DR. AMBEDKAR AND THE HINDU CODE BILL 357
substance of the opposition was the same as it is now but the approach was a very different one. The approach was naturally different because it was made to an alien government. The approach was made on the lines that they were the loyalists who were the ardent supporters of the Government, that it was the Congress, which was agitating, that was behind this demand which the women of India had brought forward and that the Government should not give any credence to it. I am not making statements without foundation. It is true that the nationalist press of this country did not give that opposition much chance. Yet the opposition did bring out many pamphlets wildely abusing our national leaders, not even sparing our belovd leader Mahatma Gandhi. There was a weekly paper produced called ‘Hindu’ in which these Bills were attacked and they were attacked on the basis that the national leaders of this country were behind it and it was due to their advice and under their influence that this was being done. Coupled with this factor, when the Government found that the women of this country were not willing to agree to those machinations which wanted to further divide and bring discord among them, when they realized that women were against separate electorates and that they stood behind those who were in the vanguard of the freedom movement of this country, then there was not much hope that a legislation of this type to improve the lot of women and to give them their rights would go through with the alien Government in power. It was then that we realized that it was necessary to wait till a national Government came in. Later the Government appointed the Hindu Law Committee, and the Bills were re-circulated. This Committee as the House knows, presented its Report after touring the country, taking the opinions of thousands of individuals and organisations in 1946 after the Intrim Government came in. I will not recapitulate the subsequent steps when this Bill was reintroduced after 1947 in the present Legislature as these are well known to the Members of this House. But I merely want to point out that the opposition which is in substance the same, in character the same, has a new approach. I would like to know who are they who were opposed to the Congress in those days to say today to the Congress ‘You will lose your elections if the Hindu Code Bill goes through.’ I would like to ask them when they were deliberately against the movement for freedom—when they neither supported it nor symalhised with it—when it was in spite of them that the Congress won the elections and the country’s freedom, who are they today to tell the Congress that they will not win the elections. If anyone of them comes into the legislatures of the country today it is by the grace of the Congress and so it shall be tomorrow also.