'I personally do not understand why religion should be given this vast, expansive jurisdiction, so as to cover the whole of life and to prevent the legislature from encroaching upon that field.'
During the debates in the Constituent Assembly, B.R.Ambedkar had demonstrated his will toreform Indian society by recommending the adoption of a Civil Code of western inspiration. He had then opposedthe delegates who wished to immortalize personal laws, especially Muslim representatives who showed themselvesvery attached to the Shariat:
"I personally do not understand why religion should be given this vast,expansive jurisdiction, so as to cover the whole of life and to prevent the legislature from encroaching uponthat field. After all, what are we having this liberty for? We are having this liberty in order to reform oursocial system, which is so full of inequities, discriminations and other things, which conflict with ourfundamental rights."
However, Ambedkar did not obtain anything more than an article of the Directive Principlesstipulating that:
"The State shall endeavour to secure for the citizens a uniform civil code throughoutthe territory of India."
This recommendation was to remain a dead letter, notably because the minorities– to begin, with the Muslims – took a hard line on their personal law. Many Congress members also opposeda reform of Hindu practices concerning inheritance, marriage (and divorce) and adoption, as shown by the fateof the Hindu Code Bill.
This phrase refers to a project aiming to reform traditions of the Hindu society. TheBritish had drafted such a text in 1946 but they had had no time to get it adopted. In 1948, Nehru entrustedthe drafting of the new code to a sub-committee of the Assembly and nominated Ambedkar as its head. The lattergot written in it fundamental principles such as equality between men and women on the question of propertyand the necessity of justifying concretely a petition for divorce – a procedure which belonged too oftenuntil then to a case of a repudiation of the wife by her husband.
This questioning of the customs governingthe private life of the Hindus aroused a profound emotion, not only among the traditionalists of the HinduMahasabha, but also among leaders of the Congress as prestigious as Rajendra Prasad, who, after beingpresident of the Constituent Assembly had become the first President of the Indian Republic. Prasad, in aletter to Patel, who himself showed strong reservations vis-à-vis such reforms of the Hindu traditions, roseagainst a project whose "new concepts and new ideas are not only foreign to the Hindu law but aresusceptible of dividing every family".
Jawaharlal Nehru was attached to this code in which he saw, quite as Ambedkar, one of thecorner stones of the modernization of India. He even announced that his government would resign if this billwas not passed. Ambedkar pressed him to submit it as quickly as possible to Parliament. The Prime Ministerasked him for a little of patience and even split the Code into four subsets for defusing the oppositionbefore submitting it to the Assembly on September 17, 1951.
The debate which followed confirmed then thehostility of the most traditionalist Congressmen. After four days of discussions, Ambedkar gave an ardentspeech where he went as far as to question the morality of Lord Ram and his wife Sita and mentioned that theextra-marital relationship of Krishna and Radha was as indication of the degraded condition in which Hinduismmaintained its women. This brought the most conservative elected members to become even more critical of him.They retorted back through T. Bhargava that Ambedkar wanted this law to legalize his recent union with aBrahmin nurse. He had indeed married, in April 1948, Dr. Sharda Kabir, one of the doctors whom he hadconsulted, in 1947, when his work at the head of the Drafting Committee had provoked a rapid deterioration ofhis health.
Finally, on September 25, the portion of the Hindu Code Bill concerning marriage and divorcewas deformed by amendments and finally buried without Nehru uttering the least of protest. Considering that hehad not been supported enough by the Prime Minister, Ambedkar sent him his letter of resignation from hisgovernment on 27 September.
In a press release published a little later, Ambedkar attributed Nehru’s backtracking tothe pressures of the Congress: "I have never seen a case of chief whip so disloyal to the Prime Ministerand the Prime Minister so loyal to a disloyal whip…." Actually, Nehru apprehended that the Congress MPswould reject this project en bloc and/or that the President of the Republic, Rajendra Prasad, would reallycarry out his threat to refuse to promulgate it as a law.
It is utterly significant that Ambedkar chose to leave the government of Nehru on the issueof the Hindu Code Bill. It shows indeed that, while he believed in the political path of social reform fromabove, this approach did not content itself with a simple constitutional frame but implied concreteimplementation questioning the logic of the social system. Now, if a large number of the Congressmen approvedthe constitutional framework of the Indian democracy, they were not prepared to support these tangibleadvances questioning the social status quo.
Extracted from Christopher Jaffrelot's forthcoming book, "Ambedkar and Untouchability - Analysing and Fighting
Caste", to be published by Permanent Black in 2004.