Shah sets a 2029 deadline for the Uniform Civil Code in 21 NDA states

Union Home Minister Amit Shah said in Mumbai on Sunday that the Uniform Civil Code will be introduced in all 21 states governed by the BJP and its National Democratic Alliance partners before the 2029 Lok Sabha election. "Triple talaq has been abolished, giving Muslim women equal rights. We have introduced UCC in several states and I am confident that in the 21 BJP-NDA-governed states, we will introduce UCC before 2029," he told reporters, standing with Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis and Deputy Chief Minister Eknath Shinde.

The statement converts a long manifesto item into a dated state-by-state timetable. It does not announce a central law. Personal law in India is still largely a state subject in practice when a Union government chooses the incremental route, and that is the route Shah described.

Where the code already stands

Uttarakhand brought a Uniform Civil Code into force in January 2025, the first state to do so after Independence. Gujarat passed a similar Bill in March 2026. Assam passed one in May 2026. Madhya Pradesh has also passed a code; one account published on Sunday treated that law as already in force, another as still awaiting presidential assent and notification. Those three or four states are the stock Shah meant by "several."

Maharashtra, West Bengal, Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan have formed drafting committees or are otherwise preparing texts. West Bengal's presence on that list is the political anomaly: the state is not an NDA government in the ordinary sense of the current assembly, and any draft there will live or die on a different floor. The 21-state figure Shah used is the NDA map as the BJP counts it today, not a prediction about opposition capitals.

A Uniform Civil Code, in the form these states are writing, replaces religion-specific rules on marriage, divorce, inheritance and adoption with a single civil statute. The Goa Civil Code, a colonial inheritance, is the older exception. The new statutes are the BJP's own.

What else Shah put on the record

The UCC line sat inside a longer defence of 12 years of Union government and of Narendra Modi's 25 years as chief minister and prime minister. Shah said the government would run a month-long Seva Sankalp Abhiyan from 17 September to 17 October, covering every district, Lok Sabha seat, assembly seat and polling booth. The dates bracket Modi's birthday on 17 September and the 25-year mark on 6 October.

He said the criminal codes now branded as the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita had raised conviction rates by 30 percent in a single year in several states. He listed surgical strikes, air strikes and Operation Sindoor as the content of a zero-tolerance terrorism policy. He said more than 14 peace agreements in the Northeast and more than 9,000 surrenders had ended five decades of Maoist violence, a claim that will be tested against incident data rather than against a podium line.

On Manipur, asked whether a National Register of Citizens would use a 1951 baseline, Shah said the Union government was talking to allies and other parties and would announce a decision later.

In a separate Mumbai appearance he argued that decolonisation of history meant presenting "the historical truth to the world in an authentic manner from an Indian perspective," not erasing the past. That line belongs to a different argument, but it travelled with the same day's copy.

The 2029 clock

Twenty-one states in three years is a legislative assembly problem more than a drafting problem. Each text needs a cabinet, a house, and in several cases the President. Assent delays are already visible in the Gujarat and Assam files. Courts will see the first petitions as soon as notification begins, as they did in Uttarakhand, on questions of live-in registration, inheritance shares and the treatment of existing marriages.

Opposition parties will treat the timetable as proof that personal law is being rewritten state by state to avoid a single parliamentary fight. The BJP will treat it as proof that a manifesto promise is moving. Both readings can be true at once. The measurable test is narrower: how many of the 21 have a notified code on 1 January 2029, and what those codes actually do to divorce, adoption and property in the first year they run.

Shah has now named the number and the year. The states have to write the sections.