Amit Shah's UCC Pledge: A Long-Overdue Step Toward Real Equality Before Law

Union Home Minister Amit Shah delivered one of the BJP’s most consequential political promises in years on Sunday, declaring that the Uniform Civil Code (UCC) will be implemented across all 21 BJP and NDA-ruled states before the 2029 general election. For supporters of the move, it marks the culmination of a demand that has sat in India’s Constitution as an unfulfilled directive principle for over seven decades — and one that successive governments lacked the political will to act on.

A promise the Constitution itself made

Article 44 of the Indian Constitution explicitly directs the state to “endeavour to secure for the citizens a uniform civil code throughout the territory of India.” For UCC’s supporters, Shah’s announcement isn’t a radical departure — it’s the government finally making good on a founding commitment that India’s constitutional architects themselves envisioned, but which decades of political caution left on the shelf.

Speaking to reporters in Mumbai while reviewing the BJP’s record over the past 12 years and 25-year journey under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Shah pointed to the abolition of triple talaq as proof that reform in this space isn’t about targeting any one community — it’s about extending equal rights to citizens, especially women, who had long been denied them under fragmented personal law systems.

“Triple talaq has been abolished, giving Muslim women equal rights. We have introduced the Uniform Civil Code in several states, and I am confident that in the 21 BJP-NDA-ruled states, we will introduce the UCC before 2029,” Shah said.

Uttarakhand as proof of concept

Backers of the UCC point to Uttarakhand’s rollout in January 2025 — the first state to implement it — as evidence the policy isn’t theoretical. It works, and it hasn’t triggered the social disruption that critics warned of. Chief Minister Pushkar Singh Dhami hailed the move as a milestone for social equality and unity, framing it as a template other BJP-run states could follow rather than an experiment that failed and needed to be shelved.

Since then, momentum has continued to build. Madhya Pradesh joined the list of states backing the UCC after its cabinet unanimously approved it at a special meeting in Bhopal last month — a signal, supporters argue, that this is a policy gaining organic traction among state governments themselves, not something being imposed unilaterally from the Centre.

The equality argument at the heart of UCC

For proponents, the core appeal of the UCC is straightforward: a secular republic should not have citizens governed by different family laws — on marriage, divorce, inheritance and adoption — depending solely on their religion. Shah has previously framed this pointedly in Parliament, pressing the opposition to explain why there should not be a common law for every religion in a secular nation, and accusing the Congress of decades of “appeasement politics” that kept reform frozen in place.

From this vantage point, the UCC isn’t an attack on any faith’s identity — it’s an assertion that constitutional equality should mean the same set of civil rights and protections for every Indian citizen, most notably women who have historically borne the brunt of unequal personal law provisions across multiple religious codes.

A rare instance of principle meeting execution

What distinguishes this announcement from earlier UCC rhetoric, supporters say, is the specificity: 21 states, a hard political deadline of 2029, and an actual working model already in place in Uttarakhand. Shah’s announcement came bundled with a broader accounting of governance wins — a reported 30 percent single-year rise in conviction rates tied to the new Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita criminal code, over 9,000 surrenders in insurgency-hit regions, and the framing of Operation Sindoor and past surgical and air strikes as evidence of a “zero tolerance” approach to terrorism. Taken together, the pitch to supporters is one of a government that sets ambitious reform targets and then delivers on them state by state, rather than leaving landmark constitutional promises indefinitely deferred.

The other side of the debate

Not everyone views the UCC rollout so favourably. Opposition parties and several civil society groups have long argued that a uniform code risks overriding the personal laws and customs of religious and tribal minorities, and have questioned whether the push is driven by genuine gender-equality concerns or by majoritarian politics. Critics have also pointed out that Uttarakhand’s version of the UCC exempted Scheduled Tribes, raising questions about how “uniform” the code truly is in practice, and some legal scholars have cautioned that state-by-state implementation could create a patchwork of civil laws rather than the singular code Article 44 envisions. These objections are likely to remain central to the political battle over the UCC as more states move toward implementation ahead of 2029.