Uniform Civil Code: India
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The debate from the 1930s to 2015
The Times of India, Nov 02 2015
Amulya Gopalakrishnan Why a common civil code may not be a great idea
Even if Parliament does design the dream civil code, it might be wiser to make it optional. That would encourage faster reforms in personal law, perhaps even prompt its gradual withering away The Uniform Civil Code (UCC) is a dream long deferred, and now it looks like the courts can barely conceal their impa tience. A Supreme Court bench, hearing a case on a Hindu woman's petition on inheritance, was recently stirred into ordering an examination of practices like polygamy and triple talaq in Muslim personal law, which it declared “injurious to public morals“. The Centre is already on a deadline from another SC bench to present its views on the UCC. Though the BJP once claimed the UCC as a burning priority , the government has been guarded in its response so far, calling for “consensus among all stakeholders“.
First raised by the All India Women's Conference in the 1930s, the UCC was once a simple demand for equal rights in marriage, divorce, adoption and succession for all women irrespective of religious laws. But since India was born in inter-religious strife, and was a pact between religious groups of unequal clout, the Constituent Assembly left this plan to the future.
At this point, who is Team UCC? The Hindu right-wing, which is aggrieved that minority cultures remain unscathed, even though Hindu practices were painfully codified in the 1950s.Liberals also believe that secular citizenship means strict equality before law, that the state and religion should be walled off from each other, and that India's regime of distinct personal laws, which discriminate against women in various ways, should be replaced by a fair civil code.
Those who resist the UCC include many believers, and also those who say that secularism is not a one-size-fits-all model, and that instead of uniform laws, the state should push for uniform principles of gender justice and individual freedom. It could root out gender-bias from various personal laws, as the courts and legislatures to a lesser extent have indeed been doing, rather than boiling everyone down to a common citizenship, they say .
Then there are those who do want a common civil code in the future, one that reflects the state's vision rather than majoritarian norms, but not in a situation where minorities feel anxious and alienated.
What Muslim women want
Many who argue for a UCC speak in tones of concern for Muslim women. Yet, among them, there has been no audible voice asking for it.
Most Muslim women's groups oppose polygamy and triple talaq, but do not want religious laws to be steamrollered. “If you follow Quranic injunctions correctly , women have more rights than men,“ says Shaista Amber of the All India Women's Personal Law Board, suggesting that courts should consult female muftis rather than self-appointed spokesmen of the community like the All India Muslim Law Board. “Islam is our religion, our conviction, we want to live and die within it.“
For Noorjehan Safia Naz of the Bharatiya Muslim Mahila Andolan, the problem is that “Muslim personal law is not codified, and therefore open to all kinds of contentions“.Apart from the Muslim Personal Law (Shariat) Application Act of 1937, the Dissolution of Muslim Marriages Act (1939) and the Muslim Women (Protection of Rights of Divorce) Act and Rules (1986), judges have to rely on scholars of Islamic jurisprudence in a case-by-case manner. Naz advocates a comprehensive personal law code that removes triple talaq, polygamy and other unfair practices, and has drafted exactly such a model.
But not all Muslim women's groups are averse to the idea of a common code. “We want a gender-just set of family laws that is formed after listening to what women's groups want,“ says Yasmeen Aga of the Mumbai-based Awaaze-Niswan. But in parallel, “if a woman wants to follow the personal law of her religion, that choice should also be available,“ she adds.
Towards gender parity
“The general attitude is that Hindu law is reformed, Muslim law is anti-women,“ says lawyer Flavia Agnes. “But in terms of economic rights, the Muslim marriage-as-contract works out better for women, in terms of dower and traditional maintenance. Even with polygamy , the multiple wives have legal and social rights.“
She points out that the Hindu woman in a nonmarital domestic partnership is utterly without recourse -in 2010 the Supreme Court ruled that maintenance under the Domestic Violence Act did not cover such cohabiting couples, even referring to them as “concubines“.Legislation has made Hindu and Christian laws more receptive to women's rights -Hindu succession was reformed considerably in 2005, making all daughters coparceners in joint family property and giving them equal claims to agricultural land; in 2001, Christian women and men were brought on par, in terms of divorce rights.
“Meanwhile, the courts have done a creditable job in affirming the rights of Muslim women,“ says political scientist Narendra Subramanian, whose book Nation and Family: Personal Law, Cultural Pluralism and Gendered Citizenship covers this ground.
Subramanian details this remarkable reform process, showing how the courts have harnessed Islamic traditions and constitutional principles to expand individual rights.Even the ambiguously-worded Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Divorce) Act of 1986 that followed Shah Bano ruling has had a happier arc than commonly assumed, as courts have used it to award generous alimony payments to divorcees, and established, through the 2001 Danial Latifi ruling, that Muslim men owed their ex-wives ongoing maintenance. Apart from bending various personal laws towards justice, women's groups have focused on creating criminal and civil laws that apply to everyone, obviating the UCC -for instance, the Juvenile Justice Act now makes adoption equally available, the Domestic Violence Act and its protections apply to all citizens. The Special Marriage Act has been a way of opting out of personal law. “Why does there have to be a uniform code for gender justice?“ asks political scientist and feminist scholar Nivedita Menon. She argues that codification of Hindu law, in the image of north Indian upper castes, actually hurt certain women by ending matriliny and other practices that women gained from.Similarly, practices like mehr are unique to Muslim women, and they actually stand to lose from a civil code that doesn't accommodate it. Which is why, she says, much of the women's movement has abandoned the demand for a flattening UCC, likely to be shaped by dominant norms. Instead of standardisation, they press for principles like gender justice and individual autonomy within diverse personal laws.
