Kolkata: Throwing down what could become the defining ideological battle of the West Bengal election, the BJP promised in its manifesto on Friday to implement the Uniform Civil Code within six months of coming to power, a move that may consolidate Hindu votes even as the TMC seeks to rally the drifting minority voters behind it once again.
At the release of the BJP’s “Sankalp Patra” in Kolkata, Union Home Minister Amit Shah said there would be “one law for every citizen in Bengal,” regardless of religion.
“Several BJP-ruled states have implemented the Uniform Civil Code. Within six months, we will implement the UCC in Bengal and ensure that a single, uniform set of laws applies to all citizens,” he said.
The BJP manifesto also coupled the UCC promise with a pledge to stop infiltration and cattle smuggling, reinforcing a campaign narrative built around border security and “appeasement politics”.
The UCC, one common set of laws governing marriage, divorce, inheritance and adoption for all citizens, has long been a core demand of the RSS-BJP combine. By foregrounding it barely two weeks before polling begins on April 23, the BJP appears to be betting that a polarised election suits it better than a straight contest over unemployment, prices and anti-incumbency.
The timing is significant in a state where Muslims constitute nearly 30 per cent of the population and hold the balance in more than 110 of the 294 assembly seats.
Shah framed the issue not as a religious question but as one of constitutional equality.
“Tell me one thing. The Constitution is based on the principle that every citizen, regardless of religion, should be treated equally. Is having the same law for every citizen appeasement? Or is appeasement when one citizen is allowed four marriages and another only one? The UCC ends appeasement,” he said.
He also sought to blunt criticism by arguing that the proposal did not originate with the BJP.
“The recommendation for the Uniform Civil Code is not of the BJP. It is of the Constituent Assembly. It was due to appeasement politics that the UCC was not implemented for so long,” Shah said.
The BJP has already overseen the rollout of the UCC in Uttarakhand and is now seeking to make Bengal the next frontier of that ideological project.
The ruling TMC, however, seized on Shah’s remarks as proof that the BJP wants to communalise the election.
Senior TMC leaders described the UCC announcement as a “calculated attempt to polarise voters” and accused the BJP of trying to consolidate Hindu votes by stoking fears among minorities.
Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, who has repeatedly attacked the proposal in the past, has earlier argued that the UCC is an assault on India’s plural character and a bid to impose a majoritarian agenda in the name of reform.
Privately, TMC leaders said the BJP’s decision to foreground the UCC could end up helping the ruling party by reversing what had until recently appeared to be a drift in sections of the Muslim vote.
Over the last two months, the TMC had been facing an unusual challenge in minority-dominated pockets of Murshidabad, Malda, North Dinajpur and parts of North 24 Parganas, where smaller outfits such as the Indian Secular Front, the AIMIM and suspended TMC MLA Humayun Kabir’s Aam Janata Unnayan Party were trying to position themselves as an “independent Muslim voice”.
That experiment suffered a major blow on Friday after AIMIM snapped ties with Kabir following a purported video, circulated by the TMC, in which a man resembling him was allegedly heard discussing a Rs 1,000-crore deal with the BJP and speaking of dividing minority votes. Kabir has dismissed the video as “AI-generated” and politically motivated.
The collapse of the AIMIM-AJUP understanding, followed within hours by Shah’s aggressive UCC pitch, may now push Muslim voters back towards the TMC in many of the closely fought seats of south Bengal and the minority-heavy belt stretching from Murshidabad to Uttar Dinajpur, political analysts said.
Yet the BJP appears willing to take that risk because it believes the UCC, coupled with its slogans on infiltration and “Ram Rajya”, could consolidate Hindu voters cutting across caste lines, particularly in border districts and refugee belts where it has already been campaigning on identity and citizenship.
In effect, the BJP’s announcement may have sharpened the Bengal election into the stark binary that both the BJP and the TMC are most comfortable fighting: identity versus identity, consolidation versus counter-consolidation.
With the state voting in two phases on April 23 and April 29, the UCC has now moved from being a long-term ideological promise to perhaps the most combustible issue of the campaign.
