21 States, One Template: The Real UCC Strategy

The Concurrent List Is Doing the Work Article 44 Was Never Built to Do Article 44

tells the State to "endeavour to secure" a Uniform Civil Code - a Directive Principle, unenforceable in any court, sitting in the Constitution since 1950 as an instruction with no deadline and no mechanism. For seven decades, that was where UCC lived: as aspiration, not law.

Amit Shah's Sunday announcement - UCC in all 21 NDA-ruled states by 2029 - is not really about Article 44 at all. It is about Entry 5 of the Concurrent List, which quietly does something Article 44 never could: it gives both Parliament and state legislatures the actual power to legislate on marriage, divorce and inheritance right now, no aspiration required.

Why a State Bill Beats a Central One Here

A single national UCC bill would have to survive Parliament, satisfy every religious community simultaneously and withstand a nationwide political and legal challenge in one shot - a high-friction, high-visibility target.

A state UCC bill, by contrast, only needs to clear a state assembly and receive the President's assent under Article 254(2) to override any conflicting central law within that state's borders. Uttarakhand did exactly this in February 2024, in force from January 2025 and Gujarat, Assam and Madhya Pradesh have since copied its structure almost provision for provision - polygamy banned, marriage registration mandatory, equal inheritance for women, live-in relationships required to register.

What Shah announced in Mumbai is not a new UCC push. It is confirmation that the 21-state target is being pursued as 21 separate, smaller legal fights instead of one large one - each state law testing the same template in a friendlier legislature before the next state adopts it.

The clearest evidence of this design logic is what all four state laws share: every one of them exempts Scheduled Tribes. That is not an oversight and it is not something Article 44 required - it is a direct response to RSS concerns about tribal customary law, built into the template precisely because a single unyielding central law could not have absorbed that concession as easily across every state's tribal population without reopening the entire bill.

This state-by-state route carries a cost the Constitution's framers did not have to reckon with when they wrote Article 44 as a single national aspiration: personal law is now becoming genuinely different depending on which state a citizen lives in, which raises real questions for inter-state marriage, succession and property disputes that a uniform code was originally meant to eliminate, not multiply.

The "uniform" in Uniform Civil Code is, for now, uniform only within party-ruled states - not yet across India. For the exam, the mechanism worth remembering is precise: Article 44 supplies the goal, but Entry 5 and Article 254(2) supply the actual legislative route being used to reach it - and that route was chosen specifically because it avoids the single point of political and constitutional failure a central bill would invite.