Two families live three streets apart in a Madhya Pradesh town - one Gond, one not. From this week, only one of them is governed by the state's new "uniform" civil code.

Article 44 Says "Throughout the Territory of India." The Bill Invoking It Starts With an Exemption. Article 44 of the

Constitution reads: "The State shall endeavour to secure for the citizens a uniform civil code throughout the territory of India." Madhya Pradesh's Chief Minister invoked that exact provision this week, calling the new UCC Bill a "fulfilment of the Constitution's vision under Article 44." But the Bill he was defending exempts Scheduled Tribes from every one of its provisions, under the authority of Articles 342 and 366(25)

• meaning the law built to fulfil "uniformity throughout the territory" carves an entire population category out of its own territory on day one.

The Text Says Uniform. The Practice Has Never Meant Universal. This is not a

drafting oversight this Bill introduced - it is a pattern already set by Uttarakhand's 2024 UCC and now repeated in Madhya Pradesh. Article 342 lets the President notify which communities count as Scheduled Tribes; Article 366(25) defines the term.

Together they give states constitutional cover to declare tribal customary law - covering marriage, inheritance and community governance systems that predate the Indian Constitution itself - off-limits to state UCC legislation.

The gap is not hidden; the Chief Minister openly defended it as respecting "constitutional safeguards and traditional rights." What that concedes, in plain terms, is that "uniform" in Uniform Civil Code has functionally meant uniform for everyone except those whose customary law the Constitution already protects separately - a caveat baked into Article 44's implementation from the very states now claiming to fulfil it.

Where This Actually Bites For a

family in Madhya Pradesh, this is not an abstract federalism debate. A Gond family governed by tribal customary inheritance and a non-tribal neighbouring family now governed by the new Act's mandatory equal-inheritance and marriage-registration rules will, from this week, live under two entirely different civil law regimes inside the same state - one the product of this "uniform" code, the other explicitly outside its reach.

That divergence is constitutionally sound; Articles 342 and 366(25) permit exactly this. But it means the state's own marketing of the Bill as delivering "Equality for All" is doing more political work than the statute's text can support - the Bill delivers equality for all except a specific, constitutionally-defined population the state chose, correctly under the Constitution, not to touch.

The genuinely interesting constitutional question this raises isn't whether MP's UCC is valid - the ST exemption keeps it well within settled constitutional bounds. It's whether a "uniform" civil code that exempts a population by constitutional necessity can coherently claim to fulfil a Directive Principle explicitly phrased as "throughout the territory of India." For the exam, that tension between Article 44's absolute language and the practical, near-universal exemption pattern every state UCC has adopted is worth more than memorising the Bill's individual provisions.