New Delhi: A group of women’s organisations in Goa issued a collective statement urging the law commission not to gloss over the various nuances in Goan family laws while deliberating on a uniform civil code (UCC) for the country.

The groups also said that the one-month window provided to the public by the law commission for providing their inputs on a UCC, which ends on Friday, July 14, is inadequate given the complexity of topics such a code would entail.

“We come from the location of a state that has near-uniform family laws. There are also provisions in Goa’s family laws that are uniform in discrimination, there are also provisions that are uniform across religions but not substantially equal, and there are also provisions that may be different but can enable empowerment, given our realities,” the groups’ statement reads, according to a Hindustan Times report.

“Therefore, we believe that the goalpost has to be justice for all stakeholders in the family and for all communities, rather than uniformity,” it continued.

On the Law Commission’s one-month window for public consultation, the statement said the time period “does not suffice to deliberate on complex matters covering a wide range of areas such as marriage, divorce, inheritance, succession, guardianship, adoption, marital property, inheritance, different forms of property, and other related matters … that [have] repercussions for us in Goa, for the whole country and for its diverse populations.”

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The UCC is a proposed single set of laws that would uniformly govern personal matters, including marriage, divorce and inheritance, across India’s different religious communities.

Goa has its own uniform civil code that was enacted when it was under Portuguese colonial rule.

According to the Hindustan Times, Goa’s uniform code has elicited praise for being more “gender-just” than similar laws in other states, and includes provisions enabling daughters to inherit equal shares of their parents’ properties and wives to inherit half a couple’s common assets following a divorce.

Albertina Almeida, a lawyer and human rights activist who spoke to the Hindustan Times on behalf of the collective of women’s groups, said that while there are fears that a UCC may not retain the positive aspects of Goa’s uniform code, there is also uncertainty over what would happen to some of its sexist provisions.

In an article for the Indian Express, Almeida wrote that the Goan civil code includes provisions that enable husbands to control how a couple’s matrimonial property is managed and dispose of such property without his wife’s consent in some cases.

In the Goan civil code, ‘matrimonial property’ includes property that either spouse purchased or inherited before the subsistence of their marriage.

Almeida also wrote that the Code of Usages and Customs of Gentile Hindus, a law that is part of Goa’s overall set of family laws, sanctions patriarchs to govern and manage a ‘Hindu undivided family’, and provides for polygamy and adoption under sexist terms.

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The Leaflet reported that under the Code of Usages, a Hindu male can marry a second time “even without divorcing the first wife in case no child is born by the time she attains the age of 25, if no male child is born to the first wife when she attains the age of 30 years and if there is a ten-year gap between pregnancies.”

The collective statement by the women’s groups comes at a time when the BJP once again pushes for a nationwide UCC. Late last month, Prime Minister Narendra Modi brought up the UCC during a speech in Bhopal, where he also spoke about the personal laws of Muslims.

Almeida said that cherry-picking the personal laws of certain communities in the context of a UCC creates a rhetoric that is ultimately harmful.

“The atmosphere has to be created for people to articulate the challenges they face in accessing the law or because of the law, which cannot easily happen within a rhetoric where laws of a section of society are cherry-picked for critique. This kind of attitude can only drive women and marginal stakeholders in the family to silence,” she told the Hindustan Times.

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