In defending these changes, Ambedkar was at times rather defensive. Thus he argued that the Shastras, the Hindu holy texts, did not give the husband ‘an unfettered, unqualified right to polygamy’. The ‘right to marry a second time has been considerably limited by the [ancient law maker] Kautilya’. Again, the customary law of the various low castes, or shudras, had always allowed divorce. As for the woman’s right to property, some schools allowed her a quarter share in her father’s property; all Ambedkar had done was to ‘raise [the daughter] up in the share of heirs’, by making her share full and equal to that of the son.6
Ambedkar was here putting the best possible, or most liberal, spin on Hindu texts and traditions. But alternative interpretations were possible, and certainly more plausible. Not surprisingly, Ambedkar’s proposals provoked ‘loud denunciations’ from the orthodox, who viewed them as ‘a complete abrogation of the Hindu customs and traditions’, an unacceptable interference with the rules of caste and the traditional relations between the sexes.7
A doughty opponent of the bill was the Constituent Assembly’s own president, Rajendra Prasad. In June 1948, shortly after the Select Committee had been set up, Prasad warned the prime minister that to introduce ‘basic changes’ in personal law was to impose the ‘progressive ideas’ of a ‘microscopic minority’ on the Hindu community as a whole. Nehru answered that the Cabinet had declared itself in favour of the bill, that ‘personally, I am entirely in favour of the general principles embodied in it’. To scrap the legislation now would be to give rise to the suspicion that the Congress was ‘a reactionary and a very conservative body’; nor would it go down well ‘in the mind of foreigners outside India’. Prasad shot back that the opinions of the ‘vast bulk of [the] Hindu public’ were more important than the views of foreigners.8
Within the Assembly there were other opponents as well. They stalled and thwarted the proceedings until Nehru, in high dudgeon, told them that to him the passing of the bill had become a matter of prestige. Prasad, in response, drafted a letter warning the prime minister that this would be ‘unjust and undemocratic’, as this ‘fundamental and controversial legislation’ had never been considered by the Indian electorate. Fortunately for him, Prasad consulted Vallabhbhai Patel before sending Nehru the letter. The timing is crucial here, for it was now December 1949, and soon the Congress would choose the first president of India from a shortlist that comprised Rajendra Prasad and C. Rajagopalachari. With this in view, Patel told Prasad not to send the prime minister his criticisms of the Hindu code, lest it ‘prejudice your position within the party’.9
So Prasad kept quiet (and was duly elected the first president of the Indian Republic). But outside the Council House the cries grew louder. Already, in March 1949, an All-India Anti-Hindu-Code-Bill Committee had been formed. This held that the Constituent Assembly had ‘no right to interfere with the personal laws of Hindus which are based on Dharma Shastras’. Sixty (male) members of the Delhi Bar issued a statement objecting to the codification of Hindu law, on the grounds that ‘the mass of the Hindus believe in the Divine Origin of their personal laws’.
The Anti-Hindu-Code-Bill Committee was supported by conservative lawyers as well as by conservative clerics. The influential Shankaracharya of Dwarka issued an ‘encyclical’ against the proposed code. Religion, he said, ‘is the noblest light, inspiration and support of men, and the State’s highest duty is to protect it’.
The Anti-Hindu-Code-Bill Committee held hundreds of meetings throughout India, where sundry swamis denounced the proposed legislation. The participants in this movement presented themselves as religious warriors (dharmaveer) fighting a religious war (dharmayudh). The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh threw its weight behind the agitation. On 11 December 1949, the RSS organized a public meeting at the Ram Lila grounds in Delhi, where speaker after speaker condemned the bill. One called it ‘an atom bomb on Hindu society’. Another likened it to the draconian Rowlatt Act introduced by the colonial state; just as the protests against that act led to the downfall of the British, he said, the struggle against this Bill would signal the downfall of Nehru’s government. The next day a group of RSS workers marched on the Assembly buildings, shouting ‘Down with Hindu code bill’ and ‘May Pandit Nehru perish’. The protesters burnt effigies of the prime minister and Dr Ambedkar, and then vandalized the car of Sheikh Abdullah.
