The Manusmriti is back in the discourse after Leader of the Opposition Rahul Gandhi urged women to “smash the patriarchy” and to reject the “Manusmriti mindset” at a 22 August Pune event. A week later, he held a press conference to condemn the ‘purification’ ritual held in Haldwani after Congress President Mallikarjun Kharge, who happens to be Dalit, had given a speech.
The BJP-RSS immediately confirmed his point about their Manuvadi mindset. Despite a half-hearted apology from JP Nadda, senior BJP leaders doubled down in defence of the ceremony. An FIR was filed – not against those who violated the law – but against Gandhi.
The only reason this is happening is that Gandhi said the quiet part out loud in his address to young women. He drew a connection between their experience and the text and tradition that justifies their subjugation.
Silent counter against democracy
The Manusmriti, a 2,000-year-old treatise on law and morality, may not be widely read today, but its hierarchical logic structures our society. It is the common sense of WhatsApp uncles and oppressive families. It stacks humans in a pyramid the moment they’re born, and assigns rules of conduct to each varna, and differential punishments to each. Shudras, Atishudras and women are born to serve ‘twice-borns ’, i.e. Brahmins, Kshatriyas and Vaishyas, according to the text.
It treats Chandalas (Dalits) as outcasts equivalent in status to dogs and other animals, living outside villages, wearing clothes taken from the dead and handling corpses. A Brahmin may not enslave twice-born individuals but may enslave a Shudra who was created “solely to do slave labour for the Brahmin”. Everybody is disciplined by the rulebook and punished for deviations.
It’s no wonder that it has long been the flashpoint of anti-caste activism; almost a hundred years ago, it was symbolically burned in the presence of Dr BR Ambedkar, at the second conference of the Mahad Satyagraha.
If independent India’s Constitution and democratic institutions are based on the premise that all Indians have equal political worth, the Manusmriti is the silent counter, carrying the weight of centuries of social power. In 1949, RSS mouthpiece Organiser proclaimed: “There is nothing Bharatiya about the Indian Constitution”, complaining that it ignored the Manusmriti. The statue of Manu as lawgiver, right outside the Rajasthan High Court, is a reminder that the deep structure endures, no matter what the Constitution promises.
Some Right-wing voices now seek to downplay Manusmriti‘s influence or argue that it must be viewed ‘in context’ – but let’s look at the contemporary context. What role does each social group today play, if one looks at boardrooms, universities, armies and sanitation work? This is why the prospect of the caste census is so alarming to them and why the Modi government is doing its best to kill it. The numbers would reveal the exact distribution of power in our society.
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The so-called protection of women
Women are central to this order as the site of reproduction and lineage. Which is why the Manusmriti is a manual on how to cage women, control their ‘fickle, sensual’ nature, and do all this in the name of protection.
Women’s freedom would rattle the whole social order, and scramble bloodlines and caste purity. This is why Rahul Gandhi’s simple reminder to women – “you belong to yourself” – is a radical statement even in 2026.
The Manusmriti binary between ‘good women’ and ‘defiled women’ is visible in conservative responses to violence against them, such as RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat’s response to the 2013 Delhi gangrape. He said: “Such crimes hardly take place in ‘Bharat’, but they occur frequently in ‘India’”. This implies that women not playing traditional roles or refusing to ‘stay in their lane’ somehow invite sexual violence.
Look at the recent Right-wing meltdown over what an actress wore in a Rakshabandhan commercial. For the Manusmriti mentality, a woman cannot simply exist naturally in her own body, wearing what she likes on whatever occasion. She must either be a receptacle of family honour or be slut shamed.
“I would like to quote the Manusmriti here, which clearly says that in childhood, a female must be subject to her father, in youth, she belongs to her husband and when her husband is dead, she belongs to her sons. A woman must never be independent,” Rahul Gandhi said in Pune.
This is an accurate summary of verses 5.147, 5.148 and 9.3 (see more examples of its attitude toward women here).
The young women who spoke at the Pune event described the violence and fear they face when they step out to study or travel or work on their own. The BJP’s counter to that is protection, which is basically subjugation – a restatement of the Manusmriti idea that women need to be safeguarded, rather than questioning a violent male-centred order.
Recall what Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath wrote some time ago about women: “Just like urja (energy) left free and unchecked causes destruction, women also don’t need independence; they need protection and proper channelisation. Stree shakti (women’s power) is protected by the father when a child, by the husband when an adult, and by the son in old age. Women cannot be left independent or free.”
‘Indian values’ and ‘sanskaar’ are all too often code for this mindset. It pervades society and tradition, and it is not difficult to find individuals across the political spectrum who subscribe to its logic. Nor is sexism confined to one community – patriarchy spans all religions.
But nobody can deny that the BJP-RSS is the distilled essence of Manusmriti. VD Savarkar described the Manusmriti as “Hindu law” and called it “the basis of our culture-customs, thought and practice.” The second RSS chief MS Golwalkar, praised Manu as “the first and greatest law giver of the world” and declared the varna system valorised in the Manusmriti as “the very core of our concept of ‘nation’.”
This is why Prime Minister Narendra Modi experienced “cultural shock” on hearing young women using profanity, but his own IT cell is just ‘boys being boys’. It is why BJP’s instinct to an obviously casteist act against Kharge is to defend the perpetrators. The BJP-RSS is, in essence, the force of pushback against constitutional equality. Meanwhile, women, Shudras and Atishudras who refuse the Manusmriti’s allotted roles, and all those who care about democracy, are giving them the fight of their lives.
Amitabh Dubey is a Congress member. He tweets @dubeyamitabh. Views are personal.
(Edited by Ratan Priya)
The Manusmriti joins many religious texts and scriptures I have not read. By all accounts, it contains ideas that people lower down the caste hierarchy find deeply offensive. Sufficiently for Dr Ambedkar to have publicly burnt a copy in 1927. Women too are not granted full agency. If some people even today feel it provides a valuable framework for the ordering of society, that is a personal view with which one can always have a respectful discussion. However, it should not intrude into constitutional spaces. There is a Constitution which deals with some of these issues and that should prevail.