Strengthen gender justice & secular legal frameworks, No To ‘Uniform Control Code’ in garb of UCC: ALIFA

The All-India Feminist Alliance (ALIFA) unequivocally has rejected the state-level Uniform Civil Codes (UCCs) that are being enacted or proposed by the BJP-led far right state governments, without adequate, transparent and inclusive consultations with women, queer and transgender people, Adivasi communities and other affected groups from all social locations and from across the country. Contrary to the claim of being ‘gender-just’, these Codes arbitrarily increase the powers of the State through surveillance, without ensuring either protection or justice for women and bring in draconian intrusions into the privacy of individuals.

Hence the alliance of women rights organisations from across the country has rejected the conflation of equality with uniformity and homogeneity. Likewise, ALIFA has ‘refused the criminalisation and surveillance being imposed in the garb of ‘gender justice’. We demand an immediate rollback of these Codes and insist that there must be no rush to enact or impose them without ensuring that all constitutional rights of the affected communities are fully safeguarded and that widespread consultations are held with them.’

‘A week ago, on September 13, 2026, Mr Amit Shah, the Union Home Minister, publicly said that a Uniform Civil Code (UCC) would be implemented in all 21 BJP- and NDA-ruled states before 2029. This renewed push by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to impose a UCC across the country before the 2029 elections demands a firm and clear response from women representing diverse social locations across India, in whose name this monolith project of the BJP-RSS is being orchestrated.

The Uniform Civil Code in Uttarakhand has been in force since January 27, 2025. The UCC Bills passed by Gujarat, Assam and Madhya Pradesh in their Legislative Assemblies are awaiting Presidential assent as of September 2026, and therefore, not yet in force. Neither Uttarakhand’s UCC nor the frameworks contained in the Gujarat, Assam and Madhya Pradesh UCC Bills provide a model that incorporates substantive gender equality, let alone gender justice. A critical scrutiny of the UCC Codes across states by ALIFA has revealed the many ways in which these are likely to have adverse impacts on women and vulnerable social groups, while claiming to ‘safeguard women’s rights’.

The All-India Feminist Alliance (ALIFA) elaborates on our key concerns regarding the UCC Law and Bills here:

