JOURNAL OF THE NATIONAL HUMAN RIGHTS COMMISSION, INDIA VOL. 21, 2022 deal with issues and practices governing relationships of people within familial structures, encompassing marriage, separation or divorce, maintenance, inheritance, succession, adoption, custody and guardianship. The history of secularisation of these practices that govern relations in the personal sphere of the family, can be traced to the debates around the Hindu Code Bill introduced in 1947, when Dr. B.R. Ambedkar met with resistance in the Constituent Assembly. It was referred to a Select Committee in 1948, and there was no discussion on it thereafter till 1949, when piecemeal discussions took place. Dr. Ambedkar’s intention to move the Hindu family laws from a personal realm into that of a secular code, was among the critical steps to accord gender justice. It involved access of women to property rights, instituting the practice of monogamous marriage irrespective of caste, and to provide divorce rights. But the resistance within the Constituent Assembly and the lackadaisical attitude of the Cabinet led to its adoption in a truncated form. A deeply troubled Ambedkar finally resigned from the Cabinet sensing the lack of political will for a transformation of the social and familial lives of the majority of Indians, mostly women (Rege, 2013). 2. Feminist Claims to Equality Not Uniformity The contemporary women’s movements’ articulation emerged forcefully after the Shah Bano judgement of 1984. Prior to this, the women’s movements had focussed on the objective mentioned in Article 44 for the development of a Uniform Civil Code. This was mentioned in one of the earliest reports of 1946, Women’s Role in a Planned Economy that emerged from the National Planning Committee (1939-46), and subsequently in the report on the status of women in India of 1974 titled Towards Equality. These highlighted the patriarchal nature of family/personal laws that draws from religious communities and their fundamentalist principles. Further, since the 1980s, while women were increasingly visible in the public sphere due to increasing access to education, employment, migration, economic and political visibility, it was also a period of strained social and economic lives due to the state policy initiatives of the structural adjustment programme along with liberalisation of markets (Rege, 2003). Simultaneous to this rise in economic conservatism was the rise of religionbased public assertions. The sati in Deorala in 1987 marked a public display of caste and 92