A three judge Supreme Court bench led by Chief Justice Surya Kant has issued notice to the Union Government in a constitutional challenge targeting Muslim personal law inheritance provisions as discriminatory against women, and the hearing turned heads when the CJI, responding to fears that a Uniform Civil Code would effectively impose Hindu personal law on minorities, declared the UCC to be "a constitutional ambition" that "has nothing to do with religion." The remark signals the Court's willingness to engage the UCC debate squarely, even as the underlying petition presses for gender-equal inheritance rights across religious lines.
The writ petition, filed under Article 32 by Advocate Poulomi Pavani Shukla alongside the organisation Nyaya Naari Foundation, directly challenges Muslim personal law inheritance rules as constitutionally discriminatory against women. During the hearing, petitioner's counsel Advocate Prashant Bhushan conceded that a uniform civil law governing inheritance across all faiths would be the ideal outcome, but flagged a ground reality: that many Muslim individuals fear the UCC, as currently proposed, would function less as a neutral codification and more as an extension of Hindu civil law onto other communities. That tension set the stage for the bench's pointed interventions on the constitutional status of the UCC.
Chief Justice Surya Kant, who had previously remarked in an earlier hearing of this very matter that "Uniform Civil Code is the answer," reiterated that position with added clarity, framing the UCC not as a religious project but as a constitutional directive. Justice Joymalya Bagchi went further, stating that "the answer is there in the Constitution" before raising the harder question, "But how much the society is ready is the question?" Bagchi also urged that "a scientific, rational, humanistic temper must be developed as encrafted in the fundamental duties", a pointed invocation of Article 51A, to which Bhushan candidly responded that the country appeared to be moving in the opposite direction.
With these exchanges on record, the bench formally issued notice and called for the Union Government's response on the constitutional validity of the challenged inheritance provisions.
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