Authored By: Swati Kumari
LNCT University
A seventeen-year-old girl in Prayagraj was turned away from her own Class XI classroom in August 2026 for wearing a headscarf she had worn to school without a single objection since Class VI. Nine months before that, several hundred kilometres away, a state government had gone much further: it told every resident, regardless of faith, which rules would now govern their marriage, their divorce, and who inherits what when they die. Different scale, same word. Both disputes turn on “uniformity,” and both raise the same uncomfortable question — when the state insists everyone follow one rule, is it removing discrimination, or removing difference? To what extent does a state, whether secular or not, actually have power and legitimacy to decree and enforce legal uniformity?
This piece treats the two disputes as one problem rather than two. Tracing back the history of personal law it would lead towards the British Era where they supported its formation to Divide and Rule to keep India segregated into water tight compartment. If different commis have different rules there would be friction and difference and British would use it for advantage unfortunately for India who was dreaming of Uniform law, the jungle plurality is still there and with time it got dencer. We find more state law, but no Uniform Civil Code.
Courts deciding on school dress codes and courts eventually asked to test a Uniform Civil Code (“UCC”) are leaning on the same underlying doctrine — the essential religious practices test. What follows moves from the constitutional text, through the dress-code litigation up to the 2026 Allahabad ruling, into the UCC’s own constitutional and legislative history, and closes by weighing what “facial neutrality” is actually worth once its effects are examined rather than assumed.
I.The Constitutional Text Both Sides Are Reading
After all, what are we having this liberty for? We are having this liberty to reform our social system, which is fully on inequities and discriminations.
After ferocious debates in the Constituent Assembly, the Indians eventually inserted into their Constitution of 1950 a compromise program for the future, which seemed to privilege legal uniformity and raised the expectation that there should eventually be a Uniform Civil Code. This overarching policy aim, as an ambition for the future, was laid down in Article 44 of the Indian Constitution of 1950, a Directive Principle of State Policy; no court can compel Parliament to act on it — a design choice, not an oversight, as the drafting history below shows. Pulling in the opposite direction are Article 25’s guarantee of religious practice (itself qualified by public order, morality, and health), the equality guarantees in Articles 14 and 15, and, since 2017, Article 21’s protection of personal autonomy and dignity.[^4]
Indian courts resolve this pull using the essential religious practices doctrine: a practice earns protection only if it is obligatory to the faith, such that removing it would change the religion’s essential character. The test was built in the Shirur Mutt case (Commissioner, Hindu Religious Endowments, Madras v Shri Lakshmindar Tirtha Swamiyar of Shri Shirur Mutt 1954). Whether it transfers cleanly to a teenager’s headscarf,or to an entire civil code governing millions of families,is exactly the question courts keep answering by assuming rather than arguing — and that unexamined assumption is where both disputes below go wrong.
The School Uniform Cases: A Test Applied on Autopilot
A. Karnataka’s Split, Still Unhealed
The 2022 controversy began at a government pre-university college in Udupi, which excluded hijab-wearing students from class. The Karnataka High Court upheld the exclusion, holding that headscarf was not essential to Islamic practice. On appeal, the Supreme Court could not agree. Justice Hemant Gupta upheld the ban, reasoning that tolerating one community’s religious marker inside a uniformed institution would itself work against secularism; Justice Sudhanshu Dhulia dissented, treating dress as a matter of individual dignity protected under Article 21. The split sent the case to a larger bench, which has not convened more than three years later.
This unfilled gap has quietly become load-bearing. Every High Court since has decided dress code disputes standing in the shadow of an authority that, strictly speaking, does not exist.
B. Kerala’s Lower Bar
Before Karnataka, the Kerala High Court had already supplied the reasoning later courts would borrow: a uniform policy survives challenge so long as it is applied to every student without exception. Note what that test actually asks. It checks whether the rule mentions religion — not whether a religion-blind rule still lands unevenly on one community. The gap between what a rule says and what a rule does is the thread running through everything that follows.
