The Uniform Civil Code: Between Principle And Pragmatism
Urvashi Choudhary, LL.M., University Institute of Legal Studies, Panjab University, Chandigarh
ABSTRACT
The Uniform Civil Code (UCC) has re-entered Indian constitutional life not as an abstract Directive Principle but as operative state legislation. Between February 2024 and July 2026, four states Uttarakhand, Gujarat, Assam, and Madhya Pradesh enacted their own civil codes, converting a seven-decade- old constitutional aspiration under Article 44 into a contested field of ongoing legislative practice.
This article departs from the largely descriptive treatment the UCC debate has received in much doctrinal writing and instead asks a narrower, more testable question: has the constitutional case for uniformity, as developed through Constituent Assembly debate, Supreme Court precedent, and Law Commission inquiry, actually been made out, or has it been assumed?
Engaging critically with the reasoning not merely the holdings of Shah Bano, Sarla Mudgal, and Shayara Bano, and situating that case law against the competing normative accounts offered by constitutional historians and feminist legal scholars, the article argues that the judiciary's repeated invocation of Article 44 has functioned more as rhetorical reinforcement than as legal reasoning, and that the 21st Law Commission's 2018 conclusion that a uniform code is “neither necessary nor desirable” at this stage remains, on the evidence, more persuasive than either the judiciary's obiter enthusiasm or the recent state legislative wave's practical execution.
The article's contribution is to compare the four post-2024 state codes on their own terms, evaluate them against three foreign implementation models, and defend a specific, non-neutral position: that comprehensive, gender-just codification of each personal law rather than uniform imposition is what Articles 14, 15, and 21 actually require of the state at this stage, with a national uniform code remaining a legitimate longer-term horizon rather than an immediate constitutional command.
Keywords: Uniform Civil Code; Article 44; Constitutional Morality; Legal Pluralism; Transformative Constitutionalism.
