualify the uniformity being praised, is the question the two-examples analysis below puts to both territories. The pattern did not end there. In the Constitution Bench that decided the triple talaq cases in 2017, the minority of two judges would have injuncted the practice for six months in order to give Parliament room to legislate on it, a course the majority declined to take; even that proposal, the most interventionist the Court has entertained in the field, framed the legislature and not the Court as the reforming authority. And on 7 July 2021, a single judge of the Delhi High Court, Justice Prathiba M. Singh, deciding Satprakash Meena v. Alka Meena, recorded that “the hope expressed in Article 44 of the Constitution that the State shall secure for its citizens a Uniform Civil Code ought not to remain a mere hope”, expressed the wish that the Ministry of Law and Justice would act on the judgment, and directed that a copy be sent to the Ministry. The case itself concerned whether the Hindu Marriage Act applied at all to a couple of the Meena community, a notified Scheduled Tribe, which is the classification question of the personal law system wearing judicial dress, and the observation was made in the course of answering it. The judicial strand of the debate thus ends where it began: with observations that governments may invoke and opponents may discount, a doctrine that bars judicial shortcuts in either direction, and a question that the Court has remitted, repeatedly and expressly, to politics.

The proposal in Parliament and in the statehouses

The debate’s parliamentary life has a shape of its own, distinct from the argument conducted in print and in court. Parliament has completed exactly one legislative episode in this field, the response of 1985 and 1986 that the article on the Shah Bano case owns; its other encounters with the code have been interrogative and procedural rather than legislative, made of questions, ministerial answers and private members’ bills, and in the most recent period the statehouses have carried more of the action than the national chamber. The record of those encounters matters because each side quotes Parliament selectively. Supporters quote the manifestos and the state enactments. Opponents quote the government’s own answers, which are considerably more cautious than the manifestos.

The fullest parliamentary confrontation of the period came on 9 December 2022, when the Bharatiya Janata Party member Kirodi Lal Meena sought leave to introduce in the Rajya Sabha his private member’s measure, the Uniform Civil Code in India Bill, 2020, which proposed the constitution of a national committee to prepare a code within a stated period. The introduction itself was opposed and put to a division, in which the House voted by 63 to 23 that the bill be introduced. The objections made that day are the opposition’s case in miniature. Tiruchi Siva of the DMK argued that the very idea of a uniform civil code was against the principle of secularism and the country’s diversity. John Brittas of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) read the twenty-first Law Commission’s conclusion into the debate, quoting its description of a code as neither necessary nor desirable. Ram Gopal Yadav of the Samajwadi Party called the proposal unconstitutional. For the Treasury benches, Piyush Goyal defended the introduction not on the bill’s merits but on the member’s right to bring it, observing that members of many parties had brought such bills in the past. The episode’s significance is exact and limited: the only vote either House has taken on a code in this period was a vote on whether a private member might propose one, carried on a procedural defence, and the bill, being a private member’s measure, has no path to enactment unless a government adopts it. Nor was the attempt the first of its kind: private members’ proposals for a code have been brought before Parliament repeatedly across the decades, and none has been taken up by a government or carried into law, an institutional fact the division of December 2022 did not disturb.

The one occasion on which Parliament has legislated across the family field in this period rehearsed the entire argument, and it is worth recording as a parliamentary exchange in its own right. The Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Marriage) Bill, which made the pronouncement of instant triple talaq a criminal offence, was debated in both Houses across 2018 and 2019 before enactment. For the government, the Law Minister, Ravi Shankar Prasad, defended the measure in the vocabulary of the case for the code itself: gender justice, the equality of Muslim women with their sisters of other faiths, and the Supreme Court’s own judgment as warrant. Against it, members across the opposition argued the case against in its criminal-law form: that a pronouncement the Court had already held void could not sensibly be made a crime, that imprisoning the husband destroyed the maintenance and the household the measure claimed to protect, and that a reform aimed at one community’s practice, carried by criminal sanction rather than by civil relief, was uniformity of the punitive kind. The bill passed, and the Act of 2019 stands as Parliament’s one completed intervention in the field in this era; both camps cite the debates, the supporters for the proposition that Parliament can legislate over personal law resistance, the opponents for the proposition that when it does, it reaches for the criminal law against a minority rather than for a considered common text.

The government’s answers to questions fill out its stated position, and they are more guarded than its party’s manifesto. In February 2022 the Law Minister, Kiren Rijiju, told the Rajya Sabha that no decision had been taken to implement a uniform civil code, and that the government had requested the twenty-first Law Commission to examine issues relating to it. The written answer of July 2023, described in the Law Commission section above, placed on record that the earlier Commission had issued a consultation paper and had not submitted any report. Answering questions in the Lok Sabha in December 2024, the Law Minister, Arjun Ram Meghwal, quoted Dr Ambedkar’s Constituent Assembly speech in the course of the government’s reply and stated that no guidelines had been issued to the states in the matter, the field being one where Entry 5 leaves the states competent to legislate. An opposition that wants the government’s position in its own words need not speculate: on the parliamentary record, the executive’s position is that a reference to the Law Commission is the process in train, that the states are free to proceed in their own sphere, and that no national draft exists and none is promised by a date.

The statehouses supply the movement, and the resistance. Gujarat’s government announced in October 2022 that it would constitute a committee under a retired High Court judge to examine the implementation of a code in the state, and in February 2025 it set up a five-member committee chaired by Justice Ranjana Prakash Desai, the retired judge of the Supreme Court who had chaired the Uttarakhand committee, to prepare a draft for Gujarat. Assam’s government announced its intention to bring a code before the state assembly, and in 2024 the Assam Legislative Assembly repealed the Assam Muslim Marriages and Divorces Registration Act 1935, the colonial-era statute under which Muslim marriages and divorces had been registered in the state, a repeal the state government defended as part of the movement toward common civil law. Uttar Pradesh’s Chief Minister stated in 2022 that his government was seriously considering the implementation of a code in the state; no bill has followed there. In the opposite direction, the governments of Tamil Nadu and West Bengal have placed their opposition to a national code on public record, and the resolutions of Nagaland and Mizoram, recorded in the design section below, carry the resistance into constitutional form. The pattern across the states reproduces the constitutional design exactly: initiative and resistance both sit where Entry 5 put the competence.

The sharpest single exchange of the period was conducted in public statements rather than on any floor. When the Prime Minister used the Independence Day address of 15 August 2024 to describe the civil code under which the country lives as in truth a communal civil code and to commend a secular civil code in its place, the Congress party’s reply, issued the same day by its general secretary for communications, Jairam Ramesh, quoted paragraph 1.15 of the 2018 consultation paper back at the government, recited its description of a code as neither necessary nor desirable at this stage, and called the Prime Minister’s characterisation of the existing settlement a gross insult to Dr Ambedkar, whose gradualism and voluntary mechanism the statement set out. The reply also made the procedural point that the twenty-second Law Commission’s term had ended on 31 August 2024 without any report on the reference the government had itself made, so that the case for urgency was being pressed while the government’s own consultation stood formally unanswered. The exchange is the debate in its mature form. The executive argued from the vocabulary of secularism and constitutional promise; the opposition argued from the two most authoritative texts of restraint, the Law Commission’s paper and Ambedkar’s speech; each side claimed the Constitution’s mantle; and neither side placed a draft on any table, which remains, in Parliament as in the country, the debate’s defining absence.