Prayagraj, 2026 — Where the Gap Shows Up Again
Sukaina Rizvi’s case followed the same script almost exactly. She had worn a headscarf with her school uniform for five years; on promotion to Class XI, the school made her enrolment conditional on removing it. The Allahabad High Court dismissed her petition, holding that an unsupported claim of religious obligation cannot meet the essential-practice threshold, that the dress code was religion-neutral on its face, and — this is the part worth pausing on — that because Aishat Shifa remains split, Karnataka’s 2022 ruling still “holds the field.
III. The Uniform Civil Code: A Promise the Constitution Never Quite Made Binding
A. The Bargain Struck in 1949
Mohammad Ismail Sahib had proposed in the Constituent Assembly that no religious community be forced to give up its personal law without its own consent. Ambedkar wanted a Uniform Civil Code, and I personally do not understand why religion should be given this vast, expansive jurisdiction to cover the legislature from encroaching upon that field. After all, what are we having this liberty for? We are having this liberty in order to reform our social system, which is so full on inequities and discriminations. Which conflict with our Fundamental Rights. It is, therefore, quite impossible for anybody to conceive that personal law shall be excluded from the jurisdiction of the state.
Nehru’s views were, “I want to prepare the ground for it and this kind of thing is one method of preparing the ground”
The Patel-led sub-committee voted down the amendment, and Article 44 was placed among the unenforceable directives rather than enforceable rights. The local and regional diversity of religions, customs, and laws impacts almost everywhere directly on formal legal structures. While the desire for equality conscious and nationally uniform legal regulation is of course strong and justice
B. Uniformity Has a History of Meaning “Extend the Majority’s Code”
Hindu personal law was codified within a decade of Independence — through the Hindu Marriage Act, the Hindu Succession Act, and related statutes— and that codified law was extended to Sikhs, Jains, and Buddhists, even when they have diverse cultures, beliefs, and customs. Therefore, a UCC would not be India’s first experiment. This weakens the argument that a UCC is an unprecedented imposition. It equally weakens the argument that “uniform” has ever, in Indian legislative practice, meant a neutral synthesis rather than one community’s already-reformed law extended outward.
Goa Proves Less Than It Is Usually Made to Prove
Goa’s civil code — inherited from Portuguese rule in 1867 and preserved after 1962–is the go-to example whenever someone wants to show that a common code can work without communal friction.
This shows how to handle cultural diversity through a sophisticated system of legal pluralism, relying on concepts and experiences of the past, but also looking to the future and not afraid to experiment with new, potentially explosive mixes of ingredients in the legal laboratory.
D. Three States, Three Codes, One Word
Uttarakhand’s Uniform Civil Code Act, 2024, in force since 27 January 2025, covers marriage, divorce, succession, and mandatory registration of live-in relationships, and exempts Scheduled Tribes; a further amendment ordinance followed in 2026. Gujarat passed its own version in March 2026, built on a committee report led by former Supreme Court judge Justice Ranjana Prakash Desai, again exempting Scheduled Tribes while reaching out to Gujaratis living elsewhere in India. Chhattisgarh and Assam are reportedly considering the same path.
Notice the irony sitting inside this list. Marriage and divorce are Concurrent List subjects, and each of these codes differs from the others in what it covers and whom it exempts. A constitutional provision written to end legal fragmentation is, in its current rollout, generating a new kind of fragmentation — three or four state-level “uniform” codes that are not uniform with each other. Whether that still counts as progress toward Article 44, or as a quiet drift away from what Article 44 actually asked for, is not a settled question, whatever the state press releases say.
E. The Litigation Already Under Way
Petitions before the Uttarakhand High Court test mandatory live-in registration against the privacy standard set in Puttaswamy, and challenge how broadly the Code defines “resident. “The All India Muslim Personal Law Board has said that it will contest both the Uttarakhand code and related maintenance rulings from the Supreme Court, and commentators have already flagged tension between Gujarat’s inheritance rules and the existing Hindu Succession Act as a likely next front.
