On Saturday, Kerala’s most powerful party, CPM, organised a seminar in Kozhikode on the proposed UCC (Uniform Civil Code), which the BJP has been weaponising for a while. It was a large, red affair and reeked reassuringly, as events of this sort do, of an unlikely revolution.
The Uniform Civil Code, if implemented, would take precedence over the personal laws. Indian Muslims, already feeling persecuted, would be among those affected most directly. So would Christians. Property inheritance, marriage and divorce proceedings would be altered in both cases so God gets more rest. The temple, mosque and church, the underpinnings of our society, imperfect as they are, would be rendered much less cohesive.
Though Christians outscore Muslims in literacy and other life indices, most Christians are Church-governed. Rituals and practices like marriage—now sanctified by the Church and the Mosque—would have no legal standing in a post-UCC era.
The relevance of God as an organising and ordering principle in human affairs would be in question. This will not be taken too kindly. And not just because religious institutions would see their power whittled. In numerous ways, too, we need gods more than they need us. Why else would we invent so many of them? Millions of us continue to die more for myths than for facts.
Sitaram Yechury made the inaugural address at the Kozhikode convention. He said the urgency that the BJP is exuding about the UCC is aimed at polarising the votes in the 2024 election. The others noted that each religion must source its reforms from within to assure individual rights, justice, and gender equality. Well, if the parish mended itself, you would not need the priest.
In Kozhikode, then, on the vast, red stage, some 40-odd dignitaries and speakers from various communities and religious organisations generally threatened the world with greater gender equality and justice. They all spoke loudly against the secular UCC. It was hard to believe them: no single woman was on the stage.
To an observer with vague, anarchic tendencies, it might have come across as just another conspiracy to give patriarchy a bad name. Indeed, it could be said that the absence of non-male gender delegates on the stage is itself a critique of the anti-UCC movement led, in this instance, by the CPM. One could easily defend the UCC just on this ground: that it could be used as an instrument to fight patriarchy. Except that the BJP is leading that fight, not the liberals.
As of now, especially in minority communities, marriage, divorce, adoption, and inheritance largely come under the personal laws. The UCC changes that. The judge would replace God as the arbiter in many matters; a judge appointed, as it happens, by a god-fearing Hindu government. It is a paradox. It could well be that at the heart of the whole affair is the old war between the Abrahamic and Indic gods by other means. We don’t know because there has been no debate.
One of the most reasonable positions on the vexed issue has been that of Kapil Sibal, an MP and a legal luminary. He has been consistently asking for a debate on the subject.
In a recent TV interview, he says he is not even sure of the subject matter as the UCC is sure to affect the Hindus equally. For instance, the concept of the Hindu Undivided Family, which, even for tax and inheritance purposes, is considered a product of observed custom, not of a written contract, would be affected.
Indeed, if custom wields as much writ as the law, then the UCC could be the undoing of a tradition-bound society.
Even otherwise, the UCC would need to find exemptions for an overtly Catholic Goa and the tribal belts of India, including the sensitive Northeast. The Sikhs would not like secular law to take precedence over their traditions. The business community of Jains, often seen as a sub-sect of the Hindu religion, and, in another breath, the diminishing community of Parsis, all will have reasons to differ from the UCC.
The average human behaviour differs from country to country. George Orwell said things that could happen in one country could not happen in another. An October Revolution will never happen in India. A Gandhi will never lead the US to its Independence. But given India’s diversity, the average human behaviour differs from state to state. In such a volatile flux, powered on further by social media technologies, do we need a disruption as great as the UCC?
Remember, these are times when our sanity is in a continuous state of coup. Acts of force—riot, arson, torture, murder, war—are ways of eliciting an affirmative. Violence always seeks positive responses. We want a Yes from a person who would rather say No. The imposition of the UCC without a real debate on its far-reaching implications would have violent repercussions—a coup of a kind that we have sprung on ourselves.
In ideal circumstances, implementing the UCC all across a country of many desperately different but equally demanding gods, each claiming absolute superiority over the other, would be a secular achievement over religious orthodoxies. The Modern asserting over the Middle Ages. But the wider implications complicate the picture beyond comprehension.
The UCC represents a fork in the path. We do not know what its collateral damages are in a semi-literate society like ours. Sometimes in the history of a nation, the right move is the wrong one. The politics and powers of the UCC are way beyond the absorption levels of Indian culture. Desist. Let sleeping gods lie.
C P Surendran
Poet, novelist, and screenplay writer. His latest novel is One Love and the Many Lives of Osip B
(cpsurendran@gmail.com)