The case for a code, in its strongest form

The case for a uniform civil code, stated as its holders state it, rests on a sequence of propositions that begin in the enforceable part of the Constitution rather than in the directive. The first is equality before the law. Article 14 guarantees equality before the law and the equal protection of the laws, and Article 15 forbids discrimination on grounds of religion and sex. A legal order in which the consequences of marriage, divorce and death, the most consequential civil events in most lives, are determined by the community into which a citizen is born is, on this argument, a standing exception to the Constitution’s first promises, tolerated because it was inherited rather than chosen. The code’s supporters ask why the republic maintains a single criminal law for the pickpocket of every faith, a single law of contract for the merchant of every faith, and a single law of evidence for the witness of every faith, yet distributes the law of the family by birth. Munshi’s Assembly argument is the ancestor of the point: the domain claimed for religion had expanded historically to cover the whole of life, and a modern state accepts that expansion in no other field.

The second proposition is gender justice, and it carries the case’s empirical weight. Under the uncodified and codified personal laws alike, though in different measures, women have held the weaker legal hand: in the shares of inheritance open to them, in the ease and unilateralism of divorce available against them, in guardianship, where the father stood as natural guardian in the statutory text long after independence, and in maintenance, where the summary remedy of the criminal procedure code had to be invented because the personal laws’ provision was so often illusory. The supporters’ argument is not that a code would be drafted perfectly, but that a single text drafted under the discipline of Articles 14 and 15, and exposed to constitutional challenge as a statute, is a better instrument for women’s equality than a set of systems in which the least codified rules are the hardest to challenge, the Narasu Appa Mali doctrine having placed uncodified personal law largely beyond the courts’ reach. The point is pressed from within the communities concerned and not only from outside them: the women who petitioned the Supreme Court against instant triple talaq in Shayara Bano, and organisations such as the Bharatiya Muslim Mahila Andolan, which has campaigned for a codified and gender-just family law, argue that the demand for equal law is a demand of the women governed by the unequal systems and not an imposition upon them. Successive benches of the Supreme Court, in the observations collected above, have lent the argument the judiciary’s prestige without its authority.

The third proposition is national integration, the oldest of the three, running from the Assembly debates through Shah Bano’s language of “disparate loyalties to laws which have conflicting ideologies” to the Coutinho judgment. Its modern form is usually civic rather than cultural: a shared civil law is said to be part of the common citizenship the Constitution elsewhere assumes, and the spectacle of the state’s courts administering different rules of marriage and inheritance in adjoining courtrooms is presented as a survival that a self-confident republic need not preserve. The fourth proposition is administrative and rarely stated as plainly as the others: the classification questions the plural system generates, who is governed by which law, whether a convert carries his law with him, whether a community has become sufficiently Hinduised to fall under a code, consume judicial time and generate injustice at the margins, and a territorial code dissolves the classification question by answering it with residence.

Politically, the commitment has a documented home. The Bharatiya Janata Party has carried the enactment of a uniform civil code in its election manifestos over successive general elections, and the Prime Minister pressed the case in the Independence Day address of 15 August 2024 in the vocabulary of secularism itself, arguing that the civil code the country lives under is in truth a communal and discriminatory one and that a secular civil code is what the Constitution’s promise requires. The state’s own experiment adopted the same vocabulary: launching the Uttarakhand code, Chief Minister Pushkar Singh Dhami described it as a constitutional measure to end discrimination, through which practices such as halala, polygamy, child marriage and triple talaq could be ended altogether, and presented it as the fulfilment of a promise made to the state’s electorate in 2022. The National Commission for Women placed its support for a code on record in 2023 on the ground of equality for women across faiths. The strongest form of the case, gathering these strands, is that the code is not an innovation demanded by one party but a constitutional commitment of 1950, supported by the equality clauses, urged by the courts, desired by many of the women whose subordination is its target, and blocked only by the political cost of legislating it.

Two further points complete the case as its holders make it, one about the threshold costs of the plural system and one in answer to the drafting charge. The threshold point is that the plural system spends its first question on identity rather than on justice. Before a family court or a succession court can reach the merits of a dispute, it must often decide which law the parties carry: whether a conversion changed a man’s law and dissolved his marriage, whether an interfaith couple’s ceremony engaged one system or neither, whether a community has been sufficiently absorbed into the Hindu fold to fall within the Hindu code Acts’ wide definitions, whether a tribal litigant stands inside or outside the statutory exclusion for Scheduled Tribes. The Delhi High Court’s Meena case, noted above, is a specimen of the genre: a wife’s maintenance and divorce claims waited on an anterior ruling about her community’s status. A territorial code answers the anterior question with residence and spends the court’s whole attention on the merits, and its supporters connect this to a wider administrative gain: registrars, revenue officers and family courts administer one text, precedent accumulates on one text, and the citizen can learn her rights from one book rather than from a jurisprudence of classification.

The answer to the drafting charge concedes its premise and disputes its conclusion. A code, the supporters say, would indeed embody choices; every statute does. The question is whether the choices are made visibly, by an elected legislature, through committee scrutiny and floor debate, recorded in a text that any citizen can read and any future legislature can amend by ordinary majority, or made invisibly, by the internal authorities of each system, by commentators and custodians whom no one elected and whose reasoning the governed cannot inspect. Personal law’s rules arrived by inheritance and accretion; a code’s rules, whatever their content, would arrive by enactment, and would be exposed as statutes are to constitutional challenge under Part III, the discipline the opponents themselves invoke. On this view the drafting-power argument proves too much: it is an argument against legislating in the family field at all, which its holders do not intend, since they support internal reform legislation; and if legislating is legitimate for the reform of each system separately, it cannot become illegitimate merely because the instrument is common. The supporters’ closing claim is about candour: a code forces the majority to say in a public text what it believes the law of the family should be, and to defend it clause by clause, whereas the plural settlement allows every community’s inequalities to persist under the shelter of respect for difference.

The case against a code, in its strongest form

The case against begins where the case for it begins, in the constitutional text, and reads the same document to a different conclusion. Article 25 guarantees the freedom of conscience and the right freely to profess, practise and propagate religion, subject to public order, morality and health and to the other provisions of Part III. Article 26 guarantees every religious denomination the right to manage its own affairs in matters of religion. Article 29 protects the right of any section of citizens having a distinct language, script or culture to conserve the same. For the communities that hold their family law to be a matter of religious obligation, and the All India Muslim Personal Law Board, constituted in 1973 to defend the application of the Shariat, has maintained institutionally that Muslim personal law rests on divine command and is not open to legislative reconstruction, these clauses are not obstacles to the Constitution’s project but parts of it, promises made to minorities at the founding on the strength of which they consented to the common enterprise. The consent argument of November 1948 has never been answered on its own terms, its holders say: the amendments were rejected, but the anxieties they recorded were the price of the Union for the communities that voiced them, and a code imposed on an unwilling minority by a majority legislature takes by arithmetic what the founding promised by right.

