Role Name Affiliation

National Coordinator
Subject Coordinator Prof. Sujata Patel Department of Sociology, University of
Hyderabad
Paper Coordinator Anurekha Chari Wagh Department of Sociology, Savitribai
Phule Pune University
Content Writer Debjani Chakravarthy Assistant Professor of Sociology
College of Humanities and Social
Sciences
Utah Valley University
Content Reviewer Anurekha Chari Wagh Department of Sociology, University of
Pune
Language Editor Anurekha Chari Wagh Department of Sociology,
Savitribai Phule Pune University
Technical Conversion

Module Structure:

Section 1: The Legacy of Colonialism and

the Civil Code
The module is structured into three sections
followed by a conclusion. Section 2: The Ongoing Debate on Uniform
Civil Code
Section 3: Basic Concepts

Items Description of Module

Subject Name Sociology

Paper Name Sociology of Gender

Module Name/ Title Uniform Civil Code

1
Module ID

Pre-requisites 1. Some background on modern Indian history and the Constitution of

India.

2. Understanding of the terms “law,” “religion,” and “gender.”

3. Understanding ofdemocracy and religious fundamentalism.

Objectives 1. Learning about the Uniform Civil Code in India—its history,

political background, and effect on gender relations.

2. Learning about the current debates and multiple perspectives

on the controversial directive principle.

3. Learning about the politics of lawmaking, communalism and

secularism and their impact on women.

Keywords Civil code; Colonial modernity; Feminist Jurisprudence; Religious and

minority rights; Fundamental rights and directive principles in Indian
Constitution.

2
Uniform Civil Code

Introduction
Uniform Civil Code, a directive principle in the Indian Constitution has been the theme of one of
the most intense, intriguing and widespread debate that emerged in India‘s public life right from
the juncture that the constitution was adopted in 1950. You may have heard about the issue of
Uniform Civil Code (henceforth, UCC) in the recent statements by the Jamiat-e-Ulama Hind
(JUH) and All India Muslim Personal Law Board (AIMPLB) about how religious laws are a
matter of religious freedom. A country with a secular constitution such as India is expected to
uphold religious freedom as well as social justice. In this chapter we will learn about the UCC;
its history and the debates surrounding its (non) implementation; the issue of gender and law in
India—and the controversial question of how to balance religious and personal freedom as well
as secularism and social justice.
Directive principles in the constitution are those provisions that are required to be taken into
account by the state while making legislations, plans and policies. However these principles are
non-justiciable, unlike fundamental rights, that is, if they are infringed in any way by the state,
no judicial remedy is available to the citizens. In case of The Fundamental Rights embodied in
Part III of the Constitution— encroachment of such rights are subject to judicial remedy. The
rights of the citizen in the context of the directive principles may be exercised in an indirect way.
The citizens are expected to treat the directive principles as yardsticks of a government‘s
performance while expending their right to vote. The directive principle of UCC appears as
Article 44 in the Indian constitution, advising the state to enact a uniform, undifferentiated set of
civil laws throughout ‗the territory of India.‘ It reads:
The state shall endeavour to secure for the citizens a uniform civil code throughout the territory
of India.
The issue of UCC is closely tied to the operation of democracy in India, the formation of
nationalist discourses, and the disavowed continuity of both these phenomena with the
ideological and administrative apparatus of colonial rule. It also— as you will see— represents
the interface of gender issues with democracy, citizenship and formal equality.

3
Section 1: The Legacy of Colonialism and the Civil Code
Colonialism is project and practice of domination—mostly by European/Western/White powers—of
land, peoples, and cultures. Indian administrative and legal systems, as well as the idea of Indian
democracy have been largely derived from the British Colonial State. This is not to suggest that this
derivation or inheritance have been uncritical and uncontested. Cultures of anti-colonial resistance
thrived in the British era and thrive today. The concept of colonialism has been expanded to include
systems of domination that marginalize large sections of the population based on caste, gender,
religion, sexuality, language, location – and other realities. Thus, the notion of intersectionality—of
identities and politics—is essential to understand the evolution and issues surrounding the UCC. You
can refer to the module on Intersectionality theory for a better understanding. UCC is not just a legal
issue; it is a matter of intersecting identities and ideologies of gender, religion, and caste.