How to be secular
The debate over UCC, then, is an argument about secularism. Contrasted with US-style “assimilative secularism“, India has its own kind of “ameliorative secularism“ that moulds the majority religion towards social equality , but gives minorities greater space. It may be infuriating to some and not good enough for others, but it does have an appreciation of minority group rights and multiculturalism, in ways that western liberal democracies have been lately contending with.
But there is a common view, recently voiced by historian Romila Thapar, that India must gradually remove any religious considerations from the law, to be strictly secular. “This would not be a cosmetic change; or mean uniformity only in personal law, but all the codes we conform to that are determined by religion or caste“, she says. That kind of strict uniform secularisation would upset many vote banks, apart from Muslims -it would end the Hindu undivided family's tax benefits, it would extend reservations to eligible castes in all religions.Assume that Parliament irons out all the conflicts and designs a dream civil code -through what Subramanian calls an “amplification of the Special Marriage Act“ -extending across all domains of family law. (Many women's groups have indeed floated versions of such a code). Should this be obligatory or optional? “If it is made obligatory in an environment where there is no social support for it or state capacity to implement, then you may be pushing women into sharia courts or other dispute resolution forums, as happened in Turkey . Look at the way khap panchayats reject the state's authority even in criminal and civil law,“ Subramanian says. If it is optional, it would give citizens a common set of rights, and also let them choose the sphere of personal law if they prefer. This might prompt further reform of personal law, to keep women within the fold.And conversely , for those who hope for secularisation in the Western mode, this would make the advantages of civil law obvious enough that personal law could slowly wither away .
Nehru okayed principle, but didn't make it a directive
India's first PM Jawaharlal Nehru professed his keen desire to have a Uniform Civil Code (UCC), but though he succeeded in codifying Hindu law, his government took no step towards reform of Muslim personal laws and sidestepped the question of a common code altogether.
When Dr B R Ambedkar asked the Constituent Assembly to adopt a uniform code, its Muslim members staunchly opposed it, so all he got in the Constitution was Article 44 in the Directive Principles that said `the State shall endeavour to secure for the citizens a uniform civil code.' The British had left Muslim laws untouched but had prepared a draft for reform of Hindu laws in 1946 in the wake of a robust Hindu social reforms movement. In 1948, Nehru asked Ambedkar, the first law minister, to head a panel that would work on this draft and finalise a Hindu code (which would apply also to Buddhists, Jains and Sikhs). When Ambedkar felt Nehru wasn't pushing the code through, he quit the Cabinet in 1951. After Nehru won a thumping win in the 1952 general elections, the Hindu Code Bill was revived, though by then it was split into many parts (relating to marriage, divorce, inheritance etc).
While the R-S-S saw in it an assault on Hindu tradition and many swamis quoted from the scriptures to show, for instance, how Hindu marriages were sacrosanct and indissoluble, the political opposition, right-wing as well as the Left, attacked Nehru's government, asking why the code wasn't an `Indian' one. Dr Shyama Prasad Mookerjee of the Jana Sangh said, “I know the weaknesses of promoters of this bill. They dare not touch the Muslim minority . There will be so much opposition coming from throughout India that government will not dare to proceed with it. But of course you can proceed with the Hindu community in any way you like and whatever the consequences may be.“
The Hindu Mahasabha's N C Chatterjee questioned the need for a `Hindu' Marriage Act if India was a secular nation. And if polygamy was bad, “why not rescue our Muslim sisters from that curse and plight?“ Socialist leader JB Kripalani said the government ought to bring in monogamy for Muslims too and added the community was “pre pared for it.“ His wife Sucheta Kripalani, a Congress MP, felt the Muslims weren't quite prepared but said she hoped the government would bring in a UCC “soon“. The Communists too wanted the personal laws of all communities to be reformed; B C Das and Bhupesh Gupta felt the reforms being undertaken weren't far-reaching enough.
Nehru believed that given the preand post-Partition violence, Muslims who had stayed back in India would feel insecure if a UCC was introduced immediately. He said the UCC had his “extreme sympathy,“ but the time was not “ripe“ for it. “I want to prepare the ground for it and this kind of thing (Hindu code) is one method of preparing the ground,“ he said. Muslim MPs then thanked him profusely for “protecting“ their personal laws.
The bills on reforming Hindu laws were passed in 1955-56, after which the UCC debate and the one on codifying Muslim law more or less died down. It resurrected itself in 1985-86 (by then Panditji had been dead for over 20 years and his daughter Indira, too, had passed away) when Nehru's grandson Rajiv overturned the SC verdict in the Shah Bano case.
See also
All India Muslim Personal Law Board
Muslim law and adoption: India
Muslim personal law, India: Divorce
Muslim personal law, India: Divorce (SC verdict, 2017: full text)
Muslim personal law, India: Marriage
Muslim personal law: India (fatwas)
Muslim personal law: Pakistan (fatwas)
Uniform Civil Code: India
