Though the Uttarakhand Uniform Civil Code claims to be progressive by acknowledging and “protecting” live-in relationships, it grants no meaningful rights or entitlements for partners in such relationships. Instead, the UCC places immense burdens and responsibilities on those who wish to exercise their constitutional right to cohabit. The rights flowing from these responsibilities are few in comparison.
Starting with registration itself, the maintenance of a public register unwittingly drags the law into an era before the progressive judgments on the Special Marriage Act. Allahabad High Court and the Supreme Court highlighted the possibility of violence given the opposition to inter-caste/inter-religious marriages, along with the inherent invasion of privacy that public notices and registers of adult unions pose. Without acknowledging these concerns, the Code has taken a leap backwards, mandating the maintenance of a public register and explicit intimation of police officers upon registration of a live-in relationship.
The UCC’s part on live-in relationships, added almost as an afterthought in the scheme of the Code, also introduces a novel unwanted concept of “parental consent” into consensual adult intimacy. In every law, adults of the requisite minimum age can get married without parental consent, in line with their constitutional rights to life and liberty. Now, an 18 year-old-woman in Uttarakhand can get married without informing her parents, but she cannot choose to live with her partner without telling her parents first. This provision is a reflection of a demand from many quarters—to curb inter-caste and inter-religious marriages, along with limiting the agency of women.
Also read: Uttarakhand UCC doesn’t reform Indian family law. Gender equality was never its intention
More responsibilities, few returns
Even upon “successful” registration, a live-in couple is not necessarily any better off in their access to legal and welfare-related entitlements. The regulations try to protect women in live-in relationships but do not give any legal right to regular maintenance for them. Women can only seek maintenance on desertion, which is a narrower subset of maintenance than the larger concept of marital and post-marital maintenance.
Registered partners are left high and dry in succession too—they have no right to receive a share in the properties of their partners who die without a will. This is another example of the imbalance between the responsibility to register and entitlements in return.
While the UCC recognises children born from live-in relationships as legitimate children, with the same succession rights as children born out of a valid marriage, it does not clarify whether children from registered live-in relationships would be treated differently from those born out of unregistered relationships. The wording of the provision does not delineate which category such children can belong to. The worst-case assumption remains that only children from registered relationships will be treated as legitimate.
Far from “protecting” women in live-in relationships, the UCC’s focus seems to be on state interference in such relationships. In both Supriyo Chakraborty v. Union of India and Shakti Vahini v. Union of India, the Supreme Court explicitly held that there is a fundamental right to cohabitation and to choose a partner without fear of state or societal sanction, respectively. This means that the State cannot intervene in this right without good reason and only so much as is necessary for that good reason. While the logic of protection remains unhashed in these provisions, the State’s interference goes way beyond the threshold of necessity, stepping into the realm of criminalisation.
In the guise of protection, acknowledgement, and rights, the Code only offers live-in couples additional burdens and penal consequences.
The authors are part of the Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy. Views are personal.
(Edited by Theres Sudeep)