Inside the Assam UCC Bill, 2026: What it changes for marriage, divorce, live-in and the parental inheritance

When Parliamentary Affairs Minister Atul Bora rose in the Assam Legislative Assembly on Monday morning, May 25, to table "The Uniform Civil Code, Assam, Bill, 2026" on behalf of Chief Minister Dr Himanta Biswa Sarma, the move did more than fulfil a 2026 BJP manifesto promise. It set Assam on course to become the first state in the Northeast — and the third in the country, after Uttarakhand and Gujarat — to adopt a common personal-law code. The Bill, opposed on the floor by the Congress, the Raijor Dal and the Trinamool Congress, was scheduled to come up for discussion and passage on May 27, on the closing day of the five-day session of the 16th Assembly.

At the heart of the proposed legislation is a single civil legal framework that will govern marriage, divorce, succession and live-in relationships for all residents of Assam, irrespective of religion, while expressly exempting the Scheduled Tribes (Hills) and the Scheduled Tribes (Plains) so as to preserve their constitutional protections and customary practices. The government has also clarified that the Bill does not interfere with religious solemnisation rituals — marriages may still be performed through Vedic Bibah, Ahom Chaklong, Saptapadi, Ashirvad, Nikah, Holy Union or Anand Karaj. What changes is the legal scaffolding that sits behind those rituals.

Marriage: one age, one rule, one registration window

The Bill sets the minimum age of marriage at 21 for men and 18 for women, mandates monogamy across communities, and requires that every marriage be registered with the concerned Sub-Registrar through a marriage memorandum within 60 days of solemnisation. Deliberate failure to register attracts a penalty of ₹10,000. Bigamy and polygamy are to be punished under Section 82 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023, with imprisonment of up to seven years. Crucially, a savings clause protects polygamous marriages solemnised before the UCC comes into force — they will remain valid in law. The Bill also proposes the repeal of the Assam Compulsory Registration of Muslim Marriages and Divorces Act, 2024, folding that compliance regime into the new unified code.

Child marriage and marriages contracted without valid consent will continue to be punishable under the Prohibition of Child Marriage Act, 2006, while fraudulent or deceptive marriages procured through force, coercion or concealment will invite imprisonment of up to seven years along with a fine.

Divorce: uniform grounds, and the under-five rule

For the first time, every resident of Assam — barring those in the exempted ST categories — will approach divorce through the same set of statutory grounds: cruelty, desertion and mutual consent, among others. The Bill also lays down a child-centric provision stating that custody of children below the age of five will ordinarily remain with the mother during separation proceedings, prioritising early-childhood care while leaving courts free to assess what is in the child's best interest beyond that age. Divorce, like marriage, must be registered; non-registration within the stipulated period invites penalties identical to those for marriage.

Live-in relationships: registered, regulated, recognised

The most discussed — and contested — feature of the Bill is the legal recognition of live-in relationships. Couples will be required to register their relationship within 30 days of its commencement. Failure to register may attract imprisonment of up to three months or a fine of ₹10,000. Concealing material facts or submitting false information while registering may invite imprisonment of up to three months and a fine of up to ₹25,000.

In return for registration, the Bill confers significant protections. Children born from a registered live-in relationship are declared fully legitimate under the law. A deserted live-in partner — typically the woman — is granted the explicit legal right to claim financial maintenance through the courts. The government's argument is that bringing such relationships into the formal record protects the vulnerable and gives partners and their children a clear pathway to maintenance, inheritance and other civil claims that they would otherwise have to litigate from scratch.

The objection from civil-liberty quarters is the opposite one: that compulsory registration of a private arrangement between two consenting adults, backed by criminal sanctions, blurs the line between regulation and surveillance. The Assembly debate on 27 May 27 debated substantially on this point.

Inheritance: a gender-equal Class-I, and the question of "fair shares"

In matters of succession, the Bill introduces a uniform, gender-neutral order of preference for intestate inheritance — that is, where a person dies without leaving a will. The spouse, the children (sons and daughters alike) and the parents of the deceased are all placed in the same Class-I category and receive equal legal standing. This is the single most consequential change for many Muslim and tribal-but-non-ST families in Assam, who under existing personal-law regimes inherit unequally on the basis of sex. Under the proposed code, a daughter's share in her parents' property will be identical to a son's — by statute, not by contestation.

