Words change in impact with use. In his Independence Day speech, the prime minister, Narendra Modi, brought up one of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh-Bharatiya Janata Party’s favourite ideas, the uniform civil code. But there was a change in the reference, the change of a single word which was yet large in resonance. Mr Modi said that it was time to bring about the ‘secular’ civil code. According to the prime minister, the civil code so far has been communal. Laws that foster division and religious discrimination have no place in modern society. He mentioned the Supreme Court’s allusions to a uniform civil code and also that a large number of people feel its need. In effect, he said that a secular civil code would eliminate religion from law. By substituting the word, ‘secular’, Mr Modi may have wished to disconcert the Opposition. The suspicion that the BJP’s enthusiasm for a UCC was fuelled by a desire to erase laws of minority communities had set the Opposition against it. Now it would be difficult for the Opposition, which calls the BJP ‘communal’, to explain why ‘secular’ was undesirable in this particular instance.

Since Mr Modi’s secular civil code would be a disguised UCC, the entire impact of the word ‘secular’ has changed, its meaning turned inside out. The point of the exercise would be to flatten religious laws; in that case, which should be the norm for ‘secular’ laws and who will decide this? It is not just a question of insulting B.R. Ambedkar by calling India’s civil code ‘communal’, as the Congress has claimed. Rather, the change in word was the means by which Mr Modi introduced the religious dimension into a potential law-making exercise: ‘secular’ implies its silenced opposite, ‘religious’. But ‘uniform’ or ‘common’ with reference to the civil code simply meant ‘applicable to or shared by everybody’. The emphasis is on equality. But even that, the Law Commission had said in 2018, was neither necessary nor desirable. The country is pluralistic and diverse; reduction into a centralised, single system is against the spirit of this democracy. There are civil laws for marriage and inheritance for those who do not wish to follow religious laws. Besides, a uniform civil code is civil by definition; it does not need the word ‘secular’ for emphasis.