1150 DR. BABASAHEB AMBEDKAR : WRITINGS AND SPEECHES
suffering arising out of unjust laws. So long as any section of the people of this country continue to be debarred, on the grounds of sex or caste or creed, from the full enjoyment of equal rights, so long will our Constitution continue to be a hollow mockery. And what of the freedom for which a long and gallant fight was waged, a fight that was shared by thousands of sensitive Hindu women who, for the first time in their lives, left the precious sanctuary of their sheltering homes. They came to the battlefield and stood besides their brothers and faced jail and lathi charges and often enough, humiliation, worse than death. If today those thousands of Hindu women who fought for the independence of India are to be denied their just rights, then our hard-earned freedom is no more than a handful of dust.
I have studied with some care the numerous speeches and statements that have been made by various Hon. Members of this House, far better qualified than I can ever aspire to be, to judge the technical legal implications of this Bill. I must confess that I have been a little surprised to find that with all their forensic skill and expert dialectic they have not been able to forge many weapons with which to bludgeon this Bill and none of them with sufficient validity of sanction to be lethal. We have all grown a little tired of having it proclaimed in every language, in every conceivable permutation and combination of phraseology of bearing it shouted day after day from the house stops and the market place and highways and bylanes that this Bill threatens to destroy the very stuff and texture of the fabric of Hindu society. In a statement that unfortunately received nationwide publicity in America, a very distinguished hon. Member of this House has declared that this Bill is an attack on an ancient and gentle religion that has survived for five thousnad years. He announced that because now the very structure of Hindu society was threatened, he intended “to fight and fight and fight against it”. It passes my comprehension that anybody who is proud of calling himself a Hindu can talk or even think in such terms without realsing that he is dishonouring the very religion that he claims to defend, as though any of the great religions of the world that have survived through centuries of human history could be endangered by social legislation or by any speeches or writings or other form of human endeavour. If there is any religion in the world that can be imperilled by these trivial things, then it deserves to be allowed to perish.