What the tribals fear

How afraid are tribal communities in India that the Uniform Civil Code (UCC) will marginalise their identity?

Judging by the results of the Lok Sabha election, it is not an easy question to answer.

Exactly a year ago, the Law Commission had asked for public reactions to a proposal to replace personal laws based on religion, custom, and tradition with one common law for everyone irrespective of religion, caste, creed, sexual orientation, and gender. Personal laws and laws related to inheritance, adoption, and succession were to be covered by a common code. Till June 2023, around 1.9 million suggestions had been received by the government. Now, after the election, WhatsApp messages are being forwarded by Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) supporters, asking recipients to click “yes” to the UCC.

Even before the UCC was included in the BJP 2024 manifesto, leaders of tribal groups had been meeting Union Home Minister Amit Shah and other top government functionaries to demand that tribals be kept out of the UCC. A BJP MP, a non-tribal, and the head of the Standing Committee on Law, the late Sushil Modi, had publicly said he felt tribals in the Northeast should be kept out of the UCC. He was echoing the demand of chief ministers from the Northeast like Conrad Sangma (Meghalaya), an ally of the NDA, who believes the UCC will compromise India’s core strength of diversity. The Nagaland and Mizoram Legislative Assemblies have passed unanimous resolutions that they be exempt from the UCC. In Mizoram, Nagaland, and Meghalaya the proportion of the tribal population, according to the 2011 census, is as high as 94.4 per cent, 86.5 per cent, and 86.1 per cent, respectively. Mizos cite constitutional protection for their personal laws under Article 371(G).

But India being India, there is always “a but”.

BJP leaders from Jharkhand frankly confess that fears of the UCC submerging tribal identity cost them the Lok Sabha election. Although the party did win eight of the 14 seats in Jharkhand, the victory margin of the BJP candidates was lower than in 2019. The party lost twice over: In terms of vote share (from 51.6 per cent in 2019 down to 44.58 per cent in 2024) and in seats reserved for the tribals: It was not able to win even one.

The losses in Jharkhand have been attributed to both the arrest of former chief minister Hemant Soren on charges of corruption, and the imminent threat of the UCC. Tribal communities have been active on the issue of protection to Sarna, a system of worship of animistic gods and mobilisation by the Adivasi Samanvay Samiti to protect the tribal way of life regarding women’s rights, inheritance and adoption. The situation gets more complicated because of tribal conversion to Christianity.

And yet, the situation was dramatically different in Madhya Pradesh and even Chhattisgarh. In Madhya Pradesh people — including tribals — bestowed vast riches on the BJP. The party won all the 29 Lok Sabha seats, a rousing endorsement after the 2023 Assembly elections, in which it won its highest ever tally of 163 of the 230 seats. Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh together have 76 Assembly seats reserved for the tribals. From 19 in 2018, the BJP won 44 in 2023. Most of them were earlier held by the Congress.

This brings us to the central question: If the tribals in Jharkhand are so worried about the UCC swamping their identity, why didn’t the same fear inhibit tribal voters from supporting the BJP in Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh? Or tribal-dominated Odisha for that matter, where the party posted its best ever results — forming the government in the state and winning 20 of the 21 Lok Sabha seats?

Maybe the answer lies in more granular analysis. In Chhattisgarh, for instance, the combined vote of the Bahujan Samaj Party, the Communist Party of India, and the newly formed Hamar Raj and Sarva Adi Dal was more than the victory margin of the BJP in the two tribal seats of Kanker and Bastar. So, a working hypothesis is: They may have voted for it, but tribal voters are worried about threats to their identity from the UCC and the BJP would do well to keep this in mind.