Bridging Normative Theory and Empirical Politics in the Indian Uniform Civil Code Debate

Debates on the Uniform Civil Code (UCC) in India have unfolded for over seven decades with limited normative clarity, even as the issue has become increasingly central to electoral politics and constitutional litigation. This paper uses the UCC as a methodological test case for connecting normative argument with empirical political analysis in Indian political theory, while avoiding capture by contingent political alignments. At its core, the UCC debate revolves around replacing India's diverse family law regime, based on tribal and religious affiliations, with a single, uniform code applicable to all citizens. Existing Indian political theory (IPT) responses to the UCC (Dhagamwar, Bhargava, Chandhoke, Agnes, Menon, Narain, Parashar) typically organise the debate around Muslim Personal Law and Hindu majoritarianism. These accounts rely heavily on "contingent contextual considerations": ruling party ideology, religious organisations' rhetoric, or minority status. While empirically rich, such reasoning has produced a polarised debate where proponents and opponents talk past one another, with normative principles left unexamined. The paper's core methodological contribution is to propose an "abstract, principled" mode of reasoning that neither ignores empirical evidence nor allows short-term contextual facts to determine normative argument. Drawing on Sune Laegaard's concept of "critical distance," it diagnoses how IPT on the UCC oscillates between highly contextualist reasoning and thin, unexamined appeals to secularism or gender justice. It then reconstructs the central normative question explicitly: under what conditions is a uniform family law regime normatively preferable to a legally plural one? This speaks directly to the workshop's core concerns in three ways. First, it clarifies which empirical claims are methodologically relevant to the UCC question and which are normatively distracting. This offers a framework for using empirical work without reducing normative judgment to context. Second, it demonstrates that leading "gender justice" arguments for the UCC are best understood as specific secularist arguments about the proper relation between state, religion, and family law. This refines the conceptual premises on which empirical research about the UCC should proceed, showing how empirical evidence about gender harm can inform—but not replace—normative theorising about secular governance. Third, it sketches how this methodology travels beyond the UCC. It contrasts its approach with dominant methodologies in IPT—decolonial and "founding moment" approaches that privilege either colonial intellectual histories or canonical 1920s-40s figures (Ambedkar, Gandhi, Nehru)—and proposes instead a normatively structured, issue-driven methodology that begins from live political controversies and disciplines their treatment through principled reasoning at critical distance. The paper thus addresses several workshop questions: How should normative claims be revised when empirical assumptions they rest on prove false or politically co-opted? How far can normative arguments about legal pluralism be justified independently of current partisan configurations? By articulating a methodology for connecting Indian political theory to empirical political research, the paper contributes to the emerging methodological turn in normative political theory. It models how contested political questions rooted in postcolonial contexts can be theorised with both normative rigour and empirical sensitivity, without abandoning either dimension to the other. This approach offers a contribution to bridging the normative–empirical divide.