If you think that the UCC is a good idea, you might wonder why the provision on enacting one was
placed as a directive principle and not a fundamental right. Tenets of Liberal democracy suggest that
every citizen of a nation state must have equal legal rights. Yet in the Constitution, which lays down
the terms of democracy in India, a distinction is made between rights in the public and rights at the
private sphere. This distinction has been inherited from the colonial system and its lawmaking.

Colonial law first distinguished between criminal and civil law and placed laws regarding family
practices, such as, marriage, divorce, adoption and inheritance within civil law. All laws other than
family laws were universally applicable to all subjects. However, family laws were called personal
laws and were codified according to religious tenets—a task entrusted to Hindu and Islamic religious
authorities. The colonial state also drew a sharp distinction between the private and public sphere. In
the former, structures of traditional religion and family life were allowed to remain without any state
intervention (to stop any oppression of women and children). Interestingly, the colonial state used
gender justice and women‘s issues as a reason to justify colonial rule.
For the public sphere, strict universal laws about trade/commerce, criminal offences, and ownership of
property were instituted, so that civic and revenue administration becomes easier. The British state had
also formed alliances with religious authorities (such as Brahmans/Savarnacastes) to facilitate indirect

4
rule and social control. The notion of ―majority‖ and ―minority‖ for instance, is a framework of
assessing Indian pluralism constructed during the colonial period and is a part of the dominant
discourse of colonial modernity. This discourse assigns identities based on religion to various
communities for the purposes of maintaining administrative order within a deeply heterogeneous
empire. This approach undermines the vast diversity of society in India with its plurality of cultural
practices— relegating it instead to a society of just a few contending religious groups.The British
institutionalization of tribal identities follows the same logic. ―The definition of tribes as culturally
distinct—from Hindu society as well as from one another—hinged on a catalog of cultural, racial and
linguistic traits according to which they were labeled and classified. The anthropological gaze
constructed the ‗tribes‘ as unitary, well-integrated, and timeless wholes, unpolluted by contact with the
larger civilization until the advent of colonialism (Upadhya 2011, 268).‖ The question of tribes or
tribal rights is rarely raised in the debate on UCC.

Thus the British colonial state divided the legal domain into Criminal and Civil, further dividing the
‗civil‘ into personal and fiscal laws. It codified personal laws with the help of religious authorities.
Traditional family laws of Hinduism (like Mitakshara and Dayabhaga) and Islam (Sharia laws derived
from the Quran and the Hadith) were unified and organized within codes. The state envisioned gender
justice through passing of criminal laws prohibiting atrocious customary practices on women.
However, the state was disinterested to reform the religious family laws which are often inequitable
and unjust to women. This is related to the way in which colonialism differentiates the rights of
individuals in public and private domain. Colonial ideology imposed on Indian society followed the
logic of divide-and-rule.

So you can imagine how instead of eradicating social stratifications based on gender and caste, these
divisions were carefully nurtured by the state to ensure status quo and prevent mass rebellion. This
hands-free policy helped an initial commercial agency such as the East India Company to assume
power over vast territories and colonize them substantively and epistemologically. Law as well as
strengthening the hand of Brahmanism was a chief vehicle of this paternalistic control. There was
constant effort towards standardizing law for the benefit of the newly introduced colonial juridical
structure.The uniformity of colonial logichas left its indelible smear all over the Indian constitution and
the debate over UCC.

