UCC: Move with Caution

There are reports that the BJP-led Union government is preparing to take up the Uniform Civil Code (UCC) as the agenda prior to the next Lok Sabha election slated for 2024. It is in the hope that the issue will be like a red rag for the Muslim ulema who will not feel restrained in opposing it.

The outcome will be a polarizing narrative which will enable the saffron party to cash in on the votes of the majority community, especially in the Hindi heartland states from where the party got the majority of its seats.

The ensuing cacophony, the party wishes and hopes, would overshadow issues such as costly fuel, rising prices of essentials, mounting unemployment, failure to defuse ethnic conflict in Manipur.

These are issues where the party does not have much to show by way of performance. With Article 370 standing abolished and Jammu and Kashmir having been integrated and the Ram Mandir coming up in Ayodhya, the BJP is now eyeing introduction of the UCC to whip up emotions.

Article 44 of the Indian Constitution under the directive principles of the state policy lays down that the State shall endeavor to secure for the citizens a uniform civil code throughout the territory of India. It does not mandate the Union Government to formulate or implement such a code and is therefore not justiciable.

A private member’s bill by a BJP MP has been in the Rajya Sabha since December 2022. It has been introduced as a litmus test. The party hopes a slight push may provoke strident opposition to the merriment of the BJP desperately looking for a divisive issue.

This however should not lead one to conclude that the UCC is totally politically motivated and is meant to cash in upon the ensuing provocation. There can be no gainsaying that reforms are inevitable in family laws pertaining to all communities as they were framed in a context when gender justice was not on the radar of human social progress. In the changed configuration of society, changes in the laws are inevitable if the current challenges have to be grappled with.

The opposition by the conservative sections will only allow the clerics to walk into the trap being assiduously laid by the BJP to raise a high pitch. Moreover, the All India Muslim Personal Law Board which has already declared its intent to oppose the UCC has sat over the reform as simple as agreeing to 18 as the legal age of marriage under Prohibition of Child Marriage Act 1978 or for civil registration of marriages.

It was refusal to reform that prompted the current dispensation to enact the law to ban the triple divorce thereby criminalizing it. But it simultaneously turned a civil law into a criminal law.

The Board has failed even to chalk out a training course and an institutional mechanism to arbitrate marital disputes and refuses to proceed beyond issuing dire warning against fiddling what it believes is a ‘divine law’.

Now that the BJP-led government is readying to use the issue as cash cow of votes, the minority community and the Board would need to exercise extreme caution in politicizing the issue at a critical moment.