ONE NATION, ONE LAW: THE UNIFORM CIVIL CODE DEBATE

Abstract

Article 44 of the Constitution directs the state to endeavour to secure a Uniform Civil Code for all citizens, yet for seven decades that directive remained a matter of unresolved constitutional aspiration rather than enacted law. This paper examines the doctrinal and political history of that aspiration, from the Second Law Commission's 1835 recommendation against codifying personal law, through the Constituent Assembly's contested debate, to the Supreme Court's repeated, if inconclusive, invocations of Article 44 in Mohd. Ahmed Khan v. Shah Bano Begum, Sarla Mudgal v. Union of India, John Vallamattom v. Union of India and Jorden Diengdeh v. S.S. Chopra. It surveys the gender disparity that continues to characterise personal law across religious communities, and analyses the constitutional relationship between a uniform code and the guarantee of religious freedom under Articles 25 and 26. The paper then turns to the development that has transformed this debate from theoretical to practical: the Uniform Civil Code of Uttarakhand Act, 2024, which came into force on 27 January 2025, making Uttarakhand the first Indian state to enact a uniform civil code and supplying, for the first time, a working legislative and administrative model against which the arguments long rehearsed in the abstract can now be tested empirically. Weighing the arguments for and against a uniform code, including the genuine concerns of religious minorities regarding cultural autonomy, the paper concludes that the Uttarakhand experiment, still less than two years into implementation and already the subject of pending constitutional challenge, offers the clearest available evidence of both the code's capacity to address documented gender inequity and the practical and constitutional difficulties its wider national implementation would need to resolve.