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What is the idea of ​​God to an agnostic, the UCC proposal is to India. The idea in itself is pretty cool. But once one starts to put it into context, they start to search less. The common code in civil monotheism is one thing. In the context of diversity, it’s quite the opposite. I have been working with Adivasis for several decades now. Some of them follow the custom of asking the husband to move to the wife’s place after marriage and the wife has the right to expel the man at any time during the marital cohabitation if she decides to do so in consultation with the community. To me, this seems to be a more just custom than the custom of asking girls to go after marriage to live in families of men. Will the proposed UCC give fair consideration to the comparative merits of these two systems?
In some Indian societies, property is inherited by daughters, not sons. Among the Khasis in Meghalaya, the woman is treated as the head of the family and she plays that role for all legal purposes. Will the UCC consider such a great practice? I have known some societies that considered the cattle folk in the house to be members of the family. Among the Kinnaur tribes of Himachal Pradesh, it is the custom for women to marry up to five husbands. One could go on giving examples of the rights, rituals, and material substance related to birth, marriage, death, inheritance, and authority pursued by various communities in India that do not describe themselves as Hindu, Muslim, Jain, Buddhist, Christian, or Sikh. Would the proposed WCC law take into account the law of their community, their customary practices and their settled views on the relations between men and women and the relations between man, animal and nature? Or to expect that since 80 per cent of Indians are recorded in official records as ‘Hindus’, it is the ‘civilization’ of legally constituted Hindus that will emerge as a universal concept of civility while drawing up the law? Besides, would the proposed civil code consider the customary right to yajnopavita – the sacred thread – which some Hindu communities have, and some do not?
The question is not limited to the variety of traditional practices currently recognized by law as valid. It is also a matter of the different disparities that exist in the country. For example, the right to speak is a fundamental right. One likes to speak one’s own language, unless immigration, work, livelihood, or other social contexts make it necessary to speak another language. However, out of the hundreds of languages ​​found in India, only 22 are listed in the Eighth Schedule and enjoy government protection and patronage. Will a common civil code recognize the need to speak as a “civil” matter and rescue non-scheduled languages ​​from their current status of being unrecognized?
The point I am making here may seem completely irrelevant and even trivial (which it is not). I bring it up to emphasize the context of civil inequalities, which are very distinct from economic inequalities. The most egregious form of civil inequality is class inequality and the resulting discrimination. Is the proposed uniformity in civil law a factor in class inequality while constructing its provisions? For example, would all temples be entered on an equal footing for all citizens, and not require in the future any existing “purification rituals” imposed on women, castes, and tribes before entering a sacred space?
This is certainly not a trivial matter. In other words, any unified civil law presupposes a unified system of civil liberties without impediments as well. The most problematic aspect of UCC is the potential clash between an individual’s religious identity and his or her civic identity. Since an element of sacredness is associated with decisions such as marriage, and since religious and sectarian affiliations continue to play a role in those decisions, it would be impractical to require citizens to treat marriage as a purely secular act (meaning “unrelated to religion”).
Particularly in times when high-ranking public office holders deliberately display their religious affiliation publicly, it would be wrong to expect ordinary citizens to ignore their religious identities while making very important decisions in their lives. Had the holders of high public office respected the principle of secularism (meaning “they have nothing to do with any religion”), the idea of ​​a unified civil law would have become an idea worth examining.
Finally, the most important question is not about the idea but the intention behind the idea. If the intention is to stir prejudice against all religious and ethnic castes, sects, and tribes that do not share customs or regulations regarding marriage, maintenance, divorce, adoption, and inheritance, and to show them as less “national”, then talk of UCC should be seen as Malfeed.
What the people of India need is equality, all of which, as the Constitution affirmed, without abolishing it by bringing to the whims of the majority what constitutes the nation and what makes the citizens patriots. They need governments with the ability and willingness to think beyond mere electoral victories. They need political parties that think of diverse groups of people as a nation and not advance a myopic idea of ​​a nation to fit them all into the same mold based on the clichés of “loyal and primary citizens” and “suspected of disloyalty and secondary citizens” simply because the ancestors of one group They migrated to India a thousand years ago.
Common civil law is a modern state of life. It can find stability if the rulers accept that modernity, rationality, scientific temperament, respect for diversity, dialogue, and tolerance are necessary for social harmony and the continuation of diversity. Otherwise, what will be proposed as a common civil law could push the country towards an unfamiliar civil conflict. It is not abnormal for more people to turn to agnostics when the gods they have chosen to worship begin to fail them.
The writer is a cultural activist
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