The most reliable feature of Delhi commentary is that a reform becomes authoritarian approximately seven minutes after a BJP government announces it. The panel discussion is assembled, the constitutional adjectives are unpacked and somebody discovers that India’s soul has once again been placed in immediate danger. Uttarakhand’s Uniform Civil Code has received this treatment with almost laboratory-grade predictability.
I am not interested in pretending every clause is immaculate. The provisions concerning live-in relationships invite legitimate questions about privacy, administrative discretion and the state’s appetite for paperwork. But the argument that common civil rules are inherently an assault on pluralism is intellectually lazy. Marriage, divorce, succession and maintenance govern material rights. They decide who can leave a relationship, inherit property or seek support. Treating unequal outcomes as sacred diversity is not liberalism. It is the preservation of hierarchy using gentler vocabulary.
The useful starting point is the text rather than a television chyron. Uttarakhand publishes the English-language rules, while the official frequently asked questions explain the procedures covering marriage, divorce, succession and live-in relationships. Anyone may criticise those documents. What irritates me is the number of people who prefer criticising a spectral version constructed from political talking points.
Equality is not majoritarian merely because BJP proposes it
The INDIA alliance has trained itself to oppose the identity of the proposer before considering the proposal. If a Congress government had described equal inheritance and standardised marriage procedures as a women’s-rights project, sympathetic commentators would have produced admiring essays about constitutional modernity. With a BJP government, identical vocabulary is recast as camouflage.
Motives matter in politics, but outcomes matter more in law. A woman denied a fair civil remedy is not improved by being told that the inequity protects India’s composite culture. Communities are entitled to worship, observe rituals and transmit traditions. They are not entitled to place every civil consequence beyond democratic scrutiny. Faith and citizenship can coexist without the state enforcing different baselines of dignity.
I understand the minority concern that uniformity may simply mean the majority’s rules with a new label. That risk deserves a clause-by-clause answer, not mockery. A defensible UCC should draw from constitutional principles, not copy one religious code. It should apply symmetrically, protect customary ceremonies where they do not violate fundamental rights and offer accessible remedies. The government should demonstrate those qualities continuously rather than demand trust.
But sceptics incur obligations too. They should identify the precise unequal rule they wish to preserve and explain why. Abstract invocations of diversity allow political parties to avoid this embarrassing exercise. It is easier to say “social fabric” than to defend a discriminatory inheritance outcome in plain English.
The live-in provisions need repair, not melodrama
The weakest part of Uttarakhand’s approach is the bureaucratic treatment of live-in relationships. Registration may be intended to create evidence, secure maintenance claims and clarify legitimacy or succession. Those are valid objectives. Yet intimate adults should not have to fear unnecessary disclosure, moral policing or expansive access to their personal data.
I want strict purpose limitation, narrow access controls, auditable searches and meaningful penalties for officials who misuse information. The government should publish anonymised statistics on registrations, rejections, appeals and data breaches. It should explain when police involvement is permitted and ensure that administrative staff cannot turn a welfare-oriented mechanism into a neighbourhood surveillance service.
This is where government supporters should resist the temptation to defend everything. Conservative politics ought to understand limits on the state. A person can believe stable families are socially valuable while also believing consenting adults possess a private sphere. The BJP will strengthen its reform by listening to this objection. It will not strengthen it by dismissing every privacy concern as opposition propaganda.
That concession, however, does not vindicate the apocalyptic claim that the entire code must be scrapped. Laws are amended. Procedures are narrowed. Judicial review corrects excesses. The existence of a disputable provision is a reason for serious legislative work, not for returning all civil law to permanent communal compartments.
Congress has postponed this conversation for decades
Congress’s posture is especially difficult to take seriously because the party wishes to own the Constitution symbolically while treating one of its directive principles as a dangerous BJP invention. A directive principle is not an automatic command to enact any particular code, but it certainly establishes that movement towards common civil law is constitutionally imaginable.
The party’s historic method has been delay disguised as sensitivity. It promises reform after consultation, consultation after consensus and consensus after social change. Because complete consensus never arrives on questions involving authority and entitlement, postponement becomes the policy. The costs fall largely on citizens with the least influence inside community institutions.
The left-liberal commentariat assists this evasion by treating religious leadership as the natural spokesperson for every individual within a group. Communities are not unitary voting blocs with one legal preference. Women, young adults, dissenters and secular members may want rights that organised gatekeepers oppose. A genuinely plural politics must hear internal disagreement rather than romanticise whoever claims to speak for tradition.
I also reject the fashionable comparison between civil uniformity and cultural homogenisation. A common minimum age of marriage does not force everyone to hold the same ceremony. Equal succession does not require identical food, language or prayer. Civil law establishes enforceable consequences; culture supplies meaning. The two overlap, but they are not interchangeable.
Let Uttarakhand produce evidence
The code is now an administrative experiment, and experiments should generate evidence. Uttarakhand should publish district-level service standards, processing times, appeal outcomes and independent privacy audits. It should consult women’s groups, lawyers, tribal representatives, minority organisations and frontline officials after implementation rather than treating consultation as a one-off ceremonial exercise.
Scheduled Tribes and other constitutionally distinctive communities raise complicated questions. Exemptions may protect vulnerable customs but can also leave vulnerable individuals without remedies. The answer must emerge through careful constitutional design and direct engagement, not through slogans issued from Delhi studios.
Courts will inevitably examine parts of the framework. That is not evidence of democratic collapse; it is how Indian constitutional government works. The executive legislates, affected parties challenge, courts interpret and legislatures respond. Commentators who describe the filing of a petition as proof of illegality are skipping several important steps, including judgment.
The broader national debate would benefit from observing actual outcomes. Do women receive succession certificates faster? Are marriages easier to document? Do maintenance claims become more enforceable? Are citizens harassed over live-in registration? Does personal data leak? These questions can be measured. India should prefer the answer supplied by experience to the answer shouted by the most booked television guest.
A common citizenship needs common courage
My position is not that Uttarakhand has written the final national model. It is that the state has confronted a subject other parties have found electorally convenient to defer. The government deserves presumptive credit for that courage and scrutiny for the details. Those positions are compatible, however unfamiliar compatibility may appear on prime-time television.
The BJP should resist triumphalism. Civil-law reform succeeds when ordinary citizens find it fair, private and usable, not when party spokespeople win semantic wrestling matches. Officials must be trained to serve, not police, and grievance mechanisms must operate independently enough to earn trust.
The opposition should abandon its reflex that minority citizens require permanent legal separation as proof of respect. Respect includes believing every person can participate in a common framework of rights while retaining religious identity. It includes hearing reformers within communities, not merely leaders who command institutional microphones.
I will judge Uttarakhand’s UCC by whether it expands equal agency and restrains official intrusion. So far, I see a serious reform with correctable flaws, not the civilisational emergency advertised by the INDIA alliance. The burden now lies on the state to implement it fairly—and on critics to offer something more substantial than outrage rehearsed before they opened the document.
