PERSONAL LAWS, UNIFORM LAWS 19 defending a uniform civil code including 'gender justice' and 'secularism.' However, given the hindu right's anti-minority bias, and its commitment to the gendered division of labour,2 its credentials to draft a uniform civil code remain dubious. The sequence of events that has increasingly communalised the issue has also led feminist groups into taking opposing positions or on dropping common laws from their agenda. Yet the issue still has to be addressed because gender justice remains a desired horizon, even if the means of its legal institution have become controversial. Further, it has to be addressed in ways that do not surrender to the ideological rationale of the hindu right for a uniform civil code: an aggressive anti-muslim/-chnstian agenda that takes shelter under the insignia of a 'unified' nation. The majoritarian notion of a 'unified nation' is projected as (and percieved to be) a code for hindu supremacy, and rests on a vaunted universalism that, as the present stance on conversion reveals, is of course spurious. But it does raise some theoretical confusions to which I will return. Among the numerous positions on the issue, those that are based on some degree of genuine concern for gender justice and secularism range from briefs for legal uniformity to versions of legal pluralism. A number of assumptions have been vital to their formulation. The case for legal uniformity rests on uniformity as signifying a consolidated nationhood, social homogenisation and harmony as well as democracy, legal equality and individual rights for women. The assumptions on which the case for legal pluralism rest are a presumed antagonism between the religious community and the nation-state, the right of 'communities' to their own laws, the presupposition that personal law is tied up with religious belief, and a tacit division of public and private. Legal pluralists also assume (or argue) that uniform laws will be an agency of homogenisation, that the preservation of social plurality or cultural diversity depends on maintaining personal law, that gender justice need not depend on legal uniformity, and that women struggling for justice cannot unite across religious divisions. The major questions that arise vis a vis legal uniformity are whether the present conception of the uniform civil code does not replicate some of the assumptions of the personal law, whether uniformity can take existing caste/class stratification and social heterogeneity into account, whether an idea of nationhood based on legal assimilationj and uniformity is required at all, and how to set about recuperating its more positive aspect — namely the desire to procure secular, democratic and equal rights for women — without