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THE RECENTLY ELECTED BHARATIYA (ANATA PARTY (ßjp) government in India has once again brought to the foreground an issue that has plagued Indian feminists for decades: that of a uniform civil code (ucc) for all Indian citizens. On the surface, enforcing a uniform code in matters of marriage, property inheritance, and guardianship of children appears entirely consistent with feminist goals. The specific manner and context in which the ucc is formulated in India, however, reveals why Indian feminists now oppose the measure. This is an especially important time to understand the complexities of Indian feminist positions on this issue, since the Hindu right bjp actively seeks to present itself as secular and pro-women, and portrays opponents of a ucc as "pseudo-secular" and anti-women.
The debate over the ucc in contemporary India is produced by the opposition between two notions of rights contained in Part in of the constitution, "Fundamental Rights," within which the bearer of rights is construed both as individual citizen and as member of a collective. The former is the subject of Articles 14 to 24 of the constitution, which ensure the individual's rights to equality and freedom, and the latter is the subject of Articles 25 to 30, which protect religious freedom and the educational and cultural rights of minorities. It is from the latter that religious communities derive the right to be governed by their own "personal laws." Since these personal laws cover matters of marriage, property inheritance, and guardianship of children, and since all personal laws discriminate against women, the tension in Part m of the constitution is a contradiction between the rights of women as individual citizens and those of religious communities as collective units of a democracy.
The idea that providing universal laws for all citizens is the properly modern goal for a nation-state is reflected in Part IV of the constitution, "Directive Principles of State Policy," which calls on the state to bring about a ucc. Although most dominant narratives, especially those of the Hindu right, frame the necessity of a ucc as a matter of national integrity, a key change since the 1990s is that the ucc has also come to be posed as a "women's rights" issue. In the bjp's majoritarian Hindu rendering of the...