[ad_1]
Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s strong push for a Uniform Civil Code (UCC) came while speaking to the BJP’s booth-level workers in poll-bound Madhya Pradesh. That framing, to begin with, is the challenge. In a country as diverse as India, the UCC — the idea that there should be a common set of personal laws that govern marriage and divorce, inheritance and adoption, across religious communities — is a thorny issue with social, political, legal and constitutional implications. Debates on its desirability and feasibility, in one form or another, go back to the birth of a new nation, and even before that. An issue of this labyrinthine complexity, that defies easy answers, needs a platform wider than the one the PM chose for it – it needs a deliberative space that is open to nuanced views, where positions are not being taken with an eye on the next election. Of course, it is also true that the UCC is the BJP’s poll promise — alongwith the abrogation of Article 370 and the Ram temple in Ayodhya, it is, in fact, part of the party’s “core” manifesto. With Kashmir’s special status revoked, and temple construction racing to its finale, only the UCC remains undone for a party armed with two successive national mandates, and looking for a third. And yet, the BJP leadership must recognise that the UCC is different – because it touches all citizens and because it reaches deep inside their ways of life for generations, and their personal spaces. It requires, even more, an engagement in patient and intricate processes of persuasion and negotiation, not the taking of blunt positions in a polarised political environment.
While Hindutva politics and the conservative Muslim leadership’s resistance to reform have given it its current political salience, the UCC does not affect Muslims alone. It affects the Hindu majority, too, as well as the various other minority communities and tribal groups. Fundamentally, it speaks to concerns of gender equality and justice. But amid a take-over by a hardening identity politics, those issues are in danger of being given short shrift. It has become the site of a face-off between arguments for homogenisation and positions more attentive to the protection of plurality, and that prefer reform of personal laws over the imposition of a neat uniformity.
Recognising the enormity and complexity of the task of implementing it, and the pull and tug that is bound to ensue, the Constitution included a nudge towards the UCC in its section on Directive Principles of State Policy — these are legally un-enforceable. The 21st Law Commission said that a UCC is “neither necessary nor desirable at this stage”. But the 22nd Law Commission has opened a narrow 30-day window for consultation with stake-holders. Meanwhile, in the Supreme Court, the Centre has opposed same-sex marriage on grounds that the concept of “marriage” is inherently connected to religious and cultural norms – according those norms an autonomy and inviolability that it appears to deny to them in its advocacy for the UCC. Given the complex ground, and the contradictions and conflicts that the UCC must cover, it needs to be disentangled from the inevitable short-termism of politics in the year ahead of a general election. Unfortunately, that doesn’t seem likely — setting the stage for a discourse that, in the name of uniformity, could divide rather than resolve.
[ad_2]
