Towards an Inclusive Gender Just Code in India
Subtitle: Women’s Rights are Non-Negotiable
Publisher: We the People Network, Delhi NCR
Published: 2025
Place of publication: India
Number of pages: 149
Description: he Common Civil Code (the UCC) in India was initially introduced during the making of the Constitution to create a common legal framework for marriage, divorce, inheritance, and adoption with a focus on gender equality. While it aimed to eliminate harmful practices and promote justice, its inclusion as a fundamental right was blocked due to potential conflicts with religious freedoms, resulting in its placement as a Directive Principle of State Policy. In post-colonial India, family laws remain governed by diverse religious norms. However, over the years, despite difficulties, women from diverse backgrounds have increasingly sought reforms through courts. These women-led reforms followed the framework of intersectionality, are progressive, democratic, just, and based on their everyday realities.
Simultaneously, the dominant narrative initiated by political parties and religious leaders has politicized this debate for their vested agendas while suppressing women's voices. This top-down approach driven by vested interests seeks to restrict women’s rights. Moreover, the current push for a UCC is coercive, unconstitutional, anti-secular, and anti-women. It forcefully imposes a discriminatory law and is lacking in a democratic process, therefore refused by many, including women from minority communities.
While rejecting this arbitrary law, this work argues that to navigate the complex terrain of religious freedom and gender justice, the family laws reforms should be comprehensive, inclusive, consensus-based, progressive, rights-based, uphold a person’s dignity, women-led, and should involve the consent of women from various communities it affects. This work suggests that the state should revoke the Uttarakhand UCC law. Instead, the state should facilitate conditions that allow women to exercise their rights through transformative constitutionalism across all communities. The family law reforms should adhere to democratic norms, constitutional morality, and gender justice. Grounded on the concept of women’s autonomy, this work proposes to rewrite a feminist code based on feminist principles of substantive equality, solidarity, acceptability, and respect for community rights while forging unity across diversity—a feminist code written by women, of women, and for women from diverse communities.