DR. AMBEDKAR AND THE HINDU CODE BILL 487
address themselves to that, will the honourable Member be thoroughly satisfied with what has been done by the Select Committee.
Mr. Naziruddin Ahmad : The point is that the Select Committee Member were not made aware of the changes.
Mr. Deputy Speaker : It serves no useful purpose. It is not a question of law whether this House has got jurisdiction over the Select Committee’s piece of handiwork. It has been decided and sufficiently discussed to show that the Select Committee has looked into every one of the clauses to come to a conclusion. But on matters of substance, the old law has been widely changed. There is some substanse in that. Those are the matters on which the honourable Member should address the House. I do not say that all that has been said is out of place, but sufficient has been said.
Mr. Naziruddin Ahmad : To many honourable Members sufficient has not been said. It is said that these are not substantial changes and I shall take care to point them out. The difficulty is that the changes are too numerous to ensure the attention of the House. In fact the changes are very serious and very various and very substantial and my point is that they were introduced not by the Select Committee and whether they accepted them or not is a different matter. My thesis is that they were presented with a ready-made Bill with the assurance that no substantial changes had been made and so the attention of the Select Committee was not sufficiently drawn to that matter. Now let us consider the actual changes in the list of inheritance. In fact in the original Bill the list of inheritance is to be found on pages 4, 5 and 6 in the body of the Bill. This has been bodily lifted from this place in the departmental Bill and transported to the Seventh Schedule. While the other parts remain in the body of the text, the list of inheritance, strangely and for unaccountable reasons, removed. It is not very easy to compare the original list with the new list as it appears in the Seventh Schedule; there have been serious and substantial changes. The Honourable Minister wanted to know what are the changes made.
The Honourable Dr. B. R. Ambedkar : I am quite aware of them. So far as I am concerned, you need not spend your labour in enlightening me at all.
Mr. Naziruddin Ahmad : If these are intentional changes, then what is the point in saying that no changes were made by the Drafting Committee, and that all the changes were made by the Select