The second argument is about drafting power, and it is the argument of scholars who are not defenders of the personal laws’ content. Flavia Agnes, a lawyer and scholar who has spent a career litigating against the gender injustices of every personal law, has argued that uniformity and equality are different projects that the debate persistently confuses: a single code drafted in a majoritarian political climate is likely to generalise the majority community’s norms and present them as neutral universals, so that the question is never whether the code will embody values but whose values it will embody. The majority’s own codified law is her standing exhibit: the Hindu code of the 1950s, produced by a Parliament of the majority community reforming itself, nonetheless retained a guardianship hierarchy that placed the father before the mother, preserved the coparcenary that the twenty-first Law Commission would still be recommending for abolition in 2018, and accommodated custom at every joint, which suggests that codification by itself delivers neither uniformity nor equality, only a text. The legal scholar Faizan Mustafa has pressed the constitutional version of the same caution, arguing that the freedom of religion protects practices and not merely beliefs, that the debate’s presentation of a code as a reform of one community’s law betrays the universality it claims, and that the pluralism the Constitution protects is a value and not a defect awaiting correction.

The third argument is from efficacy, and it is the one the twenty-first Law Commission made its own. Law that is imposed on communities rather than negotiated with them is observed in the breach, driven into informality, or evaded by the very people it claims to protect; the history of reform legislation in the family field, from the age of consent controversies of the colonial period to the uneven enforcement of the prohibition of child marriage, is a record of texts outrunning the societies they governed. Reform that lasts, on this view, has come from within the systems or from general statutes aimed at specific harms: the criminal law of dowry and cruelty, the protection statute against domestic violence, the maintenance remedy of the criminal procedure code, all of which bind every community without requiring any community to surrender its law of status. The internal diversity of the communities deepens the point. There is no single Hindu law in lived fact, the codified Acts themselves save custom and divide by school and region; Muslim law divides between Sunni and Shia and among schools; Christian and Parsi laws are codified antiques reformed at intervals of generations; tribal law is uncodified by design. A drafter commanded to produce one code from this material must choose at every clause, and every choice is a political act wearing a technical costume.

The fourth argument is federal and territorial, and it has acquired institutional voices. The legislatures of Nagaland and Mizoram, states whose customary law stands behind the resolution clauses of Articles 371A and 371G, have placed their opposition on the parliamentary record of their own assemblies: the Nagaland Legislative Assembly resolved unanimously in September 2023 to seek the state’s exemption from any uniform civil code, and the Mizoram Assembly had earlier in 2023 adopted a resolution against the code’s application to the state. Tribal organisations across the north-east and central India have made the same demand in their own forums. The argument these voices make is not religious but constitutional: the protections for customary law were the terms on which their peoples entered and remain in the Union, and a code that overrides them reopens accession settlements that the republic has treated as closed for seventy-five years. Gathered, the strongest form of the case against is that the code promises an equality its drafting process cannot guarantee, at a constitutional cost its supporters do not price, by a method whose record in the family field is failure, against the stated refusal of the communities and states whose law it would displace.

Two reinforcements are added by the holders of this case, and each is aimed at a different joint in the opposing argument. The first is that the constituency for equality is itself divided, and divided on knowledge. The women’s movement in India does not speak with one voice on the code: the National Commission for Women supports it, the Bharatiya Muslim Mahila Andolan demands codified and gender-just law from within the community most discussed, and a body of feminist legal scholarship, associated with Flavia Agnes and with the legal aid practice of the Majlis centre in Mumbai, holds that the equation of uniformity with equality is the debate’s founding error, pointing to the majority’s own codified law as the proof. That law, reformed by the majority’s own Parliament, retained the coparcenary until 2005, retains the tax-advantaged Hindu undivided family, and retains the remedy of restitution of conjugal rights, under which a court may order a spouse back to a marriage she has left. If codification by the majority community, for itself, preserved those features for half a century, the sceptics ask what a code drafted by the same political process for everyone else would preserve, and the question is not answered by pointing to the minority systems’ defects, which the sceptics have spent careers litigating against. The 2019 legislation is their worked example: when Parliament did intervene across the field, it criminalised a pronouncement the courts had already voided, and the opposition’s argument in both Houses, that a jailed husband pays no maintenance, states the sceptics’ thesis that the interventions the political process produces in this field are punitive symbols rather than considered family law.

The second reinforcement concerns the majority itself. A code must flatten not only the minorities’ law but the majority’s internal plurality, and the Hindu code precedent shows how reluctant even a self-reforming legislature has been to do that. The Hindu Marriage Act applies to a statutory category far wider than any single faith, sweeping in Buddhists, Jains and Sikhs and every person who is not a Muslim, Christian, Parsi or Jew and can be brought within its terms, yet it excludes the members of the Scheduled Tribes from its operation altogether by Section 2(2), saves the ceremonies and customs of each community in its central provisions, and preserves customary divorce where custom allows it; and Hindu succession law lived for centuries in the two great schools, Mitakshara and Dayabhaga, whose differences on the fundamental question of when property vests were themselves a standing refutation of the idea that one community naturally has one law. The codifiers of 1955 and 1956, legislating for their own community with a reforming mandate and a commanding majority, did not attempt the full internal uniformity that a national code’s advocates promise across all communities at once. Opponents rest the point there: not that uniformity is undesirable, but that every legislature that has actually faced the material has bought commonality with exceptions, exclusions and savings, and a debate that ignores that record is arguing about an instrument that has never been the one on offer.

Uniform laws or uniform rights: the third position

Between the two cases stands a position that shares the first case’s destination and the second case’s method, and it is held by enough of the debate’s serious participants to count as a third camp rather than a compromise. Its claim is that the object worth wanting is not uniformity of text but uniformity of rights: that a daughter’s share, a wife’s exit from a violent or ended marriage, a mother’s guardianship and a widow’s maintenance should not depend on community, and that this equality of outcome can be reached by reforming each personal law to a common standard, by general statutes that overlay all of them, and by a secular option open to every citizen, without requiring the symbolic surrender of community law that makes the single code politically indigestible. The twenty-first Law Commission’s consultation paper is this position in institutional form: its operative programme was the amendment of discriminatory provisions within each system, its test for every proposal was contradiction with the fundamental rights rather than divergence from a common template, and its roll of targets included the majority’s coparcenary and the Hindu undivided family’s tax privileges as readily as any minority practice.

The third position draws support from the reform record, which is longer than the code debate usually admits. Parliament has equalised daughters in Hindu succession by the amendment of 2005, after the states had shown the way; it has read maintenance for divorced Muslim women upward through the statute of 1986 in the Danial Latifi decision; it has criminalised instant triple talaq in 2019; it has enacted general statutes on domestic violence, child marriage and sexual offences that apply across every community; and the courts have used the codified statutes’ own texts to discipline guardianship and adoption toward the child’s welfare. Each of these changes was contested, and several were denounced at passage as the end of a community’s law; none required a code, and the accumulation is the third camp’s evidence that the destination is reachable by the road of specific reform. The camp’s critics answer from the same record: that the road is generational in its pace, that it leaves the least organised communities and the least litigious women waiting longest, that the Narasu Appa Mali immunity still shelters the uncodified residue from constitutional challenge, and that a destination reachable only community by community, at the speed of each community’s internal politics, is a destination whose arrival date for the worst-placed women is indefinitely postponed. The third position has no fully satisfactory answer to the charge of pace, just as the code’s supporters have no fully satisfactory answer to the charge of drafting power. The debate’s honest map shows both charges standing.

