Devendra Fadnavis likely will appoint an expert committee on Uniform Civil Code sometime this week, before the monsoon session of the Maharashtra assembly ends. The chief minister has already provided the intellectual underpinning for it in the House: Art. 44 of the Constitution, the DPSP and the reading of B.R. Ambedkar that puts common civil framework as unfinished business of the constituent assembly and not a partisan one. It's a well thought out, almost legalistic pitch. It is also, on its own, a somewhat thin measure of what will be delivered because the true measure of what a government can do should be based on the difference between what it says in a legislature and what its bureaucracy can actually do on the ground and the historical record of the previous Maharashtra government on this very point suggests that the difference is large.

Let's go back two weeks and the scene is different than Fadnavis is now portraying. It was minister of state for home Yogesh Kadam who first put a UCC panel on the record in the assembly, and then in response to a specific, ugly episode, of a woman in Nashik being divorced by her husband over the phone through triple talaq a practice which has been technically a criminal offence in India since 2019. That debate, brought about by a calling-attention motion by BJP legislator Devyani Pharande, resulted in a promise of a one-member committee to be set up with a retired High Court judge, who will draft, study and consult the public before taking a decision on implementation. What is being unrolled now is referred to as a wider expert panel to review the current legal frameworks and draft an expert suggestion. Has it been a re-branding of the same body, or two different ideas that have come together, has not been made clear and that matters. A UCC panel resulting from a specific communal flashpoint will have different political value and be subject to different type of scrutiny than one that is created from the beginning as a considered constitutional exercise.

The debate two weeks ago also indicated that the fault lines here do not necessarily draw a clear line between government and opposition. Congress's Sachin Sawant pointed out that the concept of a common civil code had its origin in Jawaharlal Nehru's contribution to the Constitution and that his party would support a UCC bill if it was "constructive and inclusive" and would reject it if it was used "to manufacture polarisation. Over the other side of the aisle, Shiv Sena's Manisha Kayande made the UCC's yes conditional, on the basis of “decades old ideological commitment” of Ram Temple, abrogation of Article 370 and a uniform civil code, the terms of alliance with the BJP given by Balasaheb Thackeray. But the telling one was from within the ruling combine itself; NCP legislator Sana Malik, who is part of Fadnavis's own alliance, took a hardball stand against the singling out of Muslim personal law on polygamy, asking rhetorically if Muslims are alone in taking multiple spouses, and sent a strong retort from BJP's Atul Bhatkhalkar that the country is not governed by religious text but by the Constitution. That's not opposition theatre. That is a coalition member indicating, on the Floor of the House, that it is not fully on board with the way this reform is being framed and is a fault line Fadnavis will have to deal with quietly as he asserts his confidence in public.

Maharashtra isn't starting from scratch. But Uttarakhand beat everyone else to the punch, having enacted the code in February 2024, after a committee led by retired Supreme Court judge Ranjana Prakash Desai spent over 18 months, conducting 43 public consultations and reviewing some 2.3 lakh written submissions, to submit a 740-page report. The law was enacted on January 27, 2025, with Scheduled Tribes, who constitute nearly three per cent of the population in the state, exempted due to its separate constitutional safeguards against interference with customary practices. After a year, Dehradun observed UCC Day and in the same week passed an amendment ordinance under Article 213 to address procedural and administrative and penal deficiencies in the original law. That is a fact that's not received nearly enough coverage. What is being shown here is not failure; rather, it is a simple admission that translating a legislative text into functioning civil administration registrar, digitized registries, trained staff, appeals process is tougher than passing the bill, especially in the case of a state government which has to make emergency amendments within a year after enacting the legislation it has spent two years drafting. Uttarakhand has approximately a crore and a quarter population. The population is nearer to twelve crore in Maharashtra, which happens to be one of the most densely populated states in the country and is also the most linguistically and religiously diverse part of the country. Dehradun will face what it faces on a grand scale, Mumbai, Pune, Nagpur, Aurangabad and the Konkan belt will face several times that.

This is no mere social-policy footnote, however, because of the economic context. As per estimates, Maharashtra's gross state domestic product (GSDP) in 2025-26 is estimated at around ₹51 lakh crore, which is nearly 14.3 per cent of the nation's GDP, and is growing at 7.9 per cent, as compared to the national estimate of 7.4 per cent. Mumbai is still India's financial capital, Pune is the second software city, the state generates about 20% of industrial output and is home to the highest number of startups with 17% as on February this year. In an economy of this scale, personal law is not a secondary matter but is part and parcel of the property register, the succession certificates, the probate procedures and the tax code. Ownership of assets, how family-run businesses are divided on death, and who is eligible to challenge an estate in court is determined by marriage, divorce, inheritance and adoption laws. This concentrated private wealth will not be just an identity issue in a civil-law reform; it will be a business and revenue one as well, and subject to as much scrutineeing by company lawyers, wealth managers and real-estate registrars as by religious organisations.

There's a tougher one underneath the equality mumbo-jumbo, too: does mandating gender parity in a statute result in a change in outcomes for women, or does it mostly change the statute? India's own data calls for caution. The Hindu Succession Amendment Act was passed in 2005 and gave equal coparcenary rights to daughters but the National Family Health Survey's fifth round of 2019-21 shows that only 31.7 per cent of Indian women aged 15-49 years are landowners, while it is 43.9 per cent for men, indicating a more than 12 per cent gap even after so many years of the legislation being in place. The numbers for Maharashtra, however, are mixed: 40.7 per cent women were in the labour force in 2022-23, exceeding the national average of 37 per cent, indicating that the state is already more economically active than the rest of the country which might mean the UCC lands on truly fertile soil here, or it might mean the State has less headroom to work with than the headlines will suggest. In any case, after ten years of unenforced equal-inheritance law in villages, the lesson is that the law is the easy part. Registration till the last mile office, family settlement without silently excluding daughters and judicial capacity to adjudicate that, are what really change the number and none of that can be done by a gazette notification.

We should remember that all of these are no new ground anywhere in the world before the debate disintegrates into a purely domestic one over religion. In the overwhelmingly Muslim nation of Turkey, they took a secular civil code in 1926, which removed marriage, property and inheritance from religious control altogether. The National Civil Code (NCC) 2017 of Nepal unified one family law throughout the country and set a common minimum marriage age. In Quebec, there exists a uniform civil code which is applicable to all its citizens of all backgrounds. In every instance where it was adopted the reform was presented as a measure of citizenship, and it was accompanied by the administrative effort to make it effective, rather than used as a wedge between communities. Where a code of conduct was used as a trophy in a group contest, it tended to get entangled in lawsuits, in lack of conformity, or in quiet non-compliance a pattern India's courts have pointed out from Shah Bano in 1985, to Sarla Mudgal and Shayara Bano, always pushing the legislature to Article 44.

Thus the committee announcement next week is the easy part and all who are involved know it. There is no challenge to the constitutional cover. The result of the assembly is not up for grabs. The fate of whether Maharashtra's Uniform Civil Code is to become the model which other large and diverse states will follow or the "Maharashtra model" that needs just another emergency ordinance in a year, as happened in Uttarakhand will be sealed far away from the press conference: in the number of Nashik-style conflicts its able to resolve, how much NCP's internal discomfort turns into something more concerted, and how much the state puts into building the unsung and unmentioned "plumbing" of registries and enforcement.