The leader of the movement against the new bill was one Swami Karpatriji Maharaj. We know little of this swami’s antecedents, except that he was from north India and appeared to be knowledgeable in Sanskrit. His opposition to the Bill was coloured and deepened by the fact that it was being piloted by Ambedkar. He made pointed references to the law minister’s caste, suggesting that a former Untouchable had no business meddling in matters normally the preserve of the Brahmin.
In speeches in Delhi and elsewhere, Swami Karpatri challenged Ambedkar to a public debate on his interpretations of the Shastras. To the law minister’s claim that the Shastras did not really favour polygamy, Swami Karpatri quoted Yagnavalkya: ‘If the wife is a habitual drunkard, a confirmed invalid, a cunning, a barren or a spendthrift woman, if she is bitter-tongued, if she has got only daughters and no son, if she hates her husband, [then] the husband can marry a second wife even while the first is living.’ The swami supplied the precise citation for this injunction: the third verse of the third chapter of the third section of Yagnavalkya’s smriti (scripture) concerning marriage. He did not, however, tell us whether the injunction also allowed the wife to take another husband if the existing one was a drunkard, bitter-tongued, a spendthrift, etc.
For Swami Karpatri, divorce was prohibited in Hindu tradition, while ‘to allow adoption of a boy of any caste is to defy the Shastras and to defy property’. Even by the most liberal interpretations, the woman’s inheritance was limited to one-eighth, not a half as Ambedkar sought to make it. The bill was altogether in violation of the Hindu scriptures. It had already evoked ‘terrible opposition’, and the government could push it through only at its peril. The swami issued a dire warning: ‘As is clearly laid down in the Dharmashastras, to forcibly defy the laws of God and Dharma very often means great harm to the Government and the country and both bitterly rue the obstinate folly.’10
III
In December 1949, having agreed upon a constitution, the Constituent Assembly made way for a provisional Parliament, which was to be in place until the first general election. Through 1950 and 1951, Nehru and Ambedkar made several attempts to get the Hindu Code Bill passed into law. But the opposition was considerable, both within Parliament and outside it. To quote J. D. M. Derrett, ‘every argument that could be mustered against the project was garnered, including many that cancelled each other out’. The ‘offer of divorce to all oppressed spouses became the chief target of attack, and the cry that religion was in danger was raised by many whose real objection to the Bill was that daughters were to have equal shares with sons’.11
Within the provisional Parliament, orthodox members claimed that the Hindu laws had stayed unchanged from time immemorial. ‘The rules of conduct and duties of men in our country are determined by the Vedas’, said Ramnarayan Singh. Despite the challenges down the ages – posed by Buddhism, Islam and Christianity – ‘the Vedic religion did not perish . . . [the] Vedic religion is still there’. But now, complained Ramnarayan Singh, ‘we have Pandit Nehru’s administration whose representative Dr Ambedkar wants to abrogate with a single stroke all those rules which have existed since the beginning of the world’.
Some parliamentarians argued that the government should frame and have passed an Indian code rather than a specifically Hindu one. ‘I do not believe that only Hindu women are oppressed’, said Indra Vidyavachaspati. By passing the bill in its present form, the state would ‘give encouragement to [the] evil of communalism’. If it was not made applicable to all sections of the populations, insisted Vidyavachaspati, then ‘the feeling of communalism will arise and what should have been a boon will turn into
a curse’.
Other members were happy enough with the bill as it was. ‘While I admire those who want to have one Civil Code for the whole of India’, said Thakur Das Bhargava, ‘I do not think that it would be a practical proposition to have one Civil Code for Muslims, Christians, Jews, etc.’. For Muslim members had already expressed their opposition to any tampering with their personal code, which they believed to be the revealed word of Allah himself. To ask at this stage for a uniform code was seen as a stalling tactic, diverting attention from the reform so urgently required within the majority community. As Dr Ambedkar put it, ‘those who until yesterday were the greatest opponents of this Code and the greatest champions of the archaic Hindu Law as it exists to-day’, now claimed that they were ‘prepared for an All-India Civil Code’. This was because they hoped that while it had already taken ‘four or five years to draft the Hindu Code [it] will probably take ten years to draft a Civil Code’.
