The country is moving towards a singular civil code that will be secular in nature, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said on Thursday.

Addressing a gathering near the Statue of Unity in Gujarat’s Narmada district, the prime minister said that India was moving towards “one nation, one civil code”.

Modi was reiterating an assertion that he had made during his Independence Day speech on August 15.

During the Independence Day speech, Modi had said that the need of the hour was to implement a “secular civil code” in the country. Referring to the Uniform Civil Code in his speech, he said: “A large section of the country believes, and it is true, that the civil code that we are living with is actually a communal civil code.”

The Congress, however, said the prime minister’s claim that Indians are living with a “communal civil code” was a gross insult to BR Ambedkar.

Ambedkar was the head of the committee that drafted the Constitution. He was also independent India’s first law minister.

The Uniform Civil Code is a proposed common set of laws governing marriage, divorce, succession and adoption for all citizens. Currently, such personal affairs of different religious and tribal groups – except in Uttarakhand and Goa – are based on community-specific laws, largely derived from religious scripture.

The BJP claims that a Uniform Civil Code would ensure equality and justice for women, who are often denied rights under patriarchal personal laws. Critics, however, argue that the move could lead to the personal law practices of minority communities being erased.

Need to guard against ‘urban Naxals’: Modi

Modi on Thursday also urged citizens to guard against “urban Naxals'“, who he claimed were trying to divide the country.

The term “urban Naxals” was first used by ministers of the Union government and BJP leaders after several activists and academicians were arrested in the Elgar Parishad case in 2018. Since then, the term has often been used for dissidents of the Modi-led government.

Modi claimed on Thursday that a “new model of urban Naxalism” emerged as Naxalism began to get eliminated from the forests of central India. He alleged that a “gang of urban Naxals” was seeking to break India on the pretext of safeguarding the Constitution.