5
Fast forward to the era of freedom struggle and caste/religion identity politics of the 1930s and 40s:
when the constitution was being framed, self-identified secular nationalists recognized the
differentiation of rights based on caste/tribe and religion. Realizing that such divisiveness would
hamper the administration of formal equality and is central to the notion of liberal democracy—the
Constituent Assembly envisioned a Uniform Civil Code as a common legislation that would subject all
citizens in India to the same code or set of civil laws regardless of their religious, communal, caste,
racial, or ethnic identities. They also recognized that India had multiplicity of communities with
distinctive religious, linguistic, and local traditions. Yet a single, unified national identity had to be
shaped out of these diversities for the purposes of validating a new sovereign nation. Thus they
demanded that a civil code be created such that no community suffers disadvantages on account of the
law having a religious orientation. Not all the members of the Constituent Assembly accepted this
position however—thus a uniform civil code to govern family laws could not be consensually
introduced in the list of fundamental rights.

After independence, the judiciary was named the mouthpiece of Indian Constitution. This judiciary
used the nationalist- welfarist approach to the question of gender justice. In cases pertaining to
personal laws, the Supreme Court interpreted the religious personal laws in a way that is fair to
women. At the same time it kept on advising the state to implement article 44 and have common
family laws for all religious communities. The court reasoned that having a UCC would affect gender
justice as well as national unity. However, the independent state maintained the colonial tradition to
address women‘s issues through passing prohibitive laws. The Criminal Procedure Code of 1974 is a
prime example of this. As for Uniform Civil Code, despite efforts, the state till date has not been able
to frame it, let alone implement it.

Section 2: The Ongoing Debate on Uniform Civil Code

Any political debate in independent India such as those on UCC is couched in terms of binaries, in line
with the discourse of colonial modernity. The debates on Uniform Civil Code have always been
polarized around the twin axes of state-community, tradition-modernity, and religion-secularism: the
binaries of colonial modernity. The positions articulated by the judiciary, the Hindu fundamentalists

6
and the feminist movement on the civil code remain locked in the discourse of colonial modernity. We
will learn a bit more on colonial modernity in section 3.

The colonial government declared the setting up of a Constituent Assembly for independent India—
this committee was first summoned in 1946. Initially an advisory committee was set up which would
formulate the articles of the constitution. This advisory committee was further divided into three sub
committees on 1) Fundamental Rights 2) Minorities, 3) Tribal and Excluded areas. In March 1947, in
spite of compelling efforts by Dr.B.R.Ambedkar, MinooMasani, RajkumariAmrit Kaur and Hansa
Mehta (members of the subcommittee on Minorities) a provision of Uniform Civil Code that was
conceptualized as a unifying and egalitarian force, was decided by the ‗majority‘ to be outside the
scope of fundamental rights. The Uniform Civil Code was to ensure the unified legal subject or
citizenship that could resolve legal conflicts on account of presence of various religions and religious
laws. The provision of Uniform Civil Code was finally put, not in the justiciable provisions of
fundamental rights, but in the non-justiciable Directive Principles.

The first Prime Minister of an independent India Jawaharlal Nehru and the first law minister Dr. B. R
Ambedkar continued endorsing the UCC as an instrument of modernization, secularization, and
national integration. Various legislations were enacted in the 1950s to reform Hindu Personal law. A
comprehensive Hindu Code Bill, dealing with marriage and divorce, minority and guardianship,
maintenance and adoption and the mitakshara joint family issues was introduced in the constituent
assembly by Dr. B. R Ambedkar. This was met by furious objections by legislators and nationalist
leaders such as Sardar Patel, J. B Kripalani and Rajendra Prasad. The latter who was the first president
of independent India expressed his intention to ‗reserve presidential assent‘ to the Bill. (Jayal 1999,
Sen 2000)

At this stage the supporters as well as dissenters of the Hindu Code Bill invoked the UCCoften as the
only legitimate device of reform. Those in favor of Hindu personal law reforms referred to the
necessity of securing comprehensive, uniform, standardized laws over orthodox, religious and
traditional ones, as the deliberations on the UCC the in the constituent assembly had suggested. Many
dissenters reasoned that reforming only Hindu laws and leaving Islamic and other laws untouched
amounts to ―minority privilege.‖ Demand for Uniform Civil Code became a potent tactic for stalling

7
the Hindu Code Bill. There were many court cases that churned up the issue of the UCC but the
Mohammed Ahmed Khan vs. Shah Bano Begum Case of 1985 was the most important case that really
recharged the debate.