The overlay method the third position relies on deserves its catalogue, because its accumulated weight is the position’s real argument. The maintenance jurisdiction, carried in the criminal procedure codes since 1973 and re-enacted in the successor code, has given wives, children and parents of every community a summary remedy against neglect for fifty years, and it was through that jurisdiction, not through any personal law, that the Shah Bano claim itself succeeded. The Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act 2005 gives its reliefs, protection orders, residence orders, monetary relief, custody and compensation, to a woman in any domestic relationship, whatever her personal law says about the household she lives in. The Prohibition of Child Marriage Act 2006 makes a child marriage voidable, and in defined circumstances void, for every community, overriding any personal law permission. In custody and guardianship the courts apply the welfare of the child as the paramount consideration across the systems, and in Githa Hariharan v. Reserve Bank of India in 1999 the Supreme Court read the Hindu Minority and Guardianship Act’s provision, which named the father as natural guardian and the mother only after him, as making the mother a functioning natural guardian in the father’s absence from the child’s life, disciplining a codified text toward equality without striking any of it down. The adoption law travelled the same road by a general statute open to all. A legislature persuaded by the third position is therefore not short of instruments, and its members argue that the instruments have a property the code lacks: each was aimed at a named harm, debated as a named harm, and accepted, however grudgingly, across the communities it binds, which is why the overlays are observed in practice to a degree that symbolic codifications in the family field have historically not been.

The secular option that already exists

One element of the third position is not a proposal but a standing institution, and the debate’s heat often obscures its existence. Since 1954, and in earlier colonial forms since 1872, India has maintained an optional civil law of marriage: the Special Marriage Act, under which any two persons, of whatever religion or none, may marry before a registrar on notice, without religious ceremony, acquiring a status governed by the Act and a succession regime drawn from the Indian Succession Act rather than from either party’s personal law. The Act is, in structure, a fragment of a uniform civil code that operates by election: a common text, open to all citizens on identical terms, which displaces personal law for those who choose it and leaves personal law untouched for those who do not. It is the institutional descendant of the voluntary beginning Ambedkar described to the Constituent Assembly in 1948, the code applied, in the first instance, only to those who declare themselves prepared to be bound.

Is there a secular marriage law open to every Indian couple?

Yes. The Special Marriage Act 1954 permits any two persons, whatever their religion, to marry before a marriage officer on public notice and to take their status, divorce and succession from secular statutes rather than personal law. It is an optional civil regime, and the standing example of uniformity achieved by election rather than compulsion.

The comparison between the personal law route and this secular route, the notice period, the objections procedure, the consequences for joint family property and succession, and the circumstances in which couples choose each, is worked through in the comparison of personal and secular marriage law in India. For the purposes of the code debate, the Act’s significance is argumentative, and both camps conscript it. Supporters of a code point to its existence as proof that a common text can be drafted, administered and lived under without social rupture. Opponents of compulsion point to the same existence as proof that the citizen who wants secular law already has it, and that what a mandatory code adds to the present settlement is not the availability of common law but the withdrawal of every alternative to it. The Act also exhibits, in miniature, the compromises any real code contains: its own terms were shaped by the politics of its passage, its notice and objection machinery has been criticised as exposing inter-community couples to family and social retaliation, and its succession consequences, severing a marrying Hindu from the joint family in defined circumstances, are a reminder that opting into uniformity has always carried a price list. An optional code that citizens use in large numbers is nonetheless a datum neither camp can wave away: uniformity by consent is not a thought experiment in India but a functioning, if modestly used, institution.

The modesty of that use is itself argued from both directions, and the argument is a fair sample of the whole debate’s method. Supporters of a mandatory code read the Special Marriage Act’s limited uptake as the measure of the opt-in model’s ceiling: the citizens with the least power inside a family, a young woman whose marriage her community is arranging, are precisely those least able to insist on the registrar against the ceremony, so an optional regime leaves the unequal systems sovereign over exactly the people whose equality is the stated object. Opponents read the same uptake as revealed preference: offered a secular law on equal terms since 1954, most citizens have continued to marry within their own law, which on this reading is evidence that the personal laws are lived commitments rather than cages, and that the demand for a mandatory code comes from outside the populations it would bind. Neither reading is provable from the uptake figures alone, since couples choose the personal law route for reasons of property, family peace and ceremony, and of conviction besides; but the two readings mark the exact point where the debate stops being about texts and becomes a disagreement about what other people’s choices mean.

The two existing examples of a uniform civil code, tested against uniformity

Article 44’s supporters and opponents share one habit: both treat the two Indian territories that live under common civil codes as exhibits, the first camp as proof that a code works, the second as proof that uniformity is a label rather than a fact. The territories repay direct examination, because on inspection each camp’s exhibit supports the other camp’s qualification, and the descriptive truth about both is the same. A code in force in India has never yet been uniform in the strong sense the debate imagines, and the reasons are not accidents of drafting but features of the material.

Goa’s code is the older exhibit by a century and a half. The Portuguese Civil Code of 1867 was extended to Goa by royal decree of 18 November 1869 and took effect there in 1870. When Goa became part of India in December 1961, Section 5(1) of the Goa, Daman and Diu (Administration) Act 1962 continued in force all laws operating in the territory until a competent legislature amended or repealed them, and the code accordingly survived, its family provisions in substantial part, while the central personal law statutes were not extended to the territory. The result is the system Coutinho praised: one code governing marriage, divorce, matrimonial property and succession for residents irrespective of religion, with compulsory civil registration of marriage, a default regime of communion of assets between spouses under which property is held in common and divided in halves on dissolution, and a legitime that reserves a compulsory portion of a parent’s estate, one half in the standard case, to the children, daughters included. On the measures the code’s admirers choose, the record is genuinely impressive: a common family law administered across a society of Hindus, Catholics and Muslims for fifteen decades, under which a Muslim man whose marriage is registered in Goa cannot practise polygamy and no verbal divorce exists.

What sort of instrument the Goan code is deserves attention, because the debate often treats it as though it were a family code and nothing more. It is a general civil code of the nineteenth-century European type, whose books govern persons, property, obligations and succession together, with family law forming one part of a comprehensive private law. Goans therefore encounter the code well outside marriage: the compulsory inventory proceedings on a death, in which the estate is listed, the heirs ascertained and the compulsory shares protected before partition, are the code’s machinery at work in the Coutinho litigation itself, and land, contract and obligation in the territory have run in its channels for generations. A national instrument modelled on Goa would accordingly be a far larger legislative enterprise than a family law statute, and the observation cuts in both directions. Supporters reply that comprehensiveness is exactly the point, that a code which unified only the family’s law while leaving property and obligation plural would be uniform in name. Opponents reply that the scale is precisely the risk, since a general code displaces not only rules its drafters have debated but the whole settled texture of private law in every region, most of it uncontroversial and much of it never examined in the family-law debate at all.

