The Uniform Civil Code (UCC) is one of the most controversial unfulfilled promises of the Indian Constitution. As a Directive Principle of State Policy under Article 44, it envisions a common civil code to replace the fragmented personal law regime governing marriage, divorce, and inheritance along religious lines. This vision has continued to be a judicial suggestion for decades, with courts consistently referring to Article 44 in obiter dicta but never mandating it. Scholars have long debated whether uniformity is a prerequisite for gender justice or is detrimental to India’s pluralist fabric, and whether the postponement of the UCC reflects institutional restraint or political inertia. This discourse has taken on new urgency since 2024, as Uttarakhand, Gujarat, and Assam have introduced their own versions of a UCC, transforming an abstract constitutional aspiration into legal reality for millions of citizens.
This article argues that India’s UCC debate cannot be resolved solely through legislative will, it needs a strong political mandate or a shared doctrinal foundation (similar to what preceded codification in comparable European contexts). The article also proposes gradual constitutional harmonisation as a more viable alternative to uniformity, allowing discriminatory practices to be addressed while preserving legitimate areas of legal pluralism. To support this argument, it first traces the judicial approach to UCC through Sarla Mudgal and Lily Thomas, where courts have consistently deferred to legislative discretion. Second, it focuses on the state-level UCC frameworks enacted since 2024, and analyses how they addressed marriage, succession, and live-in relationships. Finally, it turns to the European experience, contrasting Germany’s gradualism with France’s imposition, to situate India’s unresolved struggle within a broader comparative and historical frame.
Judicial Approach to Uniformity
Article 37 of the Constitution clearly states that, “the provisions contained in this part shall not be enforceable by any court…” Consequently, Article 44, being one of the DPSPs, is non-justiciable and cannot be enforced by the courts. Dr B.R. Ambedkar, defending this design during the Assembly debates, clarified that “in enacting this part, the Assembly was providing directions to the future legislature and executive to show how they have to exercise the powers which they will have.” In other words, while Article 44 directs “the States to secure a Uniform Civil Code for all citizens” and its implementation lies within the discretion of the legislature and executive. Yet despite this constitutional design, courts have used their obiter dicta to urge the legislature to act on Article 44. Two such instances are discussed below.
First, in Sarla Mudgal v. Union of India, the case before the court was that Hindu husbands were converting to Islam solely for the purpose of contracting a second marriage without dissolving their first, exploiting Muslim law’s permission of polygamy against Hindu law’s mandate of monogamy. The Court held that such conversion does not affect the validity of first marriage, rendering the second marriage bigamous under Section 494 IPC. In doing so, the Court also pointed to the Uniform Civil Code, suggesting that such loopholes between personal laws could be addressed more permanently if India moved toward one common code.
In urging the adoption of a UCC, Justice Kuldip Singh advanced two principal justifications. First, he argued that over 80% of citizens have been brought under the codified personal law, and there was no justification to keep the introduction of a uniform code in abeyance any longer. Yet, this 80% Justice Singh cites is not a neutral, cross-religious code; it is codified Hindu law, leaving the actual diversity a uniform code would need to reconcile still unaddressed. Treating this figure as sufficient grounds for uniformity assumes extending one community’s law to others equals building a genuinely common code, when the two are analytically distinct. Second, he noted that if personal law is a creation of legislation rather than religion, then the State has both the legitimacy and the practical grounds to move toward one uniform code for all citizens. Here too, though these laws were shaped by legislation, communities still see them as part of their religious identity, not just administrative rules. This means where the law came from doesn’t decide whether replacing it would feel like reform or like force.
Second, the Court revisited this very push in the case of Lily Thomas v. Union of India, where it was called upon to clarify whether its own obiter in Sarla Mudgal had overstepped into binding territory. The issue was whether the Court’s earlier ruling in Sarla Mudgal, which held that converting to Islam did not dissolve a subsisting Hindu marriage, violated the fundamental rights of those seeking to remarry after conversion. The Court found that no such violation had occurred and dismissed the review petition, finding no valid grounds for reconsideration. Crucially, both the judges clarified that Sarla Mudgal’s UCC remarks were incidental, non-binding observations, reaffirming that Article 44’s implementation remains strictly a legislative, not judicial, prerogative.
Justice Sethi, here, proposed two reasons in support of his approach to the UCC: first, a uniform law, though desirable, must be introduced gradually, since India’s pluralist society requires the most acute problems in personal laws to be remedied incrementally. However, this gradualist approach, while sound in principle, offers no clear threshold for when reform becomes “acute enough” to act on, leaving the pace of change entirely at the State’s discretion. Second, he held that courts do not have the power to directly enforce Article 44, since Directive Principles create no justiciable rights, and clarified that Kuldip Singh’s remarks in Sarla Mudgal were only a request, not a mandate. Nevertheless, this technical change to legal interpretation does not take away the practical effect: even non-binding judicial nudges can influence constitutional discourse by framing legislative inaction as constitutional delay, thereby indirectly shaping public expectations regarding Article 44.
