Author: Editorial
Publication: The Pioneer
Date: December 15, 2014
URL:   http://www.dailypioneer.com/columnists/edit/old-debate-and-old-bias.html

Politics of damning the Uniform Civil Code

Union Minister for Law and Justice DV Sadanand Gowda's stand that the Government will seek wider consultation over the introduction of a Uniform Civil Code in the country, cannot be faulted. The issue has been contentious from the time it came to be left out of the Constitution, with many lawmakers then raising eyebrows. It must be remembered that during that time, the general consensus was that a common civil code should be enacted in due course because the concept of ‘one country, one law' made sense in the democratic republic of India.

  However, as decades went by, it became evident that political parties which reigned for the larger part of the post-independence years simply had no desire to correct the anomaly, primarily because they saw in the absence of the Uniform Civil Code a means to shore up their vote-banks. Interestingly, a common code exists in Goa, a former Portuguese colony, with no deleterious impact on the social conditions of the minorities there. It is not clear what the opponents of a uniform code have by way of logical objection. All they offer is abstract reasoning, such as that a law of this kind would alienate the minorities, especially the Muslim community, from the mainstream.

 This is amusing because the Uniform Civil Code is supposed to ‘equalise' all communities under a common law and not discriminate one from the other. A Congress leader has wondered whether a Uniform Civil Code would not militate against the religious beliefs of a particular community. While this aspect has been debated threadbare in the past, its resurgence every now and then points to the sense of insecurity which exists among the clerics who fear that a uniform code would weaken much of their leverage with the community.

 The clerics are now the final arbiters and often even the courts are helpless in civil matters of divorce maintenance, for instance, even when they see injustice being done to a victim of the discriminatory personal laws of a religious community. The Supreme Court's verdict in the Shah Bano case had been a good opportunity for the Union Government to bring in a Uniform Civil Code, but the then Congress Government of Rajiv Gandhi had capitulated pathetically to the fundamentalist voices and amended the Constitution to make the court ruling infructuous.