Dehradun: The Uniform Civil Code (UCC) has been implemented in Uttarakhand beginning Monday, January 27, making it the first state in independent India to put into effect such a law, chief minister Pushkar Singh Dhami said.
Preparations were made with all approvals of the rules for the implementation of the Act and training of officials concerned, Dhami said in a statement.
The Uniform Civil Code (UCC) will bring about uniformity in society and ensure equal rights and responsibilities for all citizens, he claimed.
“UCC is just an offering made by our state in the great ‘yagya’ being performed by the Prime Minister to make the country a developed, organised, harmonious and self-reliant nation,” he said.
UCC and BJP in Uttarakhand
The law’s implementation was a major commitment of the BJP in the run-up to the 2022 assembly polls which saw the party storm to power for a second consecutive term, something never done by any other party in the state since its creation in 2000.
As soon as Dhami formed the government again in March 2022, the state cabinet at its very first meeting chaired by him cleared a proposal for the formation of an expert committee to draft the law.
An expert committee headed by retired Supreme Court Judge Ranjana Prakash Desai was constituted on May 27, 2022, to prepare the draft of the UCC.
The panel headed by Desai set the ball rolling on the implementation of UCC by submitting a comprehensive draft in four volumes, prepared after one and a half years of dialogue with different sections of the state’s population.
The panel sent the draft to the state government on February 2, 2024, and legislation on it was passed just a few days later by the state Assembly on February 7.
It was given president’s assent nearly a month later paving the way for its implementation.
An expert committee headed by former chief secretary Shatrughna Singh, formed to frame the rules and regulations for the implementation of the Act, submitted its report to the state government late last year.
The state cabinet gave its approval recently and authorised the chief minister to decide a date for its implementation.
Uttarakhand has become the first state to implement the UCC and set a model for other states to follow. Several BJP-ruled states, including Assam, have already expressed their desire to adopt Uttarakhand’s UCC as a model.
The government machinery in Uttarakhand went into overdrive to implement the UCC in the state within the month-long timeline set for it by Dhami.
What does UCC do?
The Uniform Civil Code Act of Uttarakhand will govern and regulate the laws relating to marriage and divorce, succession, live-in relationships and related matters.
It sets equal marriageable age for men and women, grounds of divorce and procedures across all religions, and bans polygamy and ‘halala’.
Doon University vice chancellor Surekha Dangwal, who was part of the panel that drafted the UCC and was among those who framed the rules for its implementation, described provisions aimed at bringing about gender parity in matters of marriage, divorce and succession, treating all children as legitimate including those born of void or voidable marriages, simplifying the process of preparing a will and regulating live-in relationships as the most outstanding in the UCC.
“Gender parity across all religions is the spirit of UCC,” Dangwal told PTI.
The UCC makes registration of all marriages and live-in relationships mandatory. Facilities have been created to help people register their marriages online so that they do not have to run around government offices for it, she said.
“Another remarkable feature of the UCC is that it treats all children as legitimate. We have in fact totally done away with the term illegitimate in the context of children,” she said.
The UCC also makes a special provision for defence personnel called “privileged will” which can be made both in writing or by word of mouth.
Any soldier or air force personnel engaged in an expedition or actual warfare or a mariner at sea can make a privileged will for which rules have been kept flexible.
Left’s latest stand on UCC
Curiously, 40 years later the much-weakened Left parties have now softened their stand on Uniform Civil Code and are instead blaming the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party for thrusting it on the Muslims. The truth is that they were in those years of Indian politics the real champions of the UCC. The BJP which was not a powerful force then only used to raise this issue as it was another stick to beat the Muslims.
Actually, the movement by Muslims in 1985 had little to do with any individual—read Shah Bano then—but more to do with the apex court ruling in favour of the Uniform Civil Code. The Supreme Court on April 23, 1985 asked her ex-husband Mohammad Ahmad Khan, himself a lawyer of Indore, to pay maintenance of Rs 500 per month to Shah Bano who was reportedly disowned by him in 1975 at the age of 62, that is 43 years after the married life. When Shah Bano moved court her husband divorced her. It was three years later in 1978 and had paid her dain mehar (dower) of Rs 3,000. She moved the High Court which asked Khan to pay alimony.
Upon this Khan approached the Supreme Court, which also ruled in favour of his ex-wife and asked him to pay maintenance and even recommended implementation of a Uniform Civil Code.
While Muslim leadership in general opposed the ruling, in particular the reference of UCC, and mobilized the masses, the secular elements among them openly opposed it and called the judgement a landmark one. They were whole-heartedly backed by the Left-leaning public opinion makers, some film personalities and celebrities, feminists and civil society groups.
If objectively analysed from hindsight, it can be said that the Babri Masjid Action Committee perhaps failed to read the ground reality and could not anticipate how the Sangh Parivar used this issue to consolidate and bounce back to the centre stage of politics. In contrast, the so-called Shah Bano movement was an internal matter of the Muslim community, which has been peacefully protesting against the Supreme Court’s stand on the Uniform Civil Code.
Muslim viewpoint
The viewpoint of the Muslims was that the provision of maintenance after the expiry of iddat period of about three months of divorce is against the Shariat. They also argued that Shah Bano was financially not so helpless a woman who had five children in her custody as it was being projected by the secularists and feminists in the media and civil society groups.
If it was financially not sustainable for Shah Bano to survive she would not have spent thousands, maybe lakhs of rupees, fighting cases for 10 years from district court to High Court and then Supreme Court.
As she had got divorced after 46 years of marriage her children were grown up and would have easily taken up the expenditure of their mother. Muslims pleaded that it was against the dignity and self-respect of a woman to accept money from a man who had disowned and divorced her.
In contrast, the journalists and feminists deliberately ignored that in Islamic law only the ex-wife is not entitled to get maintenance. Otherwise, the ex-husband is bound to bear all the expenditure of the children till they grow up and stand on their own—in the case of daughters, married off. The ex-wife can even demand money for the breastfeeding of the child from the ex-husband. But in the case of Shah Bano, this does not arise as her children were grown up.
In Islam, the divorced woman and widow can marry again after the expiry of the iddat period of three months. While the Left and BJP were quite ‘sympathetic’ towards divorced women, they have no solution for the widows, whose number are many times more in the society.
What is happening everywhere is that, because of fear of paying maintenance, males are deserting their wives and no law is coming to the rescue of the latter.
(With inputs from PTI)
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