The qualifications are not footnotes; they are rules of the code itself. A marriage celebrated in church by Catholics has civil effect under arrangements descending from the canonical marriage decree of 1946, so that one community marries, for civil purposes, in a religious form the code incorporates, and an annulment pronounced by the ecclesiastical authorities carries civil consequences for that community while every other resident must go to a civil court. The regime of communion of assets, the code’s most admired uniformity, is a default and not a command: couples may displace it by antenuptial contract and carry different property consequences into the same legal system. The Portuguese administration separately codified the usages and customs of the Hindus of the territory, and the usages decree of 1880 preserved to a Hindu husband the possibility of a second marriage in defined circumstances, where the first wife had borne no child by the age of twenty-five or no male child by the age of thirty, a provision aimed at the continuity of the male line that sits inside the celebrated code to this day; the government of Goa, defending the code against the charge, has answered that the provision is a dead letter unused for generations, which may be true of its use and is not an answer about its text. Succession, finally, has been substantially re-legislated by the territory’s own legislature in the Goa Succession, Special Notaries and Inventory Proceedings Act 2012, so that the exhibit cited as a single Portuguese code is in part a twenty-first century Goan statute. None of this makes the Goan achievement small. It makes it precise: Goa operates a common code with community-specific forms, contractual exits and preserved usages built into it, which is to say a code that purchased commonality by accommodation. Goans themselves conduct the argument on exactly these lines. Goan women’s lawyers, among them the lawyer and campaigner Albertina Almeida, have praised the communion regime’s equal property consequences between spouses while cataloguing the survivals that qualify the code’s uniformity, which is the national debate carried on inside the one community that lives under the precedent, by the people with the strongest claim to judge it from experience.

Uttarakhand’s code is the deliberate exhibit, drafted to be one. A five-member expert committee chaired by Justice Ranjana Prakash Desai, a retired judge of the Supreme Court, consulted widely, reported in February 2024, and saw its draft introduced in the state assembly on 6 February 2024 and passed the following day, in a sitting where opposition members attacked the live-in registration provisions as an invasion of private life. The Uniform Civil Code of Uttarakhand Act, Act 3 of 2024, received the President’s assent on 11 March 2024, travelled the Article 254 route described earlier, and was brought into force on 27 January 2025 with its rules. Its contents, stated neutrally, are these. It sets a common age of marriage, twenty-one years for men and eighteen for women, for every community. It requires monogamy and prohibits polygamy, and it makes marriage registrable, with registration to be completed within sixty days. It provides a single set of grounds and a single judicial procedure for divorce for all residents, ending dissolution by unilateral extrajudicial means, the practices of instant triple talaq, nikah halala and iddat among them. It recasts succession in gender-neutral language, speaking of the child rather than the son or the daughter, with sons and daughters taking equal shares. It covers adoption within the same frame. And it does something no personal law and no earlier code attempted: it brings live-in relationships inside the statute, requiring partners to file a statement with a Registrar within one month, empowering the Registrar to inquire, treating the children of such relationships as legitimate children of the couple with full inheritance rights, giving a deserted woman partner a claim to maintenance, and backing the filing duty with penalties, imprisonment of up to three months or a fine after notice for a failure to register, and a higher fine for a false statement. Where a partner is under twenty-one, the Registrar must inform the parents or guardian, a provision the code’s critics fastened on as the state reporting adult citizens to their families.

The code’s exclusions are as deliberate as its contents. It does not apply to members of the Scheduled Tribes, whom its application clause leaves outside altogether, nor to the persons and communities whose customary rights stand protected under Part XXI of the Constitution. It applies to the residents of Uttarakhand, and it follows them: a resident in a live-in relationship outside the state is within the filing duty, so the code is personal to the resident in a manner reminiscent of the personal laws it replaced. Its treatment of marriage retains the pluralism of form, since marriages may be solemnised by the rites and customs of any community, with the code governing consequences rather than ceremonies; and the prohibited degrees of marriage carry a customary exception, so that a union barred by the schedule may stand if the custom of the parties permits it. The code is therefore uniform in a specific and limited sense: within its territory, for the population it covers, it subjects every community to the same civil consequences of marriage, divorce and death, while exempting an entire constitutionally protected category of the population, preserving customary exceptions at its edges, and regulating a subject, cohabitation, that takes it beyond the personal law field it unified. Its supporters are entitled to call this the most complete code India has enacted. Its critics are entitled to observe that the exemption was not an oversight but the price of enactment, and to ask what a national code’s exemption schedule would have to contain to pass at all.

The code’s preparation and reception complete its place in the debate. The expert committee that drafted it reported receiving some 2.3 lakh written suggestions during its work, a figure the state government presented as evidence of the consultation behind the text, and the rules framed under the Act built a registration portal through which the code’s filings are made, so that the code operates, unusually for Indian family law, as a substantially digital regime whose obligations run through an online register. Its propagation began before its working could be assessed in practice. National leaders of the ruling party have commended the Uttarakhand text as the model on which a national code would be built, and Gujarat’s government, when it constituted its own drafting committee in February 2025, appointed the same chair, Justice Ranjana Prakash Desai, who had chaired the Uttarakhand committee. The state experiment thus entered the national argument as a template almost at once, which is itself a datum for both sides: for supporters, proof that the design question has an answer that a legislature has enacted and a state is administering; for opponents, proof that a text drafted for one small and comparatively homogeneous state is being generalised in rhetoric long before its consequences, for the women it registers and the couples it fines, can be known.

What would a code have to standardise before it could be called uniform?

It would have to cover every resident without a population exemption, prescribe one set of consequences for marriage, divorce, maintenance, adoption and succession with no community-specific form or preserved usage inside it, and leave no customary or contractual route to different consequences for the same act. Neither Indian code meets that standard.

The comparison can be set out in one view.

Test	Goa civil code	Uttarakhand code of 2024
Applies to all residents	Yes, to persons domiciled in Goa irrespective of religion, and it travels with the Goan domicile to property outside the state	Yes, to residents of Uttarakhand irrespective of religion, and it follows residents in live-in relationships outside the state
Any community or group excluded	No community excluded from coverage, but forms differ by community within the code	Yes, members of the Scheduled Tribes are excluded altogether, and Part XXI protected communities stand outside
Differential rule surviving within it	Catholic canonical marriage with civil effect and ecclesiastical annulment; the 1880 usages preserving a Hindu husband’s second marriage in defined circumstances; the property regime displaceable by antenuptial contract	Customary exception to the prohibited degrees; marriage solemnised by the rites of any community; a registration regime for live-in relationships that has no counterpart elsewhere in India
What it covers	Marriage, divorce and separation, matrimonial property under a default communion of assets, succession with a compulsory legitime for children, guardianship	Marriage, divorce, maintenance, adoption, succession with equal shares for sons and daughters, and the registration of live-in relationships
What it leaves to other law	Criminal law and general statutes of the Union; succession substantially re-legislated by the Goa Act of 2012; matters outside the family field under national law	Criminal law and general statutes of the Union; the whole field of tribal customary law; every question arising outside the state’s resident population

The table is the article’s findable claim in tabular form, and its lesson is the namable claim restated: the practical question in this debate has never been uniformity against difference. It is which differences a code would retain, for whom, and at whose insistence. Goa retained the differences a colonial power negotiated with the communities it governed. Uttarakhand retained the differences the Constitution’s tribal settlement required and the ones its drafters judged prudent. A national code would retain the differences its passage required, and those would be negotiated in the same currency.

