For most of independent India’s history, the Uniform Civil Code was a line in the Constitution nobody quite acted on. Article 44, tucked into the Directive Principles, gently urged the state toward a common civil code and went largely ignored. That’s no longer true. Two states have now actually done it, and the legal questions this raises are very real.

Uttarakhand: a year in, and already tweaked

Uttarakhand’s UCC came into force on January 27, 2025, applying a single set of civil law rules on marriage, divorce, inheritance, and live-in relationships to residents of all religions, with Scheduled Tribes exempted. Marriage and live-in registration became mandatory, and a lot of the process moved online.

A year later, almost to the day, the state amended it. The Uniform Civil Code (Amendment) Ordinance, 2026 came in under Article 213 of the Constitution, and it made somewhere between 15 and 18 changes based on what the government had learned from actually running the law for twelve months. One addition stands out: misrepresentation of identity is now a valid ground to annul a marriage a provision that’s widely understood as targeting cases where someone concealed their religious or personal identity. Other tweaks strengthened registration authority and cleaned up alignment with India’s newer criminal codes.

Gujarat follows

In March 2026, Gujarat’s assembly passed its own Uniform Civil Code Bill, becoming the second state in the country to do this. It came out of a state-appointed expert panel’s recommendations and covers the same territory: marriage, divorce, succession, live-in relationships, while, somewhat unusually, extending to Gujaratis living outside the state’s borders as well.

The debate before the vote ran over seven hours, and it broke down along fairly predictable lines: the ruling party framed it as equality, the opposition called it discriminatory toward the state’s Muslim population. That same fault line equality versus religious autonomy has defined this conversation nationally for decades, and it showed up again here almost unchanged.

The constitutional wrinkle nobody’s fully resolved

Article 44 tells the state to move toward a uniform code, but it never says how, or on what timeline. What Uttarakhand and Gujarat have shown is that states can just legislate their own version under the Concurrent List without waiting for Delhi. What’s less clear is how a state UCC actually sits alongside central personal laws the Hindu Marriage Act, Muslim personal law, the Special Marriage Act which still govern everywhere else in the country. That question hasn’t really been tested yet.

For now, both states’ laws operate as their own parallel systems. Whether more states follow, or whether a national UCC eventually ties all this together, is still an open question more political than legal at this point.

What this actually means if you live there

If you’re in Uttarakhand or Gujarat, the practical changes are immediate: marriage and live-in registration is mandatory, and skipping it can carry real penalties. Inheritance and succession rules now apply the same way regardless of religion, replacing the patchwork of personal laws that used to govern those areas.

For family lawyers, this means keeping two mental maps at once: the state-specific UCC provisions, and the personal laws that still apply everywhere else. Clients who move between states, or hold property across state lines, need careful advice on which regime actually governs their situation.

What to watch

This is far from settled law. Legal challenges, particularly around mandatory live-in relationship registration and its privacy implications, are already being raised in various forums. As more states weigh similar legislation, expect ongoing litigation testing exactly how far a state UCC can go against the backdrop of Article 25’s religious freedom guarantee. What was a slogan for decades is now statute one state at a time, and the fight over its limits is only just beginning.

Author by,
RVR Attorneys Associates