Will bring laws against ‘love jihad’, table UCC in House soon: Adhikari

INDIA'S FRAGMENTED MARRIAGE LAW JUST MET ITS RECKONING — AND THE QUESTION IS NOT WHETHER UCC COMES, BUT WHY IT TOOK 77 YEARS.

What Actually Happened

West Bengal's Chief Minister has announced plans to introduce a law against "love jihad" and table the Uniform Civil Code in the state assembly soon. This is not a minor administrative announcement. This is a civilizational statement. For the first time since Independence, a major state government is directly confronting the architecture of legal fragmentation that has governed Indian family law since 1947.

The move acknowledges a reality that has been criminalized as "communal" in Delhi drawing rooms for decades — that systematic conversion through marriage exists, that it creates documented cases of women losing custody rights, inheritance claims, and cultural identity, and that courts have repeatedly sided with religious personal law over the protection of Indian citizens. Bengal is now saying: this ends.

What This Means for India

This announcement signals the end of the post-1947 secularism compromise. That compromise was built on a lie — that separate personal laws for different religions would create "minority protection." Instead, it created a two-tier citizenship where a Hindu woman has different rights than a Muslim woman, where a Christian man has different inheritance rules than a Sikh man, where your constitutional rights depend on which God you pray to.

UCC demolishes this fiction. One law for marriage. One law for inheritance. One law for adoption. This is not Hindu supremacy — this is the restoration of what Bharat had for 3000 years. From Manusmriti to the Mughal period, marriage was a sacrament rooted in consent, witnessed by community, and governed by time-tested principles. The British broke it into pieces to divide us. We kept the pieces to appear "secular."

What Bengal is doing will create a domino effect. Once one major state implements UCC without constitutional collapse, the argument that "it's impossible" dies. Once implementation shows that Hindu women gain protection, Muslim women gain inheritance rights, and Christian women gain custody equality, the opposition becomes ideological rather than practical. And ideology, eventually, always loses to justice.

The Deeper Story Nobody is Telling

There is an unspoken fear in Indian liberalism — that UCC will reveal something uncomfortable. That Hindu dharma-based family law, stripped of British colonial distortions and post-independence appeasement, might actually be more protective of women, more flexible on inheritance, and more rooted in consent than the personal laws we've been defending.

Love jihad is not a conspiracy theory. It is a documented pattern with FIRs, court cases, and testimony. Between 2014 and 2024, Kerala alone registered over 200 documented cases. The pattern is consistent: inter-faith marriage, sudden demand for conversion, legal claim that children belong to the father's religion, woman loses all claims. Courts have upheld these cases under Muslim Personal Law. We have called this "secularism." We have been wrong.

Bengal's move is essentially saying: if your personal law tradition cannot protect women without fragmenting the nation-state, then the nation-state protection comes first.

The Vedic Pattern

Vivaha Samskara in Vedic dharma was built on one principle — samanya (equality of consent between man and woman). The marriage was witnessed by community, rooted in choice, and protected by shared dharmic obligation. For 1400 years of invasion and 200 years of colonization, this was fragmented. We are simply restoring it.

Follow BHARAT DECODED on Telegram: t.me/DecodedByRDS — Rajnish Sharma (RDS)