The design question: the schedule of exceptions

The tribal and north-eastern protections are the part of this subject the national debate discusses least and a national draft would meet first, because they are not policy preferences that a majority can simply outvote in the ordinary way of legislation; they are constitutional text. The Fifth Schedule empowers the Governor in the scheduled areas to direct that Acts of Parliament or of a state legislature shall not apply, or shall apply only with modifications, and to make regulations for the peace and good government of those areas. The Sixth Schedule goes further in the autonomous districts of Assam, Meghalaya, Tripura and Mizoram: the district councils are themselves legislatures for the family field, empowered to make laws on the inheritance of property, on marriage and divorce, and on social customs, and in the Khasi Hills, where descent and ancestral property run through the female line and the youngest daughter is the customary custodian of the ancestral house, those councils operate a matrilineal order that no Indian statute created and none has displaced. Articles 371A and 371G then place the religious and social practices, the customary law and procedure, and the administration of justice according to customary law of Nagaland and Mizoram beyond the automatic reach of Parliament altogether: an Act of Parliament on those matters does not apply to either state unless its legislative assembly so resolves.

Place those provisions beside Article 44 and the design problem states itself. A code that is uniform throughout the territory of India cannot be enacted over Nagaland and Mizoram without their assemblies’ resolutions, cannot be applied to the Sixth Schedule districts without displacing legislatures the Constitution created for exactly these subjects, and cannot be extended to the scheduled areas without confronting the Governor’s power of exclusion and the political settlements those schedules embody. The Uttarakhand drafters met the state-scale version of the problem and solved it by exclusion, writing the Scheduled Tribes out of the code; the resolutions of the Nagaland and Mizoram assemblies record what the national-scale version of the same encounter looks like from the other side. This is the series’ recurring finding applied to its largest subject: a statute’s exemptions define it more than its objects clause does, and a code is no exception. The drafting question that decides what any enacted uniform civil code would actually be is not the content of its chapters on marriage or succession, on which most commentary concentrates. It is the content of its application clause and its schedule of exceptions, the list of peoples, territories and subjects to which the uniform law would not apply. Until a draft exists, the debate is about a word. The moment a draft exists, the debate will be about its exceptions, and the exceptions are where the Constitution’s plural settlements are waiting.

The federal dimension completes the design problem. A state code and a national code are not the same proposal at different scales. A state code, as Uttarakhand shows, can be enacted by a single legislature for a comparatively homogeneous population, travel the presidential assent route, and accept a tribal exclusion that its own demography makes cheap. A national code must either negotiate the north-eastern resolutions and the scheduled areas in advance or carry exclusions that make its uniformity claim nominal across a significant part of the Union’s territory and population. Conversely, a proliferation of state codes, each with its own exceptions and its own novelties such as live-in registration, produces a map of family law that varies by state as the present map varies by community, an outcome the directive’s territorial phrase was written against. Neither the state road nor the national road arrives at the destination the phrase describes without remainder. That is not an argument against travelling; it is the accurate description of the terrain, and it is the description the debate most often skips.

Underneath the whole design problem sits a drafting fork that both existing codes have answered, in opposite ways, and that every future draft will have to answer community by community. A drafter who meets a difference he judges worth respecting has two techniques available. He can write the accommodation inside the text, as Goa did with canonical marriage and its civil effects, and as Uttarakhand did with the customary exception to its prohibited degrees; coverage stays formally complete while the substance concedes. Or he can place the population outside the code altogether, as Uttarakhand did with the Scheduled Tribes and as the Hindu Marriage Act did before it; the substance of the uniform chapters stays clean while the coverage concedes. The sum of those choices, made clause by clause and community by community, is what will decide whether any resulting instrument is a uniform code carrying exceptions or a frame of exceptions carrying uniform chapters, and it will be decided in the application clause and the schedules, the parts of a bill that floor debates reach last and commentators read least. Matriliny concentrates the fork into a single example. A code applied without accommodation to the Khasi Hills would abolish, in the name of gender equality, one of the world’s surviving matrilineal property orders, under which descent runs through women and the ancestral property is held in female custodianship. Its supporters would have to defend that result as equality, a defence no participant in the debate has yet attempted in those terms, and its opponents would have to explain why a difference that empowers women deserves less protection than differences that subordinate them, an explanation the pluralist literature has been equally reluctant to give. The example is small in population and large in what it reveals: the debate’s categories, uniformity and difference, equality and pluralism, do not align as neatly as either camp’s slogans suggest.

What is settled, what is contested, and on what ground

Template honesty requires the closing separation this framework demands: what the record settles, what remains contested as a matter of fact, and what is contested as a matter of value and therefore not resolvable by any accumulation of record.

Settled, as propositions of law and of documented history: Article 44 is a non-enforceable directive addressed to the State in the wide sense, legislatures of the Union and the states alike; it specifies no subjects, no design and no date. The Constituent Assembly debated it on 23 November 1948, rejected amendments that would have exempted personal law or required community consent, and adopted it in its endeavour form, its chairman recording that a future Parliament could begin voluntarily. Legislative competence over the field is concurrent under Entry 5, and a state code is constitutionally possible, as Uttarakhand’s enactment through presidential assent demonstrates. The twenty-first Law Commission concluded in a consultation paper of 31 August 2018, and not in a report, that a uniform civil code was neither necessary nor desirable at that stage, and proposed the reform of discriminatory provisions within each personal law instead; the twenty-second Commission reopened consultation on 14 June 2023 and its term ended without a report. The Supreme Court has observed, urged and regretted, and has stated through Lily Thomas that it has directed nothing. Goa’s code and Uttarakhand’s code both contain exclusions or differential rules, which is a description of their texts and not an evaluation of them.

Contested on the facts, where evidence could in principle move the argument: whether imposed codes are observed or evaded in the family field, and at what rate; whether the Goan system has delivered measurably better outcomes for women than the personal law systems, and by which measures; whether the Uttarakhand code’s registration machinery will protect the women it names or expose the couples it registers; whether the responses to the 2023 consultation divided in any direction that a published analysis could show. On each of these the record is thinner than the debate’s confidence, and this article has asserted no figure for any of them.

Contested on values, where no record can decide: whether equality of civil status is a promise that overrides a community’s claim to govern its own family life, or whether the freedom to live under one’s own law is itself one of the equalities the Constitution promised; whether national integration is strengthened by common civil law or by the visibly kept pluralism of the founding settlement; whose norms a code drafted by a majority legislature would universalise, and whether that question is a reason for pause or a reason the drafting must be taken out of majoritarian hands by insisting on rights floors. These are the questions the Constituent Assembly argued in 1948 with the partition in fresh memory, and they are the questions a Parliament would argue again over any draft. The debate has lasted seventy-five years not because its facts are obscure but because its values are opposed, and the service an account can render is the one attempted here: to keep the facts from being conscripted, so that the values are argued in the open, under their own names.

