LUCKNOW (The Thursday Times) — India’s Home Minister Amit Shah promised on Friday that a Uniform Civil Code would be brought into force in Uttar Pradesh if the Bharatiya Janata Party wins the state’s 2027 assembly election, pushing one of the Hindu nationalist party’s most contested goals into India’s most populous state.
“UCC has already been implemented in many states,” Shah told party workers at a BJP working committee meeting in Lucknow, according to The Indian Express. “If you form the BJP government in Uttar Pradesh, we will implement UCC in Uttar Pradesh.”
A Uniform Civil Code would replace the separate personal laws that govern marriage, divorce, inheritance and adoption for different religious communities with a single set of rules. Muslim organisations and opposition parties have long opposed it as an attack on minority religious practice and personal law, while the BJP has made it a central plank of its agenda for decades.
Uttarakhand, Gujarat and Assam have already adopted the code. In September, Shah said BJP-led and allied governments in 21 states would introduce it before the 2029 general election. Uttar Pradesh, home to more than 40 million Muslims, would be by far the largest state to do so.
Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav, the BJP’s main rival in the state, said the code was “not worth implementing” and accused the government of failing to implement the women’s reservation law despite Parliament passing it.