Across both cases, the judiciary flags the absence of a UCC without ever compelling it. Article 44 stays alive in constitutional discourse, yet its resolution rests entirely with the legislature. The pattern is consistent: courts nudge, Parliament decides.
State-Level Implementation of the UCC
Since 2024, three Indian states have moved to implement a Uniform Civil Code: Uttarakhand (2024), Gujarat (2026), and Assam (2026), with the latter two closely modelled on Uttarakhand’s original framework. Implementing UCC essentially means replacing religion-specific personal laws with one common civil framework. This shift can be explained best through the institution of marriage. Prior to state enforcement of a uniform civil code, every religious community in India followed its own personal laws on marriage, including conditions of validity, the permissibility of polygamy, and the grounds for divorce. The UCC replaces these fragmented provisions with a common legal framework: a uniform minimum age of marriage, 21 years for men and 18 years for women, and polygamy is prohibited for all communities. It further mandates civil registration of every marriage within sixty days, making it an essential legal requirement. Similarly, extrajudicial forms of divorce, such as talaq-e-biddat (triple talaq), are no longer legally valid, and marriage has to be dissolved through civil courts. However, tribal marriages remain outside the ambit of these reforms in all three states, as the Constitution provides special protection to tribal customary practices and does not permit legal uniformity to be imposed upon them without statutory authorisation.
Secondly, the UCC framework is different from the traditional heir classification system that governed succession under religion-specific personal laws. In Hindu law, for instance, Class II heirs, including fathers and siblings, could inherit only in the absence of Class I heirs (immediate family members, such as widows and daughters). The UCC simplifies this structure and grants equal inheritance rights to spouses, children, and parents as a single class of heirs, with sons and daughters receiving identical shares. This eliminates the disparities of earlier personal laws where Muslim daughters could inherit only half the share given to sons, or Hindu widows holding limited property rights due to the absence of coparcenary rights. It is worth noting that the UCC applies only to intestate succession (where a person dies without a will); where a valid will exists, it continues to govern, and the UCC does not interfere. Further, the UCC extends equal inheritance beyond Hindu law’s 2005 reform to Muslim, Christian, and Parsi women, potentially widening women’s access to agricultural land and ancestral property, strengthening financial independence and household bargaining power. But legal parity alone hasn’t closed the ownership gap before, NFHS-5 shows women own 31.7% of land versus men’s 43.9%, despite existing equal-inheritance laws. The increase in formal land ownership may also interact with an existing trend of land fragmentation. NABARD data shows that average landholding size fell from 1.08 hectares in 2016–17 to 0.74 hectares in 2021–22, a trend long driven by dividing land among all heirs. As the UCC expands the pool of equal heirs to include daughters and widows alongside sons, it may add to this existing pressure on plot sizes. Smaller landholdings often make mechanisation harder and limit access to institutional credit, creating a trade-off between equal ownership and land viability.
The most contested reform is how UCC regulates live-in relationships. Under the UCC, mandatory registration of such relationships is required, along with formal registration of their termination, and non-compliance with the provisions can lead to penalties ranging from fines to imprisonment. In return, the laws extend maintenance rights to deserted partners and recognise the legitimacy and inheritance rights of children born from these unions. While meaningful legal protection is provided against desertion, it also mark a significant expansion of state regulation into intimate relationships. Enforcing this registration requires the State to maintain a permanent digital record of individuals’ cohabitation status, tied to their verified identity. Such state-held identity databases in India have a poor security record: in 2018, an investigation by The Tribune found that access to over a billion Aadhaar records could be purchased from anonymous sellers for a small fee, despite UIDAI’s prior assurance that no breach had occurred. A live-in registry built on similar infrastructure could create comparable security risks, deepening concerns over state surveillance of private life.
But a substantial question follows: does correcting gender inequalities in personal law require a Uniform Civil Code, or can this same goal be achieved by reforming discriminatory provisions while preserving India’s legal and religious diversity? The 21st Law Commission’s 2018 report addressed this question and noted that the legislature should prioritise securing gender equality within each community by eliminating discriminatory provisions in personal laws before pursuing uniformity across communities. Such an approach would allow culturally significant aspects of different personal laws to survive, while addressing inequities to the greatest extent possible without demanding complete legal uniformity. The Commission was also cynical of the claim that a UCC would necessarily promote national unity, noting that cultural differences form an integral part of people’s identities and preserving those differences may itself strengthen social cohesion and territorial integrity.
