Uniform Civil Code | States break Article 44 silence

Article 44 has sat untouched in the Constitution for 70-plus years. Every government mentioned it, but none has acted on it. What’s shifting now isn’t the Centre suddenly finding courage, but the states growing tired of waiting. Committees in Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh are drafting a Uniform Civil Code. The question is no longer whether one should exist, but what it should say, and who gets a real say in writing it.

Since 1985, the courts have prodded Parliament to move on this. The Shah Bano judgement was explicit — implement a common civil code to address gender inequality. Parliament’s response was to legislate the ruling away. For the next 40 years, the judiciary kept issuing reminders: the legislature kept ignoring them.

This isn’t new ground. Babasaheb Ambedkar argued for a common civil code during the Constituent Assembly debates — not to steamroll communities, but to dismantle the social hierarchies personal laws had quietly protected for generations. He was clear-eyed about the risk of forcing it. On November 23, 1948, he proposed a middle path: let Parliament make the code voluntary at first, applying only to those who opted in. Give the state the power to act, but also the room to build consent. The framers of the Constitution built both into it. Successive parliaments treated that flexibility as permission to wait forever.

The silence had consequences. Muslim women still inherit unequal shares under personal law. Women in unregistered marriages often have no enforceable maintenance claim. Some customary regimes offer no legal path to separation or property at all. None of this is disputed. It was simply deferred, year after year, government after government.

A UCC framework won’t fix everything overnight, and the first draft will have flaws. But it creates a legal floor where none exists. For a woman in rural Bastar with no other instrument available, that’s not a philosophical point — it’s practical.

Uttarakhand has drafted and implemented one. Gujrat is working on it. Now, Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh have committees, chaired by Justice Ranjana Prakash Desai, who led Uttarakhand’s drafting process. That continuity is deliberate. She knows where the process bogs down, which provisions spark resistance, and which communities need more careful engagement. In theory, the second draft should be better than the first.

That’s where the concern kicks in. Deadlines sharpen focus, but they also risk making consultation decorative. Will tribal voices shape the draft, or will they be invited to comment only after the structure is fixed? The answer will determine whether this is a genuine reform or legislation dressed up as reform. The difference shows up years later, when the code hits the ground.

The eastern push raises the stakes. The May 4 Assembly poll results give the BJP decisive mandates in Assam and West Bengal, where UCC was a flagship promise. The project is shifting from campaign pledge to legislative reality. Assam brings Sixth Schedule areas into the mix, where tribal rights need explicit carve-outs. These states have very different communities, histories, and political pressures compared to Uttarakhand, Madhya Pradesh, or Chhattisgarh. What works as drafting in one context becomes a loaded political project in another. The experiment gets more complicated with each state, and the margins for error shrink.

Ironically, the parties now pushing the UCC forward are doing so through judge-led committees rather than open parliamentary debate. Meanwhile, the parties that once demanded reform through elected legislatures now invoke minority rights to slow it down. Neither side is following its own stated principles.

The federal process, though imperfect, is doing something real. States are studying what other states did, learning from successes and the gaps, and adjusting. That’s how constitutional experimentation is supposed to work — messy, iterative, occasionally opportunistic, but moving. The alternative was another decade of judicial reminders and legislative silence.

Whether Article 44 finally means something depends entirely on what these codes contain. Not the committees that draft them, not the political credit claimed, not the timelines met or missed. The test is simpler: does a woman in a vulnerable marriage gain a legal remedy she lacked? Does a daughter inherit equally? Are tribal rights actually protected, or just nominally exempted?

If the answer is yes, then a provision that sat as decorative text for 70 years will have done real work. If the answer is no, this will have been another exercise in political positioning, and the courts will be back to issuing reminders.

The promise of Article 44 is worth taking seriously. Whether these state experiments honour it remains an open question.

Ashok R Patil is Vice Chancellor, and Avinash Verma is Research Assistant and Student, National University of Study and Research in Law, Ranchi. X: @ashok1patil and @me_avinashverma.