922 DR. BABASAHEB AMBEDKAR : WRITINGS AND SPEECHES
Have the frame-work on the lines laid down in the Gita—that will be acceptable to all. Instead, what does my hon. friend do ? Instead of taking me upwards he takes me downwards. I could agree to go with him upwards, but……
Shri J. R. Kapoor : To heaven and not to hell.
Shri Biswanath Das : To heaven or mid-heaven, but I refuse to go with him downwards.
Dr. Ambedkar : You do not know how to choose your friends.
Shri Biswanath Das : I am glad I have committed that blunder.
Well, a common Code is not unknown. In Portuguese India you have it to-day. There are Hindus living in Portuguese India. Why not have it in India which is far more advanced than Portuguese India ? And if it is so easy to have a common Civil Code as my hon. friend says it is, let him come forward with it, and he will find at least some of those who are now against him will be with him. But, in respect of this Hindu Code, we cannot and we will never agree to go along with him. You cannot touch Muslim society, because then it will be the cry of religion being in danger. You cannot touch Christian society, then also it will be a question of religion being in danger. But you can kick Hindu society and have your new experiments propagated in that society with ruthless uniformity. We cannot agree. Being a man of sixty, I cannot agree with my hon. friend in his constitution of a society based on rationalism. In our country there had been eternal strife between spiritualism and rationality, and in that fight it is spiritualism that has come out and rationalism has gone down, and the rationalists were branded Nastikas and the spiritualists as Astikas. I refuse to be Nastik. The form of society that the Hon. Minister proposes through his Hindu Code is nothing short of a society for which agitation was carried on in India in days of yore, and the country as a whole rejected it and the country today I make bold to say, will reject and is bound to reject it. If my hon. friend refuses to leave it for option, it is because of his apprehension that society will not go with him. If he is afraid of a plebiscite it is because of his apprehension that he cannot carry the country with him. If he is afraid of any other legislature but a packed Parliament in an indirectly elected legislature, it is because of his apprehension that so bitter a pill as this cannot be swallowed by any other. It is these apprehensions that make the hon. Minister and those of his way of thinking to rush the measure through this Legislature. Because my leader the Hon.