• The new codes retain and reproduce unjust provisions that push back against hard-won rights, over decades. They retain restitution of conjugal rights equally for men and women, a remedy long denounced by women’s rights advocates for compelling marital cohabitation and for its potential use against women attempting to leave abusive marriages. They restrict access to divorce during the first year of marriage, subject only to narrow exceptions, rather than expanding women’s ability to leave a marriage safely and autonomously and include religious conversion as a ground for divorce. All these provisions are regressive and inimical to constitutional freedoms and rights.
• The new Codes fail to address the gaps already known in the existing Personal and secular laws across the country. Rather than providing a comprehensive family-law framework, many remain largely focused on marriage, divorce, succession and live-in relationships. They do not address issues such as marriage inequality, the absence of a concept of marital property for women, no-fault divorce with safeguards for women, and marital rape, which have been consistently brought before the Supreme Court for redressal or raised by women’s and queer movements, and legal reform campaigns. Nor do they suggest reform of adoption and guardianship to guarantee equal parental rights irrespective of gender identity, sexual orientation, religion or marital status.
• Instead, some of these Codes introduce new criminal penalties into intimate and family relationships without adequate provision for ensuring the matrimonial rights of women. The emerging approach of selectively criminalising certain marriage and divorce practices historically associated with Muslim Personal Law and practices such as Triple Talaq is a glaring example of this. Gender justice does not mean arbitrarily singling out particular communities and practices for penal treatment, while leaving the structural inequalities experienced by women across communities substantially untouched. As feminists, we oppose the substantive inequality and discrimination related to divorce, separation and annulment, inheritance, custody, and guardianship in all communities.
• Most glaringly, the Codes do not address women’s economic inequality within marriage. They do not establish a marital-property regime that recognises women’s unpaid care and domestic labour or guarantees an equitable share in assets accumulated, sustained, or value-added during marriage. Formal equality in marriage and inheritance means little, if women must leave decades-long marriages without an enforceable share in the wealth their unpaid and paid labour helped create.
• The succession provisions in the Codes also require much closer scrutiny than the language of “equal inheritance” suggests. Under the Hindu Succession Act, daughters and sons currently have a birthright in Mitakshara coparcenary property. Uttarakhand’s UCC removes the distinction between coparcenary and other property and permits property to be disposed of by will, potentially removing the limited protection against disinheritance that daughters had in ancestral joint-family property. The Muslim Personal Law provides mandatory shares for legal heirs, including daughters and sons, and restricts testamentary disposition to one-third of the estate. The Goa Succession Special Notaries and Inventory Proceeding Act stipulates one-half of the estate to the “forced heirs” in case of children. The UCC displaces these protections too. A genuinely gender-just succession regime should not merely ask whether formal shares are described as equal, but whether women and other vulnerable heirs remain protected against disinheritance and economic dispossession.
• The UCC Law and Bills empower the State to surveil and arbitrarily intrude into the intimate lives of citizens, including coercive intervention through registration, inquiry, reporting and penal provisions in the name of ensuring equality in marriage, inheritance and other aspects of family law. These provisions are especially dangerous for inter-faith, inter-caste, queer and transgender couples whose relationships are already under extreme scrutiny and stigma. The Gujarat Bill, which makes registers of marriages, divorces and other prescribed records open to inspection, allows certified extracts to be obtained on application, and requires employers, government bodies, companies and other authorities to rely on UCC registration certificates before changing a person’s recorded marital status, typifies this approach. While this may protect women who could be deceived if information regarding their intended marriage is not in the public domain, there are no safeguards for the adverse consequences this can have for inter-faith or inter-caste marriages that face opposition from family or civil society groups.
• The UCC Law and Bills criminalise aspects of consensual adult relationships, creating victims and culprits without a crime. The provisions transform consensual adult intimacy into a matter for administrative verification, third-party complaint, police record and criminal punishment, including imprisonment merely for failure to register a consensual adult relationship. Under Uttarakhand’s UCC Law, adults in a live-in relationship MUST register it within a month or face imprisonment; similar mandatory-registration and penal provisions have now been reproduced in the Gujarat, Assam and Madhya Pradesh Bills. In Gujarat, for example, the Registrar may summon the partners or “any other person” as part of an inquiry; records of live-in relationships are required to be forwarded to the local police; parents or guardians are required to be informed where either partner is below 21and non-registration can attract imprisonment. A complaint or information from a third party can trigger proceedings requiring the couple to register as well. The arbitrariness and discrimination are stark, as those in consensual adult live-in relationships are subjected to registration and policing under the garb of protection, while corresponding protections are not included in the Codes for adults in forced marriage, in inter-caste, in inter-faith marriage or queer and transgender couples facing familial coercion or violence.
