Omar Abdullah: BJP should bring UCC through Parliament, not backdoor

The Word Doing All the Work in This Debate Is "Uniform" Article 44

does not ask states to enact civil codes - it directs "the State" to secure a uniform civil code "throughout the territory of India," language the Constitution's framers wrote precisely to mean a single, national standard, not a patchwork.

Omar Abdullah's actual argument is not that the UCC is wrong; it is that a UCC implemented state-by-state is a contradiction in terms - you cannot call something "uniform" if it applies in Uttarakhand but not in West Bengal and in Bihar only if the state's own ruling coalition partner agrees to it.

That last detail is the one worth sitting with, because it is not a rhetorical flourish - it is a specific, checkable constitutional mechanism. Personal laws sit in Entry 5 of the Concurrent List, meaning both Parliament and state legislatures can legislate on them.

This is what makes the state-by-state route legally possible at all: it is not an evasion of the Constitution, it is a use of a power the Constitution genuinely grants states. The politics enters only in explaining why the Centre is using that route instead of the more direct one - a national bill in Parliament, which Article 44 actually contemplates.

Abdullah supplied that explanation directly: JDU, a core NDA ally, has signalled it will not accept the UCC in Bihar. If a national bill needed NDA votes to pass and a significant ally is opposed, the arithmetic for a Parliament-route UCC does not currently exist.

The state-by-state approach, by contrast, only needs a majority within states the BJP already governs on its own - no coalition partner's consent required. Read this way, federalism here is not being used cooperatively, to let states experiment with policy suited to local conditions; it is being used as a workaround for a numbers problem the ruling coalition cannot solve inside Parliament.

This is the genuinely sharp distinction for an aspirant to hold onto: cooperative federalism, as the term is normally used in GS2 answers, describes states and the Centre working together toward a shared national goal, often because the Centre lacks either the constitutional competence or the political capital to act alone and needs states as partners.

What is happening with the UCC is closer to the reverse - using the states' concurrent legislative power to achieve, piecemeal, an outcome the Centre cannot currently secure through the ordinary national legislative process because of resistance within its own coalition.

Both processes use the same constitutional provision (Entry 5, Concurrent List); only the underlying reason for choosing that route is different and that reason is what determines whether the result can honestly be called "uniform" at all.

For the exam, the takeaway is precise: don't treat "UCC via states" as automatically evidence of federalism working well. Ask what actually forced the choice of that route over the Parliament route the Constitution more directly envisions - and in this case, the answer sits inside the ruling coalition's own arithmetic, not inside any genuine constitutional design for state-level experimentation.