Mohammed Ahmed Khan, the appellant to Supreme Court had divorced the respondent, his wife, Shah
Bano by an irrevocable triple talaq. In April 1978 Shah Bano filed a petition under section 125
demanding maintenance. The appellant‘s defence to the respondent‘s petition was that she had ceased
to be his wife. Also, he had paid maintenance to her at the rate of Rs. 200/-for two years and had
deposited a sum of Rs. 3000/- in the court as Mehr (dower) during the period of iddat as per 127 (3) (b)
of Islamic Personal Law. In August 1979 the Magistrate directed Ahmed Khan to pay Rs. 25/- to
respondent by way of maintenance. In July 1980, in a revisional application filed by Shah Bano High
Court of Madhya Pradesh enhanced the amount of Maintenance to Rs. 179.20 per month. Ahmed Khan
filed an appeal before the Supreme Court by special leave claiming that Section 125 of the Criminal
Procedure Code would not apply to him as a Muslim. The Court found that two previous decisions (in
the Bai Tahira vs. Ali Hussain FidalliChothia case of 1979, and Fazlunbui vs. K Khader Vali case of
1980) upheld that a Muslim wife can apply for maintenance under section 125. Yet a bench consisting
of Justice MurtazaFazal Ali and Justice A. Varadarajan considered that those cases were not correctly
decided. As a result they referred the appeal to a larger bench by an order dated February 3, 1981.

Now a reconstituted Supreme Court Bench headed by Chief Justice Y. V Chandrchud on 23rd April
1985 dismissed the appeal, confirming the judgment of the Madhya Pradesh High Court, leaving it
open for the respondent to apply for an enhancement of maintenance allowance. The Supreme Court in
effect ruled that Section 125 overrides the Muslim Personal Law if there arose any conflict between the
two. There need be no conflict, the judgment asserted, citing and interpreting various ayats and suras
of the Koran that Muslim husbands had to provide for their divorced wives in case of their indigent
situations.

Apart from that the Court pronounced:

―It is also a matter of regret that Article 44 of our constitution has remained a dead letter.
…there is no evidence of any official activity for framing a common civil code for the
country. …. A common civil Code will help the cause of national integration by

8
 removing disparate loyalties to laws which have conflicting ideologies. No community is
likely to bell the cat by, making gratuitous concessions on this issue. It is the state which
is charged with a duty of securing a uniform civil code for its citizens of the country and
unquestionably has the legislative competence to do so.‖

The judgment in favor of Shah Bano was perceived as a judgment against Muslim Personal Law. The
issue of a divorced woman‘s protection from destitution and the meager sum of alimony involved was
buried under the waves of resentment against the judgment— perceived as an attack on Muslim
religious identity. This case became pivotal in redefining religious identities and majoritarian politics.
In the face of the overwhelming controversy totally altering the nature of the debate, Shah Bano
publicly retracted from the Supreme Court Judgment for the cause of being a devout Muslim first.

Countrywide agitations led by the Indian Union Muslim League, the Muslim Personal Law Board,
Jamat-I-Islami, and Jamat-al-Ulema worried the Congress Government led by Rajiv Gandhi. Troubled
by the prospect of loss of Muslim support, The Muslim Women‘s (Protection of Right in Divorce) Act
1986 was passed in a hurry, despite protests from women‘s groups and social-justice-consciouspeoples
from all religious affiliations. The issue was also espoused by rapidly rising communal groups as a
means to impose Hindutva hegemony. With the passing of the Shah Bano judgment and the Muslim
Women‘s (Protection of Right in Divorce) Act the issue of personal law and the Uniform Civil Code
became deeply entrenched in combative communal politics.