• The UCC Law and Bills do not apply to all women. One, they explicitly exclude Scheduled Tribe communities, almost 15% of the Indian population. Two, some emerging UCCs continue to organise marriage and family around binary categories of “man” and “woman”, do not recognise same-sex marriage, and fail to create a clear framework recognising queer and trans people’s relationships and families and other forms of CIS families. The Gujarat Bill, for example, contains no reference to transgender persons at all, thereby completely excluding the relationships and marriages of transgender people and other queer people.  Transgender and queer people, as well as Adivasi women, have been demanding gender justice, rights and equality (not UCC) in live-in and marital relationships for a long time. A UCC Law or Bill cannot credibly describe itself as “uniform” while shutting out the lived experiences of entire communities and family forms and/or rendering them legally invisible.
• The new Codes totally ignore Goa’s experience and the complexities and contradictions with its UCC. The Goa ‘UCC’ is hardly uniform when looked at closely. It continues to recognise both canonical and civil registration of marriages, which may not per se be discriminatory, while many discriminatory provisions of the Code of Customs and Usages of Gentile Hindus continue to be applicable. Uniform provisions that are discriminatory for women include empowering the male spouse to manage the marital property. The issues of inadequate access to family law and several other concerns identified in the Goa UCC remain unaddressed in the new UCC Law and Bills.
• The Uniform Civil Code was placed in the Directive Principles of State Policy of the Constitution, under Article 44, a goal that the State should be working towards. But Article 44 does not prescribe what form such a Code must take, nor does it require uniformity to be pursued through the erasure of legal pluralism and social diversity.  Thus, Article 44 clearly enables amendments to existing laws to move towards uniformity of rights. Even the 21^st Law Commission (2018) set up by the BJP government found that a UCC is neither necessary nor desirable. Instead, it recommended amending every Personal Law to remove discrimination within family laws while preserving diversity where difference itself was not discriminatory. Similar demands have been placed by several women’s groups for decades.
• The UCC Law and Bills, by conflating equality with uniformity, miss the point that uniformity does not guarantee equality, nor is non-uniformity necessarily discriminatory. The prescriptive law of monogamy has not ensured justice and equality. This for instance, is the case for women whose husbands enter subsequent relationships or marriages without their consent or knowledge, as also for women who marry not knowing of the prior marriage of their husband, and those who marry in coercive circumstances. Nor does formally identical treatment necessarily address unequal bargaining power, unpaid care work, economic dependence, domestic violence or women’s lack of access to marital assets.
• Notably, despite BJP’s push, UCC is not fully agreeable even to all NDA constituents. Bihar’s ruling JD (U) has ruled out implementing a UCC in the state. Other NDA allies have called for discussion or consultation rather than automatic implementation. Those objections cannot simply be overridden.  BJP cannot and should not manufacture consent by projecting the UCC as an instrument for achieving women’s rights in live-in relationships or marriage.
• BJP deliberately denies the plural Indian reality that all people need not live by ONE prescribed model of family, culture or community and that gender justice does not require erasure of non-discriminatory difference. India has multiple kinds of kin relationships/families that are determined by locality, community, history, geography, religion, caste, sexuality and gender. Customs differ across the country within the same religious community too. Likewise, the communities categorised as scheduled tribes also have diverse customs within. What we require is that women, queer and transgender persons across communities and social locations, enjoy equitable rights, dignity, autonomy and freedom, and the capacity to determine the terms on which they live their own lives.
• In an electoral democracy, lawmaking for citizens in the absence of their significant representation in national parliament and state assemblies is undemocratic. Laws restructuring the intimate and family lives of hundreds of millions of people require meaningful participation by those most affected, including Muslim women, Adivasi women, Dalit and Bahujan women, queer and transgender people, women from indigenous communities, persons with disabilities, single women and women from diverse regional and religious communities. Representation cannot be substituted by governments claiming to speak on their behalf. In fact, without immediate and unconditional implementation of Women’s Reservation (including for women from all disadvantaged and vulnerable groups), such laws having far-reaching implications cannot be legislated on behalf of women. If specific provisions of Personal Laws that are discriminatory in nature require reform, the Government should bring in the reforms only through widespread consultation with women, queer and transgender people from all social and geographical locations.

