Good morning fellow party members and speaker sir.

I am in representation of the Indian Muslim League and I am firmly

against the Uniform Civil Code.

Ten months before India votes for its next government, Prime
Minister Narendra Modi’s ruling Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) has
reignited a long-simmering campaign to create a single law
governing civil relationships between citizens in a diverse country
where the idea of uniformity is deeply contentious.

Although criminal laws are the same for all, different communities
namely follow their own civil laws, influenced by religious texts and
cultural mores.

Pm Modi has in recent weeks personally pushed for a Uniform Civil

Code (UCC) that, in theory, would replace this maze of personal
laws with a common set of rules for marriage, divorce, succession,
adoption, guardianship and partition of land and assets.

But the Modi government has not yet released a draft of what a UCC
might look like. Our party has is publicly accusing it from here on
out of using the idea as a political tool to paint minorities as
regressive ahead of the 2024 vote. And here is why..

Religious groups like ours fear that a uniform code would rob us of
our constitutional rights to freedom of religion and culture by
imposing a state-determined set of dos and don’ts. These concerns
are grounded in the religious and ethnic divisions that have torn
India since Modi came to power in 2014, with the mainstreaming of
Hindu majoritarianism leading to increased attacks on minorities –
especially Muslims.

Our perspective has been reinforced since 1985 with what is known
as the Shah Bano case, in which the Supreme Court upheld a
Muslim woman’s right to seek divorce alimony from her husband
after their divorce according to the constitution. Under pressure
from conservative groups, the then Congress party government of
Rajiv Gandhi passed a law in parliament that overruled the
Supreme Court order, this revolutionary case evolved the way
parties such as the congress themselves, JDS and even the national
conference thought about the pertinence of secularism in India.
However in recent days the success of the congress party in the
central government as well as our minority party has been non-
existent. Owing to the fact that 950 million of the 1.4 billion voters
in this country are Hindus themselves. Hindu majoritarianism is in
full swing, and I mean 98% of the BJP party are Hindus and it is
factually proven that all the bills, codes and laws they have formed
will indefinitely be beneficial to Hindus more than the minority
groups like ours, it is inherent in human nature to side with one’s
own ethnic group as said by a Stanford Study conducted in 2002.

I believe that the three reasons I have provided in support of my

argument are more than enough to voice our party’s stance on the
debate, Irrespective of the lack of fine print of a UCC and the
relation to ethnic minorities, a uniform code would fundamentally
break with India’s approach to secularism, which, unlike the West,
has largely allowed different communities to follow their own
religious practices on matters such as marriage, divorce,
inheritance, and property rights. Political scientists argue that while
personal laws do need an upgrade, the path towards any UCC must
run through consensus which we do not have by any measure.
Without that, we say the proposal is little more than a political move
geared towards the election – with potentially dangerous
consequences for what we claim to be proud of: being the world’s
largest secular democracy.

- Dhruv CV

- 9 Sutlej