What is the stand of Supreme Court
Separately from any state legislature, the Supreme Court has spent four decades nudging this issue through individual cases rather than settling it once. Shah Bano (1985) held that a divorced Muslim woman was entitled to maintenance and suggested that a common code would help national integration — and Parliament’s answer was not a code but a statute narrowing the ruling. Sarla Mudgal (1995) revisited the call for Article 44 reform in a bigamy dispute. John Vallamattom (2003) struck down a discriminatory limit on Christian testamentary bequests. Shayara Bano (2017) declared instant triple talaq unconstitutional. Mohd. Abdul Samad (2024) restored the Shah Bano position under Section 125 of the Criminal Procedure Code. In early 2026, a three-judge bench reviewing the 1937 Shariat Act said, in effect, that the time had come for a uniform code — while also saying that building one is Parliament’s job, not the Court’s.
What should stand out is not any one of these rulings but the pattern across all of them: the Court keeps pointing in the same direction and keeps declining to walk there itself. That restraint has a respectable constitutional justification — separation of powers is not a small thing to set aside — but it is worth being honest that forty years of pointing has produced three state statutes, not the national code the Court kept gesturing toward.
Looking Outside India
Codification across an entire population is not a new idea; the Code of Ur-Nammu and the Code of Hammurabi did it thousands of years ago, though within a single political and religious order rather than across competing faiths, which limits how much they can actually teach a pluralist democracy.
Some Muslim-majority states have taken a different route entirely, reforming family law from within their own religious framework rather than replacing it wholesale. Morocco’s Mudawana reforms raised the marriage age and restricted polygamy; Tunisia abolished polygamy outright in its 1956 Code of Personal Status; Egypt and Jordan expanded women’s access to divorce through khula provisions. None of these required scrapping Islamic family law and starting over. This suggests that gender-just reform and community consent are not actually in tension — which makes India’s choice of replacement over negotiation look less like the only option and more like the administratively easier one.
So Is Facial Neutrality Worth What It Claims to Be?
The strongest defense of uniformity — in the classroom and in family law alike — is straightforward: a rule that applies to everyone identically cannot, on its face, be called discriminatory. This is the entire logic underlying both the Kerala uniform cases and the Uttarakhand code.
The trouble is that facial neutrality can hide a lot. Mandatory live-in registration applies to every couple equally in wording, but in practice, it burdens couples who relied on informal cohabitation — often inter-faith or lower-income couples — far more than it burdens marriages already sitting inside codified Hindu law, which is exactly why it is being tested against Puttaswamy. A uniform school dress code applies to every student equally in wording, but in practice, it only ever collides with students whose faith asks for a visible marker. Neutral on paper, uneven in practice — and the essential-practices test, built to ask what a religion requires rather than what a rule actually costs the person following it, is not equipped to catch that difference. That, more than any single case outcome, is the real gap worth fixing.
Conclusion
Formally, these are two separate bodies of law — one under Article 25 and one under Article 44. Substantively, they are the same unresolved argument about whether a rule that looks neutral is automatically excused from having its actual effects examined. Four things will determine whether that argument receives a real answer soon: whether Sukaina Rizvi’s case is carried further and finally forces the Supreme Court to convene the bench it has owed litigants since Aishat Shifa; whether Uttarakhand’s live-in registration clears the Puttaswamy bar; whether Gujarat’s inheritance provisions survive the challenge everyone expects; and whether Parliament,
having been all but told to act by its own Supreme Court in 2026, actually legislates a single code instead of leaving the job to a widening patchwork of state statutes. Until one of those happens, both fights will continue to be settled the way they have been for the last three years — by default, in the gap left by a court that never finished making up its mind.
Reference(S): Cases
Sukaina Rizvi v. State of Uttar Pradesh, Allahabad High Court, decided Aug. 21, 2026 (India). Unreported at the time of writing; verify on SCC Online once formally published.