Ambedkar knew that while there were enough influential Hindus – such as Jawaharlal Nehru – who were behind progressive legislation, among the Muslims the liberal contingent was nowhere near as strong. The government, he said, could not be so ‘foolish’ as ‘not to realize the sentiments of different communities in this country’. That was why the code at present dealt only with the Hindus.12
Of course, not all Hindus were of the liberal party either. The reservations of the orthodox, as expressed in Parliament, were carried forward in the streets by the cadres of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. They brought batches of volunteers into New Delhi, to shout slogans against the Hindu Code Bill and court arrest. Among their larger aims were the dismemberment of Pakistan and the unseating of Jawaharlal Nehru – as they shouted, ‘Pakistan tod do’, ‘Nehru Hakumat Chhod Do’.
The main speaker at these RSS-organized shows was usually Swami Karpatriji Maharaj. Addressing a meeting on 16 September 1951, the swami challenged the prime minister to a debate on the proposed bill. ‘If Pandit Nehru and his colleagues succeed in establishing that even one section of the proposed Hindu Code is in accordance with the Shastras’, said Karpatri, ‘I shall accept the entire Hindu Code’. The next day, in pursuance of this challenge, the swami and his followers marched on Parliament. The police prevented them from entering. In the ensuing scuffle, reported a Hindu weekly, ‘police pushed them back [and] Swamiji’s danda [stick] was broken, which is like the sacred thread, [the] religious emblem of the sannyasis’.13
Coincidentally, just two days before Swami Karpatriji’s march, the president had written the prime minister a long letter of protest against the bill. As in 1948 and 1949, now too Rajendra Prasad felt that the present Parliament, based like its predecessor on a restricted franchise, was ‘not competent to enact a measure of such a fundamental nature’. The bill, argued the president, was ‘highly discriminatory’, for it applied to only one community, the Hindus. Either the same laws governing marriage and property should be applied to all Indians, or else the existing customary laws of the different communities should be left untouched. Prasad wrote ominously that ‘he proposed to watch the progress of the measure in Parliament from day to day’. If the bill was still passed, he would insist on his ‘right to examine it on its merits . . . before giving assent to it’.14
Nehru wrote back saying that in his view there was ‘a very widespread expression of opinion in the country in favour of the Bill’. But the president’s opposition had him worried, for it presaged a possible stand-off between the government and the head of state. He showed Prasad’s letter to several experts on the constitution. They assured him that the president was bound to act with ‘the aid and advice of the Council of Ministers and cannot act independently of that advice’. As they saw it, the position of the president of India was even weaker than that of the British monarch.15
Despite this advice, Nehru chose not to challenge the president. In any case, the progress of the bill in the provisional Parliament had been painfully slow. An immense number of objections and amendments had been tabled. It took the better part of a year to have a mere four clauses passed. In the end ‘the session ended, the bill was virtually talked out, and it lapsed’.16
The man who was most hurt by this failure was the law minister. Dr Ambedkar had staked his reputation on the bill, meeting criticism and calumny with equal resolution. That Nehru had finally chosen to give in to the opposition pained him deeply. In October 1951 he resigned from the Union Cabinet. He intended to announce his decision in the House, but when the Deputy Speaker asked for a copy of his speech beforehand, he walked out in a huff and released it to the press instead.
Ambedkar gave several reasons for his decision to resign. He had been in poor health, for one. For another, the prime minister had failed to repose adequate trust in him. Despite having a PhD in economics (from the London School of Economics, no less) he had been left out of discussions on planning and development. A third reason was his growing reservations about the government’s foreign policy, particularly with regard to Kashmir. A fourth reason was that the condition of his fellow Scheduled Castes continued to be wretched. Despite the coming of political independence, and a constitution protecting their rights, they faced the ‘same old tyranny, the same old oppression, the same old discrimination’.
