Just weeks before the Uttarakhand government tabled a bill to introduce a uniform civil code in the state in January 2024, a couple in a live-in relationship moved to Haldwani from Delhi.
A little over a year later, they find themselves in the first legal battle of their lives. Last month, they moved the Uttarakhand High Court against the Uniform Civil Code of Uttarakhand, 2024 – one among a slew of challenges that the law faces in court.
A Uniform Civil Code is a common set of laws governing marriage, divorce, succession and adoption for all Indians, regardless of their religious or tribal identities. But the UCC passed by Uttarakhand’s Bharatiya Janata Party government does not extend to tribal groups and imports heavily from Hindu laws.
Most crucially for the couple, it heavily intrudes into live-in relationships.
For instance, the law makes it mandatory for couples in a live-in relationship to register with state officials, who have been vested with the power to approve such relationships. Failing register invites a jail term of up to three months or a fine up to Rs 10,000 or both.
The couple has demanded that the entire section on live-in relationships in the UCC be declared unconstitutional and in violation of Articles 14, 19 and 21 of the Constitution that guarantee equality before law, fundamental freedoms, and the right to life and personal liberty. They said they rejected the heteronormative assumptions of a live-in relationship written into the law.
“Even before I had decided to file this petition, I knew I would not register my live-in relationship,” the man told Scroll. “It is a protest against the state, especially the surge of Hindutva in India and in Uttarakhand over the last decade.”
Keen not to draw attention towards themselves, the petitioners spoke to Scroll on the condition of anonymity.
The risk of eviction
The couple – both 29 years old – live in a rented home in Haldwani. “We realised that we are doomed if we move court, and we are doomed if we don’t,” said the woman, who identifies as a queer person.
As a part of the registration process, the Uttarakhand UCC demands that the couple share the full name and contact number of their landlord and a copy of the rent agreement with the registrar, who will contact the landlord to verify the submitted information.
Landlords must also demand a registration certificate before renting the property to a live-in couple.
This, the petition argues, will make it “very difficult for the live-in couple to secure adequate housing” – an unconstitutional measure since “personal relationships are central to and belong in the realm of choice, not in the corridors of bureaucracy”.
“If we don’t challenge the law, and instead go to the registrar to register our relationship, we would be thrown out of this rented house,” said the woman, who is apprehensive that their conservative Hindu neighbours, already hostile to their relationship, may then pressure the landlord to evict them.
A protest against the state
Both petitioners are independent researchers – the woman is from Delhi and the man from Haldwani in Uttarakhand. They started living together in Delhi after they met at Ambedkar University as students of sociology and law.
The woman’s parents accept their live-in union, unlike the man’s brother – the only member of his family after his parents died in 2021. So when they moved to Haldwani in early 2024, they were forced to find a rented accommodation, even though the man and his family own a house in the town.
The couple’s legal challenge against the UCC is coloured by their disillusionment with the Indian state.
In September 2023, the woman was physically attacked in the National Capital Region by a friend of the man, leaving her with third-degree burns. “The police did not file an FIR and said that it was my partner who had burnt me,” she recounted. “I broke down several times while trying to lodge my complaint. His brother also threatened me.”
The petitioner’s experience with failing to file an FIR against her attacker makes her wary of the uniform civil code’s insistence that the local police should be informed about the registration and termination of live-in unions in the state.
The other petitioner’s response, he said, is influenced by his parents’ death because of Covid in 2021. “There is this bitterness I have with the state since then. It began with their decision to organise the Kumbh Mela in the middle of the pandemic,” he said. “So many died, including my parents. And the government faced no accountability for it. I owed responsibility and accountability to my parents, but I don’t owe anything to the state. That is why this is a personal battle.”
Coming out in court
The woman petitioner told Scroll that she had to disclose her gender identity for the first time to mount a legal challenge against the UCC.
“The female petitioner self-identifies as queer,” says the petition.
The petitioners argued that the code defines “live-in relationship” as a “relationship between a man and a woman”, which is a “heteronormative framework”. As a result, it compels the woman “to affirm to a heterosexual identity”.
“The UCC does not recognise people beyond the binary of a man and a woman,” said the woman. “They don’t see how a queer couple would fit into their patriarchal notion of a family.”
The petition argues that this purported outlook of the UCC discriminates against the woman’s queer identity and disregards the constitutional guarantees of “the right to self-determination, dignity, and equality”.
It is the rejection of a traditional family setup that pushed the duo to choose a live-in relationship over a marriage. The plea says that their “lived experiences with unhappy marriages and domestic violence in their natal families have reinforced their belief in choosing a relationship based on mutual respect and autonomy rather than conforming to institutionalized structures”,
“I feel like there is masculine coercion [in this law],” the woman added. “UCC in its entirety is a majoritarian project – it forces certain values on an entire society.”
A long fight
Petitions can drag on for years in Indian courts, sucking time, energy and resources out of the petitioners.
The man pointed out that the legal challenge will also serve the couple’s academic interests – as researchers interested in anthropology, it would give them an opportunity to observe court proceedings first hand.
But both of them know that they have signed for something much more serious. Uttarakhand has a history of vigilante groups crudely interfering in the lives of couples, especially if they are intercaste or interfaith. Even a petition on sensitive matters like live-in relationships could attract their attention. “We will face the brunt of this law, so we might as well fight it,” the woman said.
She added that she has worked as a researcher on terror trials with people booked under the stringent Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act. “Some of those people spend 15-20 years in jail and their cases go on and on,” the woman said. “I have also lived with a disability after the [September 2023] attack. If this is a long battle, then I don’t know what is not.”
During the first hearing of the petition on February 27, Solicitor General Tushar Mehta told the Uttarakhand high court that the UCC’s objective was to protect women.
But the couple’s advocate, Vrinda Grover, argued that underneath this lofty objective, the code’s provisions on drawing in parents and the police into the registration process will open up women to “familial intimidation and social coercion”.
The bench of Justices Manoj Tiwari and Ashish Naithani questioned Grover about why registration was a problem, since “for the larger good, you have to compromise on some rights”. They added that a child born out of a live-in union will not be treated as illegitimate and the UCC was an attempt to keep pace with a changing society.
The court asked the state to file a reply to the petition on April 1. So far, ten live-in relationships have been registered in the hill state.