Commissioner, Hindu Religious Endowments v. Sri Lakshmindra Thirtha Swamiar of Sri Shirur Mutt, 1954 S.C.R. 1005 (India); A.S. Narayana Deekshitulu v. State of Andhra Pradesh, (1996) 9 S.C.C. 548 (India).
INDIA CONST. arts. 14, 15, 21, 25; Justice K.S. Puttaswamy (Retd.) v. Union of India, (2017) 10 S.C.C. 1 (India).
INDIA CONST. arts. 14, 15, 21, 25; Justice K.S. Puttaswamy (Retd.) v. Union of India, (2017) 10 S.C.C. 1 (India).
Fathima Thasneem v. State of Kerala, 2018 S.C.C. OnLine Ker. 5267 (India). Sukaina Rizvi v. State of Uttar Pradesh, supra note 1.
Justice K.S. Puttaswamy (Retd.) v. Union of India, supra note 4; writ petitions pending before the Uttarakhand High Court, Nainital (2025–2026).
Mohd. Ahmed Khan v. Shah Bano Begum, (1985) 2 S.C.C. 556 (India); Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Divorce) Act, 1986 (India).
Mohd. Ahmed Khan v. Shah Bano Begum, (1985) 2 S.C.C. 556 (India); Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Divorce) Act, 1986 (India).
John Vallamattom v. Union of India, (2003) 6 S.C.C. 611 (India); Indian Succession Act, 1925 (India).
Shayara Bano v. Union of India, (2017) 9 S.C.C. 1 (India); Muslim Women (Protection of Rights on Marriage) Act, 2019 (India).
Mohd. Abdul Samad v. State of Telangana (2024) (India)) Reported citation not yet finalized at the time of writing; verify pinpoint on SCC Online.
Justice K.S. Puttaswamy (Retd.) v. Union of India, supra note 4.
Legislation
Uttarakhand Uniform Civil Code Act, 2024 (India), in force Jan. 27, 2025. INDIA CONST. art. 44.
INDIA CONST. sched. 7, List III, Entry 5 (Concurrent List: marriage and divorce).
Hindu Succession Act, 1956 (India), compared with the Gujarat Uniform Civil Code, 2026 (India), succession provisions.
Hindu Marriage Act, 1955 (India); Hindu Succession Act, 1956 (India); Hindu Minority and Guardianship Act, 1956 (India); and Hindu Adoption and Maintenance Act, 1956 (India).
Goa, Daman and Diu Administration Act, 1962 (India), preserving the Portuguese Civil Code of 1867.
Uttarakhand Uniform Civil Code Act, 2024 (India) and Uniform Civil Code (Amendment) Ordinance, 2026 (Uttarakhand) (India).
Gujarat Uniform Civil Code, 2026 (India); Report of the High-Level Committee Chaired by Justice Ranjana Prakash Desai (Gujarat, 2026).
Hindu Succession Act, 1956 (India), compared against the Gujarat Uniform Civil Code, 2026 (India), succession provisions.
Muslim Personal Law (Shariat) Application Act, 1937 (India); unreported Supreme Court observations (2026), pending formal reporting.
SECONDARY SOURCES
Code of Ur-Nammu (c.2100-2050 BCE) and the Code of Hammurabi (c. 1754 BCE).
Morocco: Moudawana (Family Code) reforms (2004); Tunisia: Code of Personal Status (1956); Egypt: Law No. 1 of 2000 (khula reform); Jordan: Personal Status Law amendments.
Constituent Assembly Debates, Vol. VII (1948) (proposed amendment by Mohammad Ismail Sahib; rejected by the sub-committee chaired by Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel).
Combridge University Press: article published on 06 March 2019 by Werner Menski Finology Legal
Gravitas plus
Historians and other social scientists often have a far too limited and restrained positivism centric understanding of “law” and its possibilities of skillful intervention. See, e.g., SUFIA UDDIN,
CONSTRUCTING BANGLADESH: RELIGION, ETHNICITY AND LANGUAGE IN AN
ISLAMIC NATION (2006) (presenting an excellent recent discussion of such academic struggles).
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