One discipline follows for anyone who joins the argument from this point. The debate’s documents are short and quotable, and they punish excerpting. The consultation paper of 2018 argues at length for the reform of discriminatory law within each system and cannot fairly be rendered as a defence of every rule it examined. Ambedkar’s Assembly speech contains both the legislative power he defended and the voluntary beginning he proposed, and cannot fairly be rendered as either a command to impose or a veto on imposition. The Coutinho judgment praises Goa in a sentence that carries its own exception inside it, and cannot fairly be quoted with the exception trimmed away. The two codes that exist can be inspected, provision by provision, by any reader who doubts a summary of them, including the summaries in this article. The positions, by contrast, are genuinely opposed on the present record, and no accumulation of quotation will reconcile them, because they rest on different orderings of equality and pluralism, two commitments the Constitution holds together and ranks nowhere. What an honest participant owes the subject is not a verdict but the separation attempted here: the record in one hand, the values in the other, and no conscription of the first to do the work of the second.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: What does Article 44 require?

Article 44, in Part IV of the Constitution, provides that the State shall endeavour to secure for the citizens a uniform civil code throughout the territory of India. Strictly, it requires an endeavour rather than a result. It is a directive principle of state policy, and Article 37 makes the directive principles non-enforceable by any court, so no citizen can sue for a code and no court can order a legislature to enact one. It is addressed to the State in the wide constitutional sense, covering state governments and legislatures as well as Parliament. It does not name the subjects a code must cover, prescribe its content, or set any deadline, and it does not override the fundamental rights in Part III.

Q: What did the Constituent Assembly decide about a uniform civil code?

On 23 November 1948 the Assembly debated the provision as draft Article 35. Members including Mohammad Ismail Sahib, Naziruddin Ahmad and Mahboob Ali Baig moved amendments that would have exempted personal law from a future code or made any change depend on the previous approval of the community concerned. Those amendments were put to the vote and rejected. The Assembly adopted the clause as a directive principle in its endeavour form, unenforceable in court, after B. R. Ambedkar, for the Drafting Committee, argued that it conferred a power on a future Parliament rather than imposing an immediate duty. The provision entered the Constitution as Article 44.

Q: What did the Law Commission conclude in 2018?

The twenty-first Law Commission, chaired by Justice B. S. Chauhan, issued a Consultation Paper on Reform of Family Law on 31 August 2018, the last day of its term. At paragraph 1.15 it stated that it had dealt with laws that are discriminatory rather than providing a uniform civil code, which it described as neither necessary nor desirable at this stage, and it observed that the mere existence of difference does not imply discrimination but is indicative of a robust democracy. Its programme was the reform of discriminatory provisions within each personal law. The document was a consultation paper, not a report, and the Commission submitted no report on the subject.

Q: Why did the Law Commission reopen the question in 2023?

The twenty-second Law Commission issued a public notice on 14 June 2023 inviting fresh views from the public and from recognised religious organisations. Its recorded reasons were the lapse of time, more than four years having passed since the consultation paper of August 2018, the relevance and importance of the subject, and the various court orders touching it. The Minister of State for Law and Justice placed those reasons before the Rajya Sabha in a written answer of 20 July 2023. The notice reopened a consultation; it recorded no conclusion, withdrew nothing the earlier Commission had written, and published no draft of a code.

Q: Can a state enact its own uniform civil code?

Yes. The subjects a civil code covers, marriage and divorce, infants and minors, adoption, wills, intestacy and succession, joint family and partition, and all matters historically governed by personal law, stand in Entry 5 of the Concurrent List, on which Parliament and every state legislature may both legislate. A state code that conflicts with central family statutes must be reserved for the President’s consideration and receive the President’s assent to prevail within the state under Article 254. Uttarakhand travelled exactly that route: its assembly passed the code in February 2024, the President assented in March 2024, and the code came into force on 27 January 2025.

Q: What does the Uttarakhand code contain?

The Uniform Civil Code of Uttarakhand Act, Act 3 of 2024, sets a common age of marriage of twenty-one years for men and eighteen for women, requires monogamy, and makes marriages registrable within sixty days. It gives all residents a single set of divorce grounds and a single judicial procedure, ending unilateral extrajudicial dissolution. Its succession provisions speak of the child rather than the son or the daughter, with sons and daughters taking equal shares, and it covers adoption in the same frame. It also requires partners in live-in relationships to file a statement with a Registrar within one month, treats the children of such relationships as legitimate, and backs the filing duty with penalties. It does not apply to members of the Scheduled Tribes.

Q: Is the Goa civil code actually uniform?

Not completely. Goa lives under a single code, the Portuguese Civil Code of 1867 as continued after 1961, which governs residents irrespective of religion and gives spouses a default communion of assets and children a compulsory share in a parent’s estate. Within that common frame, differences survive. A marriage celebrated in church by Catholics has civil effect, and an ecclesiastical annulment carries civil consequences for that community alone. The usages preserved for the Hindus of the territory retain a provision for a Hindu husband’s second marriage in defined circumstances. Couples may displace the common property regime by antenuptial contract, and succession has been substantially re-legislated by a Goan Act of 2012. The code is common; it is not wholly uniform.

Q: How would a uniform code treat tribal customary law?

A national code would meet constitutional protections that stand in its path. The Sixth Schedule empowers autonomous district councils to make laws on inheritance, marriage, divorce and social customs in their districts. Articles 371A and 371G provide that Acts of Parliament on religious or social practices and customary law do not apply to Nagaland or Mizoram unless the state assembly so resolves. The Fifth Schedule lets the Governor exclude or modify the application of legislation in scheduled areas. A drafter must therefore choose between exempting tribal communities, as the Uttarakhand code exempted the Scheduled Tribes, or negotiating the protections themselves, which no draft has attempted. The treatment of tribal custom is a design question no code can evade.

Q: Is the rest of Indian law already uniform across religions?

Largely, yes. Criminal law, criminal and civil procedure, the law of evidence, contract, the transfer of property and most commercial law are single codes binding every citizen regardless of faith, and the maintenance remedy in the criminal procedure code applies across communities as well. The plural field is the civil law of status and the family: marriage, divorce, adoption, guardianship, succession and inheritance, together with religious endowments and the customary law of tribal communities. That is why the debate is precise in a way its slogans are not. Nobody proposes to unify the criminal law, which is unified already; the argument concerns whether the remaining plural field should follow the rest of the legal system into a common text.

Q: What did Dr B. R. Ambedkar argue about a uniform civil code in the Constituent Assembly?

Ambedkar defended draft Article 35 for the Drafting Committee on 23 November 1948. He argued that personal law had never been as immune from legislation as the amendment movers supposed: apart from marriage and succession, every field once governed by religious rules, crime, evidence and property transfer among them, already stood under common codes. He stressed that the clause imposed no immediate obligation, arming a future Parliament with a power whose timing it would judge. And he proposed that a beginning could be made voluntarily, the code applying at first only to those who declared themselves prepared to be bound by it, on the precedent of the Shariat Act of 1937. His conclusion was that there was no substance in the amendments, and the Assembly agreed.