Ambedkar came in the end to the issue which had finally provoked him to resign. He had, he said, set his cap on having the Hindu Code Bill passed before the end of the Parliament. He had tried hard to convince the prime minister about the urgency of the matter. But Nehru did not give him the kind of support he had hoped for. Facing opposition within his own party, the prime minister, complained Ambedkar, had not ‘the earnestness and determination’ required to overcome it.17
IV
In the first months of 1952 the recent debates on the Hindu Code Bill cast their shadow as India held its first general election. Feeling let down by the Congress, Dr Ambedkar had founded his own Scheduled Caste Federation in opposition to it. As for the prime minister, in his own constituency of Allahabad he was opposed by a leader of the now notorious Anti-Hindu-Code-Bill Committee.
This was Prabhu Dutt Brahmachari. He was an ascetic and celibate, to signal which he wore saffron. Brahmachari’s candidature was supported by the Jana Sangh, the Hindu Mahasabha and the Ram Rajya Parishad. His campaign was run on a single-item agenda – no tampering with Hindu tradition. He printed pamphlets detailing the prime minister’s attempts to interfere with that tradition, challenging him to an open debate on the subject.18
Nehru sensibly refused. He won his seat with a massive margin, while the Congress got a comfortable majority overall. Nehru saw this, in part, as a mandate for his campaign against communalism. Soon after the Parliament was convened he resurrected the Hindu Code Bill.
Keeping the earlier protests in mind, the original bill was now broken up into several parts. There were separate bills dealing with Hindu marriage and divorce, Hindu minority and guardianship, Hindu succession, and Hindu adoptions and maintenance. These component parts retained the rationale and driving force of the original unified proposal. The main thrust was to make caste irrelevant to Hindus with regard to marriage and adoption, to outlaw polygamy, to allow divorce and dissolution of marriage on certain specified grounds and to greatly increase a woman’s share of her husband’s and her father’s property.19
The prime minister was in the vanguard of the pro-reform movement, telling Parliament that ‘real progress of the country means progress not only on the political plane, not only on the economic plane, but also on the social plane’. The British had allied themselves with ‘the most conservative sections of the community they could find’. The conjoining of tradition and colonialism meant that ‘our laws, our customs fall heavily on the womenfolk’. Thus ‘different standards of morality are applied to men and women’. Men were allowed more than one wife, but when a woman wished for a divorce she was challenged by men, only ‘because men happen to be in a dominant position. I hope they will not continue in that dominant p
osition for all time.’
Hindu customs and laws were hypocritical as well as unjust. Women were urged to model themselves on mythic figures of devotion and fidelity but, said Nehru, ‘I do not seem to remember men being reminded in the same manner of Ramachandra and Satyavan, and urged to behave like them. It is only the women who have to behave like Sita and Savitri; the men may behave as they like.’20
Nehru worked hard to convince his colleagues of the importance of these measures. He wrote to one of his senior ministers, a Brahmin who tended towards the orthodox, that ‘we have to remember that in the acknowledged social code and practice of India, as it has existed thus far, there was no lack of moral delinquency as well as extreme unhappiness. There were two codes, one for the man and the other for the woman. The woman got the worst of it always.’ To a young first-time MP Nehru wrote that ‘we should concentrate on the passage through Parliament of the Marriage and Divorce Bills and the Succession Bill. These are the really important ones. The bills dealing with adoption and guardianship, etc. are relatively unimportant.’21
By now the Anti-Hindu-Code-Bill Committee had lost its momentum. After the 1952 election the names of Swami Karpatriji Maharaj and Prabhu Dutt Brahamachari do not appear in the newspapers or police records. There were no longer any protests on the streets, but there were still criticisms aplenty in Parliament. The orthodox MPs saw the new bills as designed to destroy Hindu culture. For them, the laws of Manu and Yagnavalkya were immutable and unchangeable, as relevant in 950 BC as in AD 1950.22
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