The issue of gender justice was swept aside. The BJP emerged as a strident critic of Rajiv Gandhi‘s
actions during the Shah Bano controversy that overturned a ‗secular‘ Supreme Court ruling. It is
important to note here that the BJP as well as the RSS have always self-consciously based their
contentions in terms of democracy, modernity and secularism. This is related to the problematic of
secularism in the Indian Constitution which can be a tool of minority oppression. If you have followed
politics over the last two decades you know that both the Congress and the BJP have twisted around
the notion of secularism to practice divisive communal politics.

Today, many women‘s organizations view the possibility of a UCC as a dubious instrument of
Hindutva/Brahmanicalfundamentalist domination. The movement‘s focus has shifted from demanding
legislation from the state to promoting women‘s participation in the processes of the state and the

9
political economy; being part of legislative and other decision making. It is recognized that though
autonomous women‘s movement has been greatly able to render women‘s issues visible and moot, and
such a movement is important in its own right –formal political participation remains important.
Feminists have begun to examine closely the relationship between women, state and legislation. They
have identified the problem in the context of the state‘s ambivalent treatment of women as rights-
endowed citizens and gendered subjects enmeshed in patriarchal social relations. The root of the
problem seems to reside in the nation‘s constitution that is unable to decide between the import of
women‘s rights and (religious) community rights. Therefore, as Anupama Roy opines, ―women‘s lived
experiences have had therefore, to contend with various superscriptions and circumscriptions. The
idealized super scribed woman---pure chaste with superhuman qualities purging the body politic----
ensnares women within normative forms of behaviour. A unified category of women----a collective
body of women, as agents and subjects of liberatory change---proves elusive as it attempts to
homogenize disparate entities, ironically within an abstracted category of woman.‖ (Roy 2005: 229)

There is also a realization that passing more and more laws is not a solution to women‘s problems.
This skepticism is captured in Flavia Agnes‘ words, ―If Oppression could be tackled by passing laws,
then this decade would have to be adjudged a golden period for Indian Women (Agnes 1992, 26).‖
Law and awareness raising goes hand-in-hand; laws do not change minds and often cannot cause a
dent in centuries of heteropatriarchal colonial Brahminical social structure. Gender justice is also a
matter of intersectionality—we cannot think of a uniform category of ―male,‖ or ―female‖ unless we
understand that these categories represent lived experiences of people negotiating not just structures of
gender but also caste, class, religion, language, ability, and geo-political location. The experience of a
Muslim (or Hindu, or Christian, or Sikh) woman living in various parts of the country (think about the
variations in urban and semi-urban areas, the experience of living in deeply contested territories in
Kashmir and the North-East, what it means to be a migrant worker, a Dalit student, a ―North Indian‖ in
South India and vice-versa—what these categories and labels mean) will be very different. Laws are
not innocent or neutral; they often represent the political will at the heart of a ruling regime, they often
represent a political agenda more than ―justice.‖

With that, let us discuss some basic concepts that will help you understand the debate on UCC better.

10
Section 3: Basic Concepts
Civil Code:Civil code is understood as law that deals with ―private‖ matters. The notion of a civil code
arose from the way the colonial state intervened in Lawmaking in India. They started by making a
sharp distinction between criminal and civil laws. Within civil laws, a distinction was made between
family laws and fiscal laws. Criminal and fiscal laws replicated English laws while codification of
family laws was left to religious experts— to be based on traditional/religious laws.―Civil Code‖ is
thus the code name for personal laws: described in entry 5 of list III of the 7 th Schedule of the Indian
constitution as laws that govern—―...Marriage and divorce; infants and minors; adoption; wills,
intestacy and succession; joint family and partition.‖ Women are disproportionally affected by
family/personal laws in any hetero-patriarchal society—India is no exception. UCC, as you know is a
directive principle in the Indian Constitution that directs the state to ensure that civil code in India in
the same for all citizens. This is a highly contested position where issues of gender, citizenship and
human rights are sometimes swept under the rug and the dynamics of electoral politics and vote banks,
the rise of Hindu fundamentalism and prospects of coercive majoritarianism loom large. There is a
deep discontent in countries such as the United States about male and misogynist lawmakers creating
laws about women‘s bodies and lives—without any consultation, feedback process, or empathy. UCC
and its fraught history in India show a similar trend.
Commentators have variously referred to the Uniform Civil Code as ‗Common Civil Code‘ or
‗Equal Personal Laws‘. In legal terminology, a code means a collection or compendium of
various laws relating to a particular subject field. The Criminal (procedure) Code, The Indian
Penal Code, and the Civil (Procedure) Code, are all examples of codes.

