Article 44 asks for one civil code "throughout" India. Chhattisgarh's version, drafted by the same committee that wrote Madhya Pradesh's, is already shaping up to look different from it. Is that still uniform?

ONE COMMITTEE, THREE CODES

• WHAT "UNIFORM" MEANS WHEN EVERY STATE DRAFTS ITS OWN Article 44 directs the state to secure a Uniform Civil Code "throughout the territory of India"
• language that reads, on its face, like a single national code. What is actually happening is a state-by-state rollout, drafted by the same person, producing laws that are not identical to each other. Justice Ranjana Prakash Desai has now headed the UCC committees for Uttarakhand, Madhya Pradesh and now Chhattisgarh - three separate codes, sharing a drafter but not necessarily sharing terms.

Same Drafter, Different Exemptions Madhya Pradesh's

Bill, passed on July 21, banned polygamy and made live-in registration mandatory, while carving out Scheduled Tribes from its scope - a carve-out grounded in the Fifth Schedule's protection of tribal customary law. Chhattisgarh, which has a substantial tribal population under Fifth Schedule areas, is almost certain to negotiate its own version of that exemption.

The moment two states apply different exemption boundaries to the same underlying committee's template, "uniform" stops describing the outcome - it describes only the process used to arrive at it.

Uniformity Was Never Meant To Stop At A State Border Article 44

sits in Part IV as a Directive Principle, non-justiciable but still a statement of constitutional intent - and that intent was national uniformity, not state-level convergence around a shared consultant. A citizen whose marriage, inheritance or maintenance rights change the moment they cross from Chhattisgarh into a neighbouring state without a UCC is living exactly the fragmentation Article 44 was written to prevent.

The Directive Principle assumed a single Parliament acting once; it did not anticipate multiple state legislatures acting separately, on their own timelines, with their own political compulsions around tribal and minority exemptions.

The Real Tension For The Exam This is not

simply a story about one more state adopting a UCC. It is a live test of whether "uniform" can survive federal execution - whether shared drafters and broadly similar templates amount to the same thing as one code applying equally everywhere or whether state-by-state UCCs are quietly building exactly the patchwork of personal laws Article 44 was meant to end, just replacing religion-based variation with state-based variation instead.