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The justification for a UCC is often anchored in constitutional equality and gender justice. But a close reading of the Uttarakhand UCC reveals a law that confuses uniformity with equality and conflates regulation with protection. It has bureaucratic hurdles and criminal penalties that will disproportionately affect poor and marginalised communities. It fails to draw on progressive reforms within India’s diverse personal laws or the best practices from family codes worldwide. It ignores lived realities and legal evolution and reads like a “copy-paste” of the Hindu Code Bill, lacking vision, inclusivity, and systemic simplification.

These are some of our concerns arising from the Uttarakhand UCC, beginning with the compulsory registration of live-in relationships. Notifying police and parents is surveillance masquerading as protection. A UCC must ensure that registration, if any, is optional, confidential, and offers tangible benefits like maintenance, legitimacy of children, and inheritance rights, not social exposure. Another concern is the criminalisation of extra-judicial dissolution of marriage with three years’ punishment and a fine. Being a civil law, a UCC should avoid criminalising civil marriage disputes.

Desertion is one of the most common issues women face, leaving them and their children extremely vulnerable. A UCC should include enforceable economic remedies for deserted women, including automatic maintenance orders and injunctive relief against disposal of assets.

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While the Hindu Marriage Act permits either spouse to claim maintenance, under other personal laws and the Special Marriage Act, only women can claim maintenance. A UCC should retain this gender-specific right. The deep social inequality and unequal power relations within marriage require this protection for women.

Mandating that every divorce be filed in a civil court will create a bottleneck of historic proportions. Family courts are already overburdened with lakhs of cases languishing for years. Customary divorces are speedy, economical, and allow greater access to weaker sections. A UCC should create a robust administrative mechanism for mutual-consent divorces and reserve court intervention for contested or complex matters.

Code Bill, while giving inheritance rights to Hindu women, also gave Hindu men the absolute right to bequeath their property. What ensued was the silent disinheritance of women through wills. On the other hand, Muslim women have a protected share in the property that cannot be willed. A UCC must protect wives and children with a minimum fixed share that cannot be willed.

It must also recognise women’s unpaid care and domestic labour and guarantee women an equitable share in assets accumulated, sustained or value-added during marriage. Marital property rights for women are a long-overdue right that should be included.

Courts have repeatedly held that a man who has used deceit to enter a second marriage cannot take advantage of the illegitimacy of that marriage to deny support to a woman who married him in good faith. Courts have granted women maintenance, even if the marriage is technically void. A UCC must codify this principle and guarantee second wives clear rights to maintenance and economic protection.

The Uttarakhand UCC remains entirely silent on the tax benefits reserved for Hindus via the Hindu Undivided Family (HUF). It must address this regressive and unequal tax advantage.

The Uttarakhand UCC penalises parties for non-registration of marriage, divorce, and live-in relationships by imposing monetary fines and even imprisonment in some cases. Such sanctions will have a severe impact on the poor and the marginalised. A UCC should ensure easy access, awareness and user-friendly procedures, rather than adding punitive measures.

The Maharashtra UCC committee was constituted on July 9 under Justice Ranjana Desai. On September 19, Justice R C Chavan resigned from the committee, raising concerns about its consultative process. Democratic, transparent consultations with individuals and organisations working on the rights of women, Adivasis, queer and transgender people, and persons with disabilities should be held, not as a formality but as a constitutional necessity.

Dmello is director and Agnes is founder of Majlis, a legal centre for women and children