The Uniform Civil Code of Uttarakhand, 2024, in force since 27 January 2025, is the first post-Independence State civil code in India and the first Indian statute to make registration of live-in relationships compulsory on pain of imprisonment. It also excludes members of Scheduled Tribes, and persons whose customary rights Part XXI of the Constitution protects, from its operation. With Gujarat and Assam now holding Presidential assent for codes on the same template, the Uttarakhand design has become a prototype. This article argues that the Code pursues uniformity through two opposite instruments, coercion for the many and exemption for the few, and that neither withstands constitutional and empirical scrutiny. Drawing on the text of the Code and its amendments, the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence on autonomy, presumption of marriage, legitimacy and tribal succession, official NCRB and Census data, and the State’s own registration figures, the article reaches four findings. First, penal registration fails the necessity and balancing limbs of proportionality, and the scheme combines negligible uptake with an abnormally high rejection rate. Second, NCRB data do not support the protective rationale, since recorded violence against women concentrates within formally solemnised marriages. Third, the Scheduled Tribe exemption is constitutionally defensible but leaves unaddressed the gender inequality that the Supreme Court flagged in Kamla Neti, Tirith Kumar and Ram Charan. Fourth, the Goa Civil Code, which the Supreme Court praised in Jose Paulo Coutinho, offers a model of managed pluralism, not of criminal enforcement.