Jawaharlal Nehru was feeling increasingly isolated. His fellow parliamentarians seemed to be drifting “further and further away” from him in “mind and heart”, he confided to Sardar Patel in a February 1950 letter.
At that time, Nehru’s mind and heart were fixed on social reform — as symbolised by the Hindu Code Bill, which sought to establish modern, ‘secular’ personal laws for Hindus in independent India.
He was trying to build a great nation, in which citizens had equal rights, but Parliament was holding him back.
Those opposing the Bill — and its promised reforms— ranged from Congress veterans such as President Rajendra Prasad and Patel to Hindu fundamentalists both within and outside the party, from MA Ayyangar to Syama Prasad Mookerjee.
Even women parliamentarians had objections to it. For Sucheta Kripalani, it was a “halting and half-hearted measure” that didn’t go far enough to protect the rights of women. Sarojini Naidu threatened to go on a hunger strike if the Bill wasn’t withdrawn.
From the right to divorce to the right to property, the Hindu Code Bill was looking at changing everything. It was about to turn society inside out and make it stare at an uncomfortable question: What kind of modern nation did India want to be?
The debate wasn’t about feminism versus patriarchy, or tradition versus modernity. Instead, the battle was caught in a narrow binary of women’s rights versus culture.
The Bill, many ardent Hindu fundamentalists said, would destroy the fabric of Hindu society. They framed their resistance as a dharamyudh (spiritual war) that was being fought by dharamveers (spiritual warriors).
Moreover, many resented that the reform was going to bypass India’s Muslim community, leaving their personal laws untouched.
“Why not frame, if you have the courage and wisdom to do it, one uniform civil code? Why are you then proceeding with communal legislation?” asked Hindu Mahasabha leader NC Chatterjee during a parliamentary debate.
Ambedkar was caught up in the tension too. He said that any Indian government would be “mad” to risk “provoking Muslims” by introducing a uniform civil code.
Over seven decades later, the nation once again finds itself standing at the familiar intersection of tradition and women’s rights, as the Narendra Modi government pushes for a uniform civil code (UCC).
This time, though, it is conservative Muslim leaders and tribal communities who have appointed themselves as the custodians of culture.
The conversation around the UCC today might seem similar to the debate around the Hindu Code Bill. The script is the same, the act is the same, the drama is the same. But both conversations belong to different Indias.
“Right from the get-go, the Hindu Code Bill was deeply political,” says historian Rochona Majumdar, a professor at the University of Chicago. “Every single legislation involved a tussle: Imagine, in a newly established republic, where the Constitution has just been created, you have this gigantic battle between the President and the Prime Minister.”
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Nehru vs Ambedkar
The story of the Hindu Code Bill begins with a shared vision for a modern, progressive India by its two biggest advocates, Nehru and Ambedkar. But a few years down the line, the relationship crashed and burned with Ambedkar’s resignation as law minister. And Nehru accepted it quietly.
It was a far cry from the Prime Minister who had entrusted Ambedkar with drafting the Bill and had lamented the resistance to it in his letter to Patel.
At the very heart of it, the Hindu Code Bill sought to replace religious laws with a secular civil code. It proposed to outlaw polygamy, granted women the right to property and divorce, amended inheritance laws, and introduced provisions on inter-caste marriage.
It was introduced with the promise of progress, reform, and equality — but was met with fierce opposition.
While the code was finally broken into four separate parts to facilitate their easy passage, at first “even this proved impossible”, says historian Reba Som, speaking to ThePrint.
Nehru and Ambedkar had different approaches to the Bill. Ambedkar believed that it was Nehru and Parliament’s duty to pass the Bill in its full, undiluted form. But Nehru found that his hands were tied by his fellow MPs.
“You know how anxious I am to get the Hindu Code Bill through Parliament,” wrote Nehru to Ambedkar in December 1950 — months after his letter to Patel. “And I should like to do everything in my power to bring this about.”
They had an intense private back and forth, with Ambedkar repeatedly asking Nehru to hold a parliamentary session to pass the Bill, only for Nehru to repeatedly outline to him why that would not be possible.
Nehru’s confidence, too, waned over the years — in December 1949, he told Parliament that the Bill was of utmost national importance. But by 1951, he still didn’t have enough support to push it through.
The reform measure was at the heart of his nation-building project, but it was also threatening to trip the fragile political consensus needed for other priorities in the first decade after India’s independence.
By February 1951, Ambedkar was angry over the inaction. He wrote a scathing letter to Nehru, criticising him for not effectively curbing opposition to the Bill.
He wrote that it would be “ridiculous, cowardly, and humiliating” on the part of the government if the Bill didn’t pass despite Nehru’s assurances. In the same letter, Ambedkar some amendments tabled to be discussed “stupid”.
His frustration came to a head months later. In September 1951, Ambedkar resigned as law minister, in large part over the delays to the Bill. He’d considered his work on the Bill as important — if not more — than his work on the Constitution.
“It was killed and buried, unwept and unsung after four clauses were passed,” wrote Ambedkar bitterly in his resignation letter. “I got the impression that the Prime Minister, although sincere, had not the earnestness and determination required to get the Hindu Code Bill through.”
“Nehru had considered a uniform civil code essential for the whole of India,” says Som. “It had been put aside in the Directive Principles of the Constitution because it was unrealisable at that time. The government is now eager to implement it.”
But Som points out that even now, the government has to consider whether the country’s diverse communities are ready for such a change: “Nehru had cautioned chief ministers, in one of the letters he regularly wrote, that lack of uniformity was preferable to a situation where, because of ill will, laws passed were dead in their application.”
‘Nehru never gave up’
By the time he resigned, Ambedkar had lost hope and blamed Nehru, Som says.
“He was a broken man and blamed Nehru for being weak-kneed in allowing filibustering in Parliament which wasted time needlessly,” she says.
But Som adds that it is important to analyse how valid Ambedkar’s indictment of Nehru really was.
“It is true that Nehru buckled under pressure,” she says. “However, to Nehru’s credit it must be said that he never gave up. He bided time and ultimately, despite several loopholes, four Acts on Marriage, Succession, Adoption and Maintenance and Dowry Prohibition were passed between 1955 and 1961.”
Ambedkarite scholar Ashok Gopal cautions that Ambedkar’s frustration should not be seen as a sign that he endorsed judicial strong-arming.
While Ambedkar, in principle, accepted that Parliament could legislate on matters of religion and custom, subject to constitutional checks like judicial review, he also believed that “public policy and law can’t be framed without considering public sentiment”, Gopal says.
“According to him, law and public opinion did not always work in tandem—and public opinion could not be suppressed by the strong arm of the law. If public opinion was not favourable toward a proposed measure, the method of dialogue and persuasion, as shown by the Buddha, had to be used,” Gopal adds. “Ambedkar would likely have said the same thing today about the UCC.”
A fight from Hindu ‘warriors’, RSS
Even before Nehru and Ambedkar tried to pass the Hindu Code Bill in Parliament, a resistance ‘movement’ spearheaded by Hindu groups was already in motion.
In March 1949, when the Constituent Assembly—which was established to draft the Constitution—was deliberating over the Bill, a group called the All-India Anti-Hindu Code Bill Committee formed to challenge the proposed legislation.
In his book India After Gandhi, historian Ramachandra Guha writes about how religious figures and “conservative lawyers” convened and held hundreds of meetings across the country, styling themselves as “dharmaveer fighting a dharmyayudh”.
They argued that the government had no right to interfere with Hindu laws, which were based on the “dharma shastras”.
The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) “threw its weight behind the agitation”, notes Guