Uttarakhand UCC panel studied laws in Turkiye, Bangladesh among 10 nations

Tribune News Service

Aditi Tandon

New Delhi, June 30

Uttarakhand appears on track to enact India’s first legislation on the Uniform Civil Code (UCC) with the committee examining the issue announcing completion of the draft code and its “very early submission to the state government”.

“The drafting of the proposed UCC for Uttarakhand is now complete. The report of the expert committee along with the draft code will very soon be printed and submitted to the Uttarakhand Government,” panel chairperson Justice Ranjana Prakash Desai (Retd) said today.

The code will be the first UCC draft in India, where people of different religions practise different personal laws.

In finalising a code for Uttarakhand, the panel studied personal laws of 10 countries, including Muslim-majority Indonesia, Bangladesh and Turkiye, besides the US and others. The panel also looked at personal laws in Suriname, a society with several indigenous people. All eyes are on whether the committee fixes the minimum legal marriageable age for all citizens irrespective of faith, recommends safeguards in inter faith marriages and live in relationships, and abolishes polyandry and polygamy.

The Uttarakhand UCC once enacted is expected to guide the Law Commission of India currently gathering public responses on the matter.

The Law Commission members had on June 2 met with the Uttarakhand panel experts to discuss the issue.

The Uttarakhand panel reviewed 2,31,000 written submissions on the subject and held 63 meetings. A panel sub-committee conducted 163 meetings with 20,000 persons.

Desai said the panel engaged in interactions with leaders of political parties, state statutory commissions and religious denominations, besides visiting 40 places in BJP-ruled Uttarakhand to debate the code and elicit responses.

“We got an overwhelmingly positive response to the code. There was some shade of resistance, which is natural. Once enacted, the UCC will strengthen India’s secular fabric. Our exercise was guided solely by the need for gender equality and elimination of arbitrariness and discrimination in personal laws,” Desai said.

The panel’s mandate is to look at laws governing marriage, divorce, property rights, succession laws, inheritance and adoption across faiths for the people of Uttarakhand, identify gaps and consider an umbrella legislation.

Discussion on July 3

• The parliamentary panel on law and justice has called Law Commission members to discuss the UCC on July 3.

Notified last year

• The Uttarakhand Government had notified the committee on May 27, 2022
• Its first meeting was held on July 4, 2022

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