Colonial Modernity:The notion of colonial modernity is important in understanding how the

UCC debate has unfolded. Colonial modernity is usually imposed by the colonizer/imperialist
entity on spaces colonized for purposes of social and governmental control. In British India this
manifested itself in introduction of English and professional education, law, comprehensive
methods of revenue collection, new methods of agriculture aimed solely at farming cash crops,
and growth of the secondary and tertiary sector in the economy was imposed over the colonized
space in the name of modernization of economy and polity. What justified this process of
modernization and seepage of modernity was an unimpeachable claim to rationality.

11
Patel (2006) states, that colonial modernity approached the society in India with two
assumptions:
The first relating to the distinction and disjunction of those groups living in India from the spatial
cultural structures of the West and simultaneously creating within India spatial cultural zones. The
second was the assertion of the boundedness of these groups (now called castes and tribes
constructed in an internally structured hierarchy) by a cultural attribute of spirituality‘ emanating
from Hindu civilization. A territory was given a religious attribute: India and Hinduism now
collapsed into each other.(Patel 2006: 384)

The colonial state sought to divide the society into existing religious communities encouraging
the imposition of traditional laws in ‗personal‘ and family matters. It encouraged Brahmanism
and its oppressive structures that affect lives of women, Dalits, and minorities. With the
separation of the penal and personal, the family was officially affirmed as a sacred, private site—
left to hetero-patriarchal discretion and customs. This sacred secrecy of the family without any
state intervention or regulation conveniently left out the question of gender rights and redressal.

Today, colonial modernity continues in jurisprudence, democracy, and discourses of modernity

and nationalism within the independent nation state that often takes on the role of the colonizer.
Today, whether the debate is for or against UCC— carried out by feminist scholar-activists, or
religious fundamentalists, or the judiciary— remain locked in the binary of ―us‖ and ―them.‖
There is little space for imagining new concepts and alternatives.

Feminist Jurisprudence: Feminist legal studies or feminist jurisprudence is emerging as a

relatively new area of study in India. It is legal philosophy from a feminist perspective—
interrogating the creation and development of laws and legal structure. Feminist jurisprudence
places the principles of legal theory and practice on a common canvas to assess its relationship to
gender equity and women‘s day-to-day lives. ―Law has developed over time in the context of
theories and institutions that are controlled by patriarchal values and reflects its concerns.
Gender-sensitive feminism seeks to correct the imbalance and unfairness in the systems of
knowledge, which have excluded attention to the circumstances of women‘s gendered lives even
on issues that intimately affect their lives (Agnes 2005, 1859).‖ Feminist jurisprudence and
feminist legal studies seek to undermine the liberal-universalist claim that law is an objective,
12
neutral truth, and exposes its role in systemic oppression of women. However many scholars also
agree that law can offer spaces of resistance within which women can challenge oppressive
social relations. The autonomous women‘s movement(s) in India often approach the issue of
UCC from the standpoint of feminist jurisprudence.

Conclusion (Summary): Gender Justice or Religious Freedom?

It might seem to you from the previous sections that UCC is a matter of gender justice vs.
religious freedom. That the implementation of UCC may tamper with many people‘s religious
freedom—provided we think of laws originating in religious text that are in use in a
constitutional democracy as a matter of accommodation and preservation of religious
freedom/diversity. What do you think?