Q: What did the Supreme Court say about Goa’s civil code?

In Jose Paulo Coutinho v. Maria Luiza Valentina Pereira in 2019, a bench of Justices Deepak Gupta and Aniruddha Bose held that the civil code of Goa governs the succession of persons of Goan domicile even in respect of property outside the state. The judgment observed that the founders had hoped and expected the State to endeavour to secure a uniform civil code, that no action had been taken in that regard although Hindu law was codified in 1956, and described Goa as a shining example of an Indian State which has a uniform civil code applicable to all, regardless of religion except while protecting certain limited rights. The Court noted that men whose marriages are registered in Goa cannot practise polygamy and that the code provides no verbal divorce.

Q: Can a citizen choose not to be governed by a uniform civil code?

Under the codes that exist, no. The Goa code governs persons of Goan domicile as their civil law, and the Uttarakhand code governs the state’s residents, subject to its exemptions for the Scheduled Tribes and protected communities; neither contains an individual opt-out for a resident who prefers a personal law. Choice exists in the opposite direction: any citizen may elect the secular regime of the Special Marriage Act 1954 for marriage and take its succession consequences, whatever their personal law says. The Constituent Assembly heard, and Ambedkar floated, a third design, a code that would begin by binding only those who declared themselves willing to be bound. No enacted code has adopted that design.

Q: What is the uniform rights alternative to a uniform civil code?

It is the position that the object worth pursuing is equality of rights rather than uniformity of text: a daughter’s share, a wife’s exit from marriage, a mother’s guardianship and a widow’s maintenance should be the same across communities, and that equality can be reached by reforming each personal law to a common standard of rights, reinforced by general statutes that bind everyone. The twenty-first Law Commission’s consultation paper of 2018 is the position in institutional form, since its programme was the amendment of discriminatory provisions within each system, tested against the fundamental rights. The scholar Flavia Agnes is its best-known academic holder, arguing that uniformity and equality are different projects and that a code drafted in a majoritarian climate may generalise the majority’s customs rather than the Constitution’s values.

Q: Why do supporters link a uniform civil code to gender equality?

Because the subordination the code is said to cure is distributed by community, and much of it is borne by women. Supporters point to inequalities that have stood in the personal laws: smaller inheritance shares, unilateral and extrajudicial divorce, guardianship texts that named the father first, and maintenance rules that left divorced women dependent on the summary remedy of the criminal procedure code. Their argument is that a single statute must be drafted under Articles 14 and 15 and can be challenged in court as legislation, whereas uncodified personal law stands largely beyond constitutional challenge under the doctrine of Narasu Appa Mali. The argument is pressed from within the communities as well, by the women who litigated against instant triple talaq and by organisations such as the Bharatiya Muslim Mahila Andolan, which campaigns for a codified and gender-just family law.

Q: Why do opponents link a uniform civil code to freedom of religion?

Because for the communities that resist a code, family law is not a regulatory preference but a religious obligation, and the Constitution protects the sphere in which it operates. Article 25 guarantees the freedom to profess, practise and propagate religion, Article 26 protects a denomination’s right to manage its own affairs in matters of religion, and Article 29 protects a community’s right to conserve its culture. Opponents argue that these guarantees were promises made to minorities at the founding, that a code enacted over a community’s refusal by a majority legislature withdraws by numbers what was promised by right, and that the Constituent Assembly’s rejection of the consent amendments settled the power question without extinguishing the moral claim the amendments recorded.

Q: What did the Law Commission ask the public in its 2016 questionnaire on family law?

The twenty-first Law Commission opened its examination with an appeal and a questionnaire dated 7 October 2016, addressed to stakeholders and the public. It sought views on whether a uniform civil code was needed and what it should contain, on the reform of family law within the personal law systems, and on contested practices that were then before the courts and Parliament, including instant triple talaq and polygamy. It followed the questionnaire with further public appeals in March and April 2018 and consultations with political parties, religious organisations, women’s groups and scholars. The exercise ended with the Consultation Paper on Reform of Family Law of 31 August 2018 rather than with a report.

Q: Why are the live-in relationship provisions of the Uttarakhand code controversial?

The code requires partners in a live-in relationship to file a statement with a Registrar within one month, empowers the Registrar to hold an inquiry, requires the Registrar to inform the parents or guardian where a partner is under twenty-one, and punishes a failure to register, after notice, with imprisonment of up to three months or a fine. Critics, including opposition members in the state assembly, argue that the machinery invades the privacy the Supreme Court recognised as a fundamental right in the Puttaswamy judgment of 2017, exposes couples, above all inter-community couples, to family and social retaliation, and places a consensual adult relationship under state surveillance. The state government answers that registration protects the weaker partner, gives a deserted woman a maintenance claim the code expressly preserves, and secures the status and inheritance rights of children, whom the code treats as legitimate.

Q: What position has the All India Muslim Personal Law Board taken on a uniform civil code?

The Board, constituted in 1973 to defend the application of the Shariat, has maintained throughout that Muslim personal law rests on divine command and is not open to legislative reconstruction, and it has opposed a uniform civil code in its resolutions, its submissions to the Law Commission and its public campaigns. Its stated grounds are constitutional as well as theological: that a code would infringe the freedoms of religion in Articles 25 and 26, that it would fall unevenly on minorities whatever its neutral wording, and that diversity of family law is a feature of the Indian settlement rather than a defect. The Board’s position is a refusal in principle, distinct from the positions of Muslim women’s organisations that have demanded codified and gender-just law, and the contrast between the two is itself part of the debate’s record.

Q: How do the Goa and Uttarakhand codes differ in their origins?

The Goa code was inherited, not designed for the debate it is cited in. It is the Portuguese Civil Code of 1867, extended to the territory in 1869, which survived Goa’s integration into India because the Administration Act of 1962 continued the laws in force there; no Indian legislature enacted it as a uniform civil code, and its community accommodations descend from colonial bargains with the territory’s communities. The Uttarakhand code is the opposite kind of instrument: a code drafted for the purpose by an expert committee chaired by Justice Ranjana Prakash Desai, introduced and passed by the state assembly in February 2024 as the fulfilment of an election promise, assented to by the President that March and brought into force in January 2025. One code is an inheritance that acquired a reputation; the other is a manifesto that acquired a statute book.

Q: What happens after the Law Commission completes a consultation on a uniform civil code?

A consultation does not bind anyone. The Commission may proceed to a report containing recommendations to the government, which Parliament may take up, modify or leave unactioned, since Law Commission advice has no legislative force of its own. The record illustrates every branch of that sequence. The twenty-first Commission’s exercise ended in a consultation paper in August 2018 and no report followed. The twenty-second Commission reopened the consultation in June 2023, received responses on an unprecedented scale, and its term ended on 31 August 2024 without a report on the subject. Until a report exists and a government adopts it, the legal position is unchanged: the directive stands in Article 44, competence stands in Entry 5, and the initiative rests with legislatures.