952 DR. BABASAHEB AMBEDKAR : WRITINGS AND SPEECHES
part to come under a common code had it been in advance of our own system. But my complaint is that it is very much backward ; and you want to draw up and bring us down to the level to which you have brought yourself down. I, therefore, wish to be excused from coming down to your level.
I may mention that the Hindu Code Bill has a very long history behind it. At one stage of it I had occasion to participate in the Committee on Hindu Law that was appointed in 1944-45. As such I have my sympathies with those who wish to advance the cause of the weaker sex. I believe that no country or society can advance if it has got submerged and suppressed people in its fold. It is very necessary that everyone should have equality before the law and in the matter of inheritance and other things. But it would be idle on our part to ignore the feelings of others. Feel as I may for myself. I must also realise what others are feeling, and as you, Sir, very poignantly pointed out, it is very necessary that there should be no dictatorship.
The Hon. the Law Minister in his speech in the Constituent Assembly, on the memorable day we completed the drawing up of the Constitution, said as follows :
“It is quite possible in a country like India—where democracy from its long disuse must be regarded as something quite new— there is danger of democracy giving place to dictatorship. It is quite possible for this new born democracy to retain its form but give place to dictatorship in fact. If there is a landslide, the danger of the second possibility becoming actuality is much greater.”
I commend to him his own speech and ask whether it would not be dictatorship on the part of this house to dictate to the thirty-six crores of people of India to come under a law compulsorily, just as the old orthodoxy was denying the right of going forward to the moreadvanced members of society. It is a dictatorship which a minority is going to exercise on a vast majority. I wish to tell my sisters and the reformist brothers that they must take heart. In everything there is a fair way of fructification. They have the whole field before them. I find that orthodoxy is not only not aggressive, but is on the defensive— is putting on the garb of reformists to fight its retreating battles. It is fast losing its momentum. We have the eternal dilemma of an irresistible force meeting an irremovable mass. But that mass is becoming every day lighter and lighter and its roots are getting uprooted