It is easy to see why many people and groups have thought so. Often under the guise of secularism,
women‘s bodies and lives have been controlled and their religious freedoms taken away. In 2011,
France, for instance –banned public use of veils for Muslim women. Belgium and some cities in Spain
have a similar law. In the 80s, Turkey‘s secular state enacted a ban on headscarves and full robes.
Women in these countries have had to fight for their right to wear hijab and practice religion—a veil
does not automatically signify oppression or compliance. Taking away of the veil can signify taking
away of rights. The BJP seized the issue of Muslim Women‘s (Protection of Right in Divorce) Act to
demonstrate the Congress regime‘s letdown to provide true legal equality to male and female citizens. This led
to the women‘s movement‘s realization that the question of gender justice has really dissipated in a vortex of
communal-patriarchal appropriations of the UCC debate. Groups that are concerned about the
repressive/oppressive nature of Muslim family laws are often silent about the extremely oppressive nature of the
Caste system that has had long term effect on innumerable people‘s safety, rights, and well-being. The so
called secular campaign for UCC has provoked religious communities in India which in turn has put
gender justice in jeopardy. Flavia Agnesexplains:

It was not surprising that the demand for uniform civil code raised by the women‘s movement
aroused contradictory response from the fundamentalists depending upon whether they hail from
the majority of the minority communities. It was opposed strongly by the Muslim and Christian
religious leaders who perceived it as a threat to their cultural identity and a violation of the
fundamental right guaranteed by the Constitution. But it became an important plank upon which
hate for Muslims could be ignited. Through it, Hindu communal organizations were not only able

13
 to gain popularity among Hindu males who envied their Muslim counterparts the freedom to
practice polygamy; they could also pose as the champions of the cause for women (Agnes (2008,
503).

Thus the notion of religious rights guaranteed by the Constitution has become an issue for the Religious
Right to spread a culture of majoritarianism and minority oppression. Gender justice and women‘s rights
are not exactly priorities for them. Gender justice is not just a matter of personal laws. That there is no
similar hue and cry about other directive principles like equality of educational and employment
opportunities point to the fact that the question of both law and uniformity has enormous political
potentials and hence the debate onUCC remains— followed by that on reservation— the single most
enduring debate in Indian public life. Today the judiciary as the mouthpiece of the constitution and the
Hindu Right as the self-proclaimed mouthpiece of all Indians have kept the debate alive.

Anveshi Research Center for Women‘s Studies, an organization committed to gender justice and a
longtime critical feminist voice in the debate states its position on the UCC:
The UCC model of legislation, we argued, seemed oblivious to the politics of law reform,
implementation issues, women‘s needs and the Hindu majoritarian agenda. The questions that the
Anveshi law intitiative is engaged with are: the conceptual rigidities that attend to translating
women‘s needs/concerns into governmental categories; the relation between gender/minority/caste
and law; and the problems related to the preeminence of the rights framework in thinking and
activism around violence.

In a society as diverse and plural as India Uniform Civil Code must not be used as a tool for convenient
and effective governance by dominant groups who prefer docile subjects to rights-conscious, active
citizens. To carry out governance in a sensitive manner begins with the recognition that difference and
pluralism is no deterrent for justice and integration. Conversely, uniformity and homogenization does not
necessarily root out injustice and dissentions.

If the Uniform Civil Code is implemented, there should be an open legal space for reasonable individual
choices. As Conrad (1995) points out, that the implementation of a common civil code must imply that
the religious family laws are not ―reformed out of existence.‖ An individual may find some elements in
these laws that define her rights more suitably than the uniform code. Under such circumstances there
must be provision to choose between family laws and a civil code. This choice takes into account
individual rights, and also implies that there need be no religious-national unifying principle.

14
It is necessary for the state to intervene as an arbiter to ensure that no matter what cultural practices are
being followed; there is no violation of rights of a citizen, for the woman, or man or people that do not
identify with the gender binary. Beyond that, state, and law must not dictate in what ways citizens should
maintain sexual relationships (including relationships outside the hetero-patriarchal norm), marry (or
cohabit without marriage), divorce/separate, adopt, bequeath and inherit. It should be outside a
democratic state‘s scope to define what is normal and what is not in matters of personal/sexual choices.
Its function rather than to dictate terms of personal life, must be to ensure that there is no unfair
exploitation rising out of power asymmetry within personal spaces of citizens. The state protects citizens‘
rights through making and enforcing law— instead of using law as an instrument to dominate historically
marginalized groups.

Bibliography

 Agnes, Flavia (1994) Protecting Women against Violence? Review of a Decade of Legislation,
1980-89. Economic and Political Weekly 27 (17) 19-33.
 ____________________(1999)Law and Gender Inequality. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
 ____________________(2005) To Whom do Experts Testify? Ideological Challenges of
Feminist Jurisprudence. Economic and Political Weekly 40 (18) 1859-1866.
 ____________________(2008) Women‘s Movement within a Secular Framework: Redefining
the Agenda. In Women’s Studies in India: A Reader. Mary John (ed.) New Delhi: Penguin Books
India.
 Anveshi Law Committee (1997) Is Gender Justice Only a Legal Issue? Political Stakes in the
UCC Debate (Report on Uniform Civil Code) Economic and Political Weekly XXXII (9)
 Anveshi - Research Centre for Women's Studies. http://www.anveshi.org.in/ Accessed February
22, 2016.
 Basu, Durga Das (1996) Uniform Civil Code for India. New Delhi: Prentice-Hall of India Private
Limited.
 Chakravarti, Uma (2003) Gendering Caste through a Feminist Lens. Calcutta: Stree
 Conrad, Dieter(1995) Personal Law Question and hindu Nationalism in VasudhaDalmia and
Heinrich Von Stietencron (eds) Representing Hinduism: The Construction of Religious Traditions
and National Identity. New Delhi: Sage Publication.
 Dhagamwar, Vasudha (1989) Towards the Uniform Civil Code. Bombay: N. M Tripathy Private
Limited
 Forbes, Geraldine (1996) Women in Modern India. Cambridge: Cambridge university Press

 Galanter, Marc (1989) Law and Society in Modern India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press

 Graham, B. D. (1990) The Origins and Development of Bharatiya Jana Sangh. U.K: Cambridge
University Press.

 Hansen, Thomas Blom (1999) The Saffron Wave: Democracy and Hindu Nationalism in Modern
India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.

15
 Jaisingh Indira (2005) (ed) Men’s laws, Women’s Lives. New Delhi, Women Unlimited and
Lawyers‘ Collective: India.
 Jha, Shefali(2002) Secularism in the Constituent Assembly Debates, 1946-1950 Economic and
political Weekly XXXVII (27)
 Kapur, Ratna (1996) An Introduction in R. Kapur (ed) Feminist Terrains in legal Domains:
Interdisciplinary Essays on Women and Law in India. New Delhi: Kali for Women
 Kapur, Ratna and Brenda Cossman (1995) Communalising Gender, Endangering Community:
Women, Legal Discourse and the Saffron Agenda. New Delhi: Kali for Women
 Kishwar, Madhu (1986) Pro Women or Anti Muslim? The Shah Bano Controversy Manushi 6 (2)
 Mahajan, Gurpreet (1998) Introduction in G. Mahajan (ed) Democracy, Difference and Social
Justice. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
 Mamdani, Mahmud (1996) Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of
Colonialism. New Jersey: Princeton University Press
 Menon, Nivedita (2001) Gender and Politics in India. New Delhi. Oxford University Press.
 Mukhopadhyay, Maitreyee (1998) Legally Dispossessed: Gender Identity and the Process of
Law. Calcutta, Stree
 Patel, Sujata. (1996) On the Discourse of communalism in T. V. Sathyamurthy (ed) Region,
Religion, Caste, Gender and Culture in Contemporary India. New Delhi, Oxford University Press.
 __________________(2006) Beyond Binaries: A Case for self-Reflexive Sociologies. Current
Sociology Volume 54 (3) 381-395.
 Roy, Anupama (2005) Gendered Citizenship: Historical and Conceptual Explorations. New
Delhi: Orient Longman
 Upadhya, Carol (2011) ―Colonial Anthropology, Law, and Adivasi Struggles,‖ in Sujata Patel (ed.)
Doing Sociology in India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.

16