Introduction to important constitutional provisions — Reservation, Uniform Civil Code

Two Mumbai law students fill the same admission form. One ticks a reserved-category box and gets a lower cut-off; the other does not, and does not. Meanwhile, a Muslim woman and a Hindu woman going through very different divorces are governed by two completely different sets of personal law on maintenance and marriage. Both situations trace back to the same unfinished argument in the Constitution: how far the State should go in treating people differently to make them more equal, and whether one civil code should ever replace many.

In two minutes

Reservation is the Constitution's tool for substantive equality under Articles 15 and 16, tested and limited case by case; the Uniform Civil Code is Article 44's unenforced directive that one common civil law should eventually replace personal laws, and courts keep raising it without being able to compel it.

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