For all these elaborated and articulated arguments, ALIFA states that it “believes that BJP’s obsession with regulating intimacy – who to marry, form relationships and constitute families belongs to an age-old repertoire of social control, now refurbished in the garb of ‘modernity’, ‘reform’ and ‘women’s empowerment’. The BJP cynically co-opts and turns upside down this language of women’s empowerment and gender justice to advance a much wider project of cultural homogenisation, control, and Hindu Rashtra. We see this pattern across a range of current initiatives, from the politics around NRC and SIR to the High-Powered Demography Mission that proposes demographic surveillance and other measures that seek to define who belongs, who does not, and what constitutes an acceptable citizen and family. We firmly place the UCC within this larger political context, rather than treating it as an isolated question of legal reform.”

Among the demands placed before the government are:

1. The Government of Uttarakhand to immediately repeal rights-repulsive provisions including those that criminalise non-registration of consensual live-in relationships, mandatorily require police and parental notification, and subject adult relationships to State inquiry, and to incorporate provisions that factor in both legal pluralism and enabling rights after due consultative processes.
2. That the Governments of Gujarat, Assam and Madhya Pradesh immediately withdraw the Bills passed in the respective state Assemblies.
3. That the governments of Maharashtra, Rajasthan, West Bengal and Chhattisgarh, which have set up committees to recommend a draft UCC, do not take any further steps and instead institute widespread democratic consultations with women’s rights and civil rights organisations, queer and transgender persons groups, Adivasi organisations, disability-rights groups, minority organisations and other affected communities.
4. That all the state government’s stop family law legislation in the name of UCC, which is being imposed and accompanied by an Islamophobic diatribe.
5. That any amendments to family laws that are discriminatory should be done only after consultation with women, queer and transgender people across communities and social locations, and should be assessed against the substantive outcomes of equality, autonomy, dignity, economic security and freedom from discrimination and violence rather than against uniformity for its own sake.
6. Any reform of succession law must preserve or strengthen protections against the economic disinheritance of women, rather than replacing existing birthright or mandatory-share protections with unrestricted testamentary power.
7. Any reform of family law must recognise the different consensual relationships, families and parental rights of adult cisgender, queer and transgender people rather than maintaining a formally uniform but substantively heteronormative and gender-binary framework that is effectively discriminatory.
8. The State must address the substantive areas on which women’s, transgender and queer movements have repeatedly demanded reform, including marital property, no-fault divorce with safeguards for women, equal guardianship and adoption rights, marital rape, maintenance, economic security on dissolution of marriage, and meaningful access to family-law justice.
9. Family-law reform must recognise unpaid care work and women’s contribution to assets accumulated during marriage and create enforceable equitable economic rights at separation, divorce and death.
10. Any legal recognition of live-in relationships must be rights-conferring and dignity-affirming rather than surveillance-based, intruding on privacy: access to maintenance, protection from violence, inheritance and other remedies must not depend upon compulsory registration of an intimate relationship.
11. Personal and relationship data collected under family law must be subject to strict necessity, confidentiality and data-protection safeguards, as also upheld by the Supreme Court in the right to privacy judgements and must not be routinely shared with police, families or third parties.
12.  No person’s free choice of partner or intimate relationship should trigger parental notification, police scrutiny or administrative investigation because of their religion, caste, gender identity, sexuality or decision not to marry.
13. Any comprehensive reform must be tested not only for formal equality but for its actual impact on women and people facing social and structural disadvantage, particularly economically poor women, Adivasi and Dalit-Bahujan women, Muslim women, queer and transgender people, persons with disabilities, migrants, single women and survivors of violence.

In conclusion, All-India Feminist Alliance (ALIFA) has stated in this detailed public statement that it “unequivocally rejects the deeply paternalistic, invasive and unwelcome ‘reforms’ being imposed in the name of women and the attempt to homogenise equality for all women, erasing the agency of women across social locations. We refuse to be fooled by the smokescreen of ‘women’s rights’ and seek to expose both the rhetoric and the substantive content of the Uniform Civil Code, including enacted and emerging Codes across India. Through a continuing critical examination of their provisions and underlying political project, we shall strive to engage with and enable women, queer and transgender people across India to see through these UCCs for the falsehoods that they are and collectively resist the exclusionary politics, the conflation of uniformity with equality, and cultural control with women’s empowerment.”

The statement has been issued by both the All-India Feminist Alliance (ALIFA) and the National Alliance of People’s Movements (NAPM).

Related:

Assam: Bill on Uniform Civil Code (UCC), a partisan act?

Uttarakhand implements Uniform Civil Code (UCC) attracting criticism and concerns

Uttarakhand Uniform Civil Code: A Majoritarian Code – Neither Uniform nor Civil