For testamentary succession, the Bill recognises the right of any adult of sound mind to execute a written and witnessed will. This is the area that has drawn the sharpest critique from AIMIM chief Asaduddin Owaisi, who has argued that Islamic personal law forbids a testator from willing away the entirety of his estate to one heir at the expense of others — particularly daughters — and that permitting unrestricted testamentary disposition under the UCC could, in practice, allow a parent to disinherit a daughter through a will. Government sources counter that the Bill's overall architecture — gender-equal Class-I status, mandatory witnessing of wills, and a registration-based paper trail for all civil acts — is meant to make such disinheritance harder, not easier, to execute and harder to defend in court.

The fraudulent will, and the gift to one child

A specific anxiety has shadowed the inheritance debate ever since the Uttarakhand UCC was passed in 2024: what happens when a parent — particularly one of two parents, where more than one child exists — executes a will or a gift deed transferring the bulk of family property to a single child, often a son, often the one resident in the parental home, and the other siblings discover the disposition only after the parent's death? Existing personal laws have offered uneven remedies. Under Hindu law, a self-acquired property could be willed away entirely; under Muslim law, only one-third of the estate could be bequeathed and only with the consent of the other heirs. The result was a patchwork in which siblings frequently litigated for years.

The Assam Bill's approach, drawing on the Uttarakhand model, is to attack the problem on three fronts rather than to prohibit unequal testamentary disposition outright.

First, by placing all children in the same Class-I category for intestate succession, the Bill ensures that in the absence of a valid will — which is the situation in the overwhelming majority of Indian households — every child inherits an equal share. This removes the most common route by which daughters are silently cut out: parental death without paperwork, followed by a male sibling taking de facto control of the homestead.

Second, the Bill requires that any will be in writing and witnessed, and it integrates testamentary succession into the same registration architecture that governs marriage, divorce and live-in relationships. A will that is not recorded, not witnessed in the prescribed manner, or fraudulently executed — for instance, by procuring a parent's signature when the parent is no longer of sound mind, or by concealing the existence of other children — fails the statutory test and is liable to be set aside. Once the rules under the Parent Act are notified, gifts and testamentary transfers will be capable of being traced on a government registry, which dramatically narrows the room for a "surprise" will produced after a parent's death.

Third, by criminalising concealment and fraud across the civil-law spectrum — with imprisonment of up to seven years for fraudulent marriages, and parallel offences of concealment in registration of relationships — the Bill signals an intent to treat the fraudulent extraction of property from a parent in the same family of offences as the fraudulent extraction of consent in marriage. The detailed rules, which the Uttarakhand experience suggests will follow the Bill's passage, are expected to spell out the verification protocols for the execution and registration of wills and gift deeds. Until those rules are notified, the precise contours of how the state will police a sham gift from one parent to one child — particularly where the other parent and the other siblings are alive and could in principle contest it during the parent's lifetime — remain a matter for the rule-making stage. Some clauses of the tabled Bill have themselves been flagged by analysts as not yet spelling out specific verification processes, and members on both sides of the aisle are expected to seek clarity on that today.

What the Bill clearly does not do is import the Quranic restriction of bequeathable share to one-third of the estate. That is the gap Owaisi has pointed to. Whether that gap will be closed by amendment, by rulemaking, or by litigation once the Act is in force is one of the more interesting open questions that today's debate is likely to raise.

The politics around the law

The introduction of the Bill on Monday was met with immediate protests from the Congress, the All India Trinamool Congress, and Raijor Dal, who demanded broader stakeholder consultation and accused the government of legislative haste. Congress MLA Zubair Anam has argued that the Bill is not "truly equal" given its blanket exemption of the Scheduled Tribes, and Owaisi has gone further, calling it a "backdoor imposition" of Hindu personal law on Muslims. Sarma, defending the Bill in the House on Tuesday, described the legislation as the "need of the hour", argued that it was not directed at any community, and said it would finally give statutory shape to Article 44 of the Constitution within Assam.

The numbers in the House favour the government — the NDA enjoys a comfortable majority in the 126-member Assembly — and the Bill was easily cleared by the end of business on May 27. What follows will be the longer, slower task: rule-making, registration infrastructure, a portal of the kind Uttarakhand launched in January 2025, and the inevitable round of constitutional challenges that has followed every state's foray into a subject that the Constitution places on the Concurrent List but which the Centre has, so far, declined to legislate on.

For the ordinary Assamese family, however, the most immediate change will not be in the courts or in the headlines. It will be the quiet, paperwork-driven reality that begins the day the rules are notified: every marriage on a register, every divorce on a register, every live-in relationship on a register, and every transfer of a parent's property — by will or by gift — anchored to a witnessed, written document that the daughter, equally with the son, has the standing to question.