A Uniform Civil Code

In one line

The Constitution tells the State to try to secure one civil law for everybody, but does not say when, cannot be enforced in a court, and no court has ordered Parliament to enact it.

In the wording a student can write in an exam: article 44 provides that "The State shall endeavour to secure for the citizens a uniform civil code throughout the territory of India." It sits in Part IV, so article 37 applies: those provisions "shall not be enforceable by any court, but the principles therein laid down are nevertheless fundamental in the governance of the country". Every statement of the Supreme Court urging a code has been an observation made while deciding something else, in Shah Bano, in Sarla Mudgal and in John Vallamattom. No decision has held a rule of personal law void for offending article 44, and none has directed Parliament to legislate. The only Indian legislature to have enacted such a code is Uttarakhand, in 2024, and its own section 2 excludes the Scheduled Tribes from it.

The provision, and its neighbour

Article 44: "The State shall endeavour to secure for the citizens a uniform civil code throughout the territory of India." Three words control it. "Endeavour" imposes an effort, not a result. "Uniform" means one law for all citizens, not one per community. "Throughout the territory of India" means a national code, which is why a State code raises a question of its own.

Article 25(1), set out in [Articles 25 and 26], guarantees freedom of religion subject to public order, morality and health and to the other provisions of Part III. John Vallamattom put the relationship directly: article 25 "guarantees religious freedom whereas the latter divests religion from social relations and personal law".

Why the article reads as it does

India inherited a system in which crime, contract, property, evidence and procedure were uniform, while marriage, divorce, maintenance, guardianship and succession followed the religion of the parties. The framers chose neither to abolish that split nor to guarantee it. Draft article 35, which became article 44, was debated on 23 November 1948; the record is at ops/notes/LLM/Constitutionalism-Pluralism-and-Federalism/authorities/cad-draft-article-35.txt.

Three provisos were moved, by Mohammad Ismail Khan, Naziruddin Ahmad and Mahboob Ali Baig, each protecting personal law from the article in some form. Only two were put to the vote and both were negatived; Mahboob Ali Baig's was moved and never put, so it is wrong to write that three amendments were defeated. Article 35 was then adopted without amendment.

K.M. Munshi answered the objection that a code would be tyranny over a minority by pointing at the majority's own law: if inheritance and succession are part of religion, "you can never give, for instance, equality to women", and "we must put our foot down and say that these matters are not religion, they are purely matters for secular legislation".