Opinion: Who stood between Ambedkar and Hindu Code Bill, forcing him to resign?

The only leader Dr BR Ambedkar found sincere about the Hindu Personal Law reforms was none but Jawaharlal Nehru. Ambedkar wrote so in his letter dated October 10, 1951 — otherwise critical of Nehru for being less firm than him in pushing the reforms. Ambedkar’s exact words were: “I got the impression that the Prime Minister, although sincere, had not the earnestness and determination required to get the Hindu Code Bill through”.

The politically polarised and highly motivated cacophony in December 2024 is drowning the crucial historical facts, misleading the common people. The only difference between Ambedkar and Nehru was that the former was rock solid for the reforms, whereas, Nehru was being politically pragmatic to defer, fragment, and dilute the Bill in the face of the stiff opposition not only from the Hindu Mahasabha but also from a large number of the Congress people, including Rajendra Prasad.

Hindu Mahasabha leaders Shyama P Mukherji and NC Chatterji (father of Somnath Chatterji) were the most vocal opponents of the Hindu Code Bill.

A careful study of the debates on the Hindu Code Bill will reveal that the Hindu right (within the Congress, and outside) was not at all for the Uniform Civil Code (Prime Minister Narendra Modi now prefers to call it the Secular Civil Code). Having employed all kinds of arguments against the Hindu Code Bill to outsmart Nehru and Ambedkar, the Hindu Mahasabha leader, NC Chatterji objected to why Muslim Personal Law was left out from the ambit of reforms. Everybody knows Nehru responded that minorities would reform themselves from within. That reform from within hasn’t come as yet, even though almost all other Islamic countries, including Turkey (and even Pakistan, as back as in 1961) have reformed.

Anyway, Ambedkar was surprised as to why, overnight, Hindu reactionaries turned into proponents of UCC. The point is obvious and too important to be lost sight of now: they weren’t for the UCC. But in order to stall/delay the Hindu Code Bill, they employed the demand of UCC.

In the given political atmosphere, telling the truth uncomfortable to the dispensation isn’t an easy task. Hence, leaving it at that, there are a few more things which my students (I do share such things in my classroom, on the theme included in my postgraduate courses on post-independence India) and other interested people must know. On this count, Reba Som’s essay (Modern Asian Studies, 1994) is of greater help.

However, most important of all, not for the first time, a Muslim leader of the Muslim League/Krishak Praja Party was so strongly with the Hindu Mahasabha and with all other gender regressives, that one shouldn’t lose sight of this. After all, the Muslim League/KPP had formed a coalition ministry in Bengal in 1941-43. SP Mukherji was the finance minister as well as the deputy “chief minister” of Bengal.

Who was the Muslim League/KPP leader opposing the Hindu Code Bill along with the Hindu Mahasabha? He was Naziruddin Ahmad. A member of the Constituent Assembly of India, he was born in Kulia, Burdwan district, West Bengal; he had been critical of the Drafting Committee and draft constitution of India.

Warring with Ambedkar and Nehru, Naziruddin Ahmad criticised the Hindu Code Bill at length and said that it was the bid to end the “Mitakshara” joint family, which he said, would lead to the breakdown of families and would result in property wrangles (Rajendra Prasad also invoked the argument of property wrangles).

To this, Renuka Ray asked Ahmad why he should deny Hindu women some advantages which would come out of the proposed Bill. Thus, Naziruddin of the Muslim League was with the Hindu Mahasabha’s SP Mukherji, NC Chatterji, and with all the Hindu right wing. They were for the Manusmriti, and only selectively with the Yagyavalkya. (The Yagyavalkya Smriti provides for a separated or widowed wife to get one-third of the assets of her husband. This was not being brought out in the arguments of the Right Wing opponents of the Bill).

Naziruddin joined the anti-Ambedkar-Nehru forces in the Constituent Assembly. In the closing speech of the Constituent Assembly (November 1949), Ambedkar commented that Naziruddin was showing contempt for the Drafting Committee by calling it a drifting committee. Ambedkar further added sarcastically, “Mr Naziruddin Ahmed thinks he is a man of greater talents than any member of the Drafting Committee.”

Wikipedia gives us a bio-note of Naziruddin: In 1919, he was elected vice-chairman of Bardhaman. He was appointed the public prosecutor of Bardhaman district in 1924 and served till 1928. He worked at the “Burdwan Muhammedan Association” as its secretary. He founded and edited the Burdwan Vani. He was also the secretary of the Bengal Raiyat Association. Ahmad served in the Bengal Legislative Council and was the whip in the government of AK Fazlul Huq. He was elected to the Constituent Assembly of India from the Muslim League.

The third important thing of interest regarding the Hindu Code Bill debates is that some members openly declared that as long as Ambedkar was piloting the Bill, they would not allow it to pass. This included even some of those who were in support of (or ambivalent about) the Bill.

Why? They didn’t want a Dalit man to go down in history as the reformer of Hindu Personal Laws, having done away with the Brahminical hegemony. Reba Som puts it candidly: “Parliamentarians became incensed with Ambedkar's loud denunciations of the Hindu social system, 'his abuses and invectives' and his attempts to 'vilify the Hindu religion'. While Ambedkar was desperate to see at least the Marriage and Divorce Act through, his opponents were equally determined that he should be denied the distinction of being called the 'Modern Manu'. Some members openly declared that as long as Dr Ambedkar was piloting the Bill, they would not allow it to pass. Even those not opposing the measures per se became determined to vote down the Bill as an expression of anti-Ambedkarism.”

Paradoxes abound

"The real motives of the Mahasabha, however, were betrayed when Dr Shyama Prasad Mukherjee made the suggestion that the Hindu Code be made optional. Ambedkar was provoked into dismissing SP Mukherjee's remarks as not worth serious consideration since he had, after all, as a member of Nehru's Cabinet, wholeheartedly supported the Code which he was now opposing", notes Reba Som.

What about Ambedkar? When Ambedkar failed to get Nehru to be as unflinching over the issue of the Hindu Code Bill and faced the obduracy of the conservative wing in the Congress (largely because of being from outside the Congress fold) as well as from the Hindu Mahasabha, Dr Ambedkar resigned from the Cabinet.

Thereafter, having drafted and helped pass the amendments to Article 31, curtailing the right to property (keeping it outside the purview of judicial review), Ambedkar now appeared in the Supreme Court on behalf of the Zamindars of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar to argue against the very Zamindari abolition Acts he had helped secure recently, notes Tripurdaman Singh, in his 2020 book, Sixteen Stormy Days.

(Mohammad Sajjad is Professor, Modern and Contemporary Indian History at Aligarh Muslim University)