Though the UCC corrects real inequalities in inheritance and marriage, it has some adverse consequences, particularly intruding on privacy through mandatory live-in registration. The implementation shows that the pursuit of equality sometimes faces complex constitutional tensions between individual rights, cultural diversity, and state regulation, which a nation as diverse as India simply cannot afford to overlook. These trade-offs raise another question, i.e. Can legal uniformity be achieved in a society characterized by deep legal and cultural diversity, and if so, under what conditions? Analysing how other legal systems dealt with similar tension may clarify what actually makes codification succeed, and whether India’s present circumstances resemble them.
The European Experience
History offers valuable insights for India’s discussion on Uniform Civil Code. Several European nations, like France, Germany, have attempted to unify civil laws within societies having diverse customs, regional identities, and legal traditions. Their experiences suggest that diversity and legal plurality do not make legal uniformity impossible; rather, the challenge lies in constructing a common legal framework without disregarding the identities and traditions embedded within that diversity.
Legal fragmentation existed in pre-unification Germany, where individual rights changed simply by crossing a regional border, depending on whether the territory applied the French Civil Code in the Rhineland, Saxony’s civil code, or traditional Roman and customary law. This divergence sparked a fundamental debate among legal scholars; Anton Thibaut advocated for unification on the grounds of civic equality and national cohesion, whereas Savigny countered that legal systems require a certain degree of historical and intellectual maturity to avoid disruption in their organic development. A similar dynamic can be observed in India, although the basis of legal fragmentation is religious in nature: Hindus, Muslims, Christians, and Parsis have distinct personal law regimes in several areas of family law. This tension persists in contemporary UCC discussions, with proponents arguing legal uniformity as key to advance equality and national cohesion, and opponents contending that India’s religious diversity hasn’t yet reached a stage where codification would unify rather than divide the polity.
Germany resolved its fragmentation in three interrelated stages: First, after the political unification of German states in 1871, the new united Reich was granted the authority to legislate across all territories; second, a Code Commission was established in 1874 to draft the Bürgerliches Gesetzbuch (BGB) which was later enacted in 1896; and third, this process was made possible by a shared Pandectist legal tradition common among German jurists, which gave the Commission a strong doctrinal foundation. This was a gradual, consensus-oriented process, resting on decades of scholarly convergence before the law itself was written. But was this the only way or did a faster, more assertive model existed elsewhere in Europe?
France claims it was not. Unlike Germany’s decades-long, jurist-led process, French unification was rapid and imposed through political will: the Code Napoléon of 1804 was drafted and enacted within a few years under Napoleon’s direct authority, overriding the divide between the Roman-law South (pays de droit écrit) and the customary-law North (pays de droit coutumier). Rather than waiting for scholarly consensus, as Germany’s Pandectist tradition allowed, the French state simply legislated uniformity into existence. This suggests political authority, exercised decisively, can substitute for the slow convergence Germany’s case required.
But India lacks both the Germanic precondition of doctrinal convergence, and, the political space for a French-style imposition, because personal laws in India are based on religious identity and constitutional protection in ways French customary law never was. This leads to a central question: if both gradual convergence and decisive state-led codification have historically provided pathways towards legal uniformity, why has India, despite having these contrasting European precedents, still struggled to translate either model into a Uniform Civil Code? So, the problem here isn’t lack of will, but a structural failure. India should either frame a strong mandate to override religious legal pluralism, or build a shared doctrinal foundation.
Conclusion
India’s progress, therefore, lies in gradual constitutional harmonisation, and not in a single rigid code. Unlike Germany’s Bürgerliches Gesetzbuch, built on decades of academic consensus, India has no pre-existing unified structure. Legal convergence here will have to evolve incrementally, through practical application and ongoing reform experiences.
State-level Uniform Civil Codes (UCCs) can be useful experimental frameworks. By testing progressive changes in succession, marriage, and cohabitation, they can develop scalable models for nationwide adoption, rather than having an all-encompassing codification. However, state intervention carries inherent trade-offs. Regulating intimate arrangements like live-in relationships shows how enforcing equality can often increase state intrusion into privacy matters. This reveals that legal harmonisation doesn’t eliminate the tension between equality and individual autonomy but merely manages it.
Finally, legal uniformity can be achieved through experiential growth within the legal system. Cooperative federalism gives India a way to safeguard gender justice while clearly defining the boundaries of uniformity within a pluralistic constitutional framework.
Author: Riya Yadav
Juris Centre 