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Amid UCC saga, PM Modi pitch for ‘secular civil code’ a bid to put Oppn on the back foot
UCC, which was a constitutional vision for gender-just and uniform personal laws in 1947-50, became a part of Hindutva agenda after Shah Bano case
In his 11th Independence Day speech, Prime Minister Narendra Modi called for a uniform civil code (UCC), framing it as a “secular civil code” as distinct from the existing “communal civil code”.
PM Modi’s framing seemed to be an oblique attack on “secular” Opposition parties which have always targeted the BJP’s UCC agenda as one that springs from the party’s purported “ploy” to put the Muslim community under pressure.
It was after the Supreme Court’s Shah Bano judgment in 1985 that the BJP took up the demand for a UCC in a big way.
Shah Bano case
Protests erupted among the conservative Muslim sections when the Supreme Court in 1985 ruled that the former husband of Shah Bano, a divorced Muslim woman with five children, was obliged to keep paying Rs 179 a month to her as alimony beyond the period of three months (Iddat) as required under the Sharia laws. The then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi used the Congress party’s brute parliamentary majority to overturn the judgment by enacting the Muslim Women (Rights to Protection on Divorce) Act, 1986, which laid down that Section 125 of CrPC, which dealt with maintenance of women, did not apply to Muslim women.
In his autobiography, “My Country My Life”, BJP stalwart L K Advani discusses the matter at length, using the term UCC for the first time in the book in the context of the Shah Bano controversy. Recalling that Rajiv asked him before the passage of the legislation what should be done - and adding that he (Advani) replied that there was nothing to be done, as it was a sound apex court judgment - Advani says that Rajiv soon took the parliamentary route to overturn the verdict. “It was obvious, however, that far from strengthening India’s secular fabric, the government’s appeasement of the Muslim vote bank against genuine demands for gender justice had greatly weakened secularism and national integration,” Advani states in the book. During his political career he has repeatedly deployed the word “pseudo-secular” to attack the Indian parties’ secularism.
indianexpress....