Maha UCC Panel Inducts Former IAS Officer Whose Presence in Meeting Was Questioned by Retired Judge Who Resigned
New Delhi: Days after former Bombay high court judge R.C. Chavan resigned from the Maharashtra’s Uniform Civil Code (UCC) drafting panel, retired IAS officer Shatrughna Singh was appointed as a member-cum-senior adviser in the panel, an exclusive report by Vidheesha Kuntamalla for Indian Express said.
Notably, in his resignation letter, Chavan had referred to Singh’s presence as a “non-member” at a meeting of the panel on September 19. In his resignation email, Chavan said that the non-member who attended the meeting had pointed out that the website prepared by state officials required further modifications.
According to Chavan, the chairperson then directed the authorities to make the necessary changes within a week.
In his resignation email, referring to Singh, Chavan had questioned the role of someone who was not part of the seven-member committee, said the Indian Express report.
“On the day of the meeting or in the emails sent before, no intimation was given regarding Singh’s appointment as adviser,” Justice Chavan told Indian Express, while Singh declined to comment and the newspaper’s calls to retired Supreme Court judge Justice Ranjana Desai, who is the chairperson of the panel did not elicit a response.
Singh, who was inducted as member-cum-senior adviser in the panel on September 21, has previously worked with Justice Desai on Uttarakhand’s UCC.
Singh was one of five members of the Uttarakhand UCC committee headed by Justice Desai and was also part of the sub-committee that worked on drafting the law as well as the group that conducted stakeholder consultations, reported Indian Express.
Earlier, Justice Chavan had resigned from the panel after expressing concerns over how public feedback is being gathered for the draft a framework for implementing the UCC.
The retired judge has expressed strong objections to the committee’s decision to limit public input on major social matters to simple “Yes/No” options.
Justice Chavan argued that reducing important issues such as late marriages, infertility, sexual perversions, and escalating matrimonial conflicts to binary choices, fundamentally undermined the primary purpose of consensus-building.
The opposition Congress had cited the resignation of Justice Chavan and said that for the Modi Government, the UCC is not an instrument of considered legal reform to be implemented after the widest possible consultations and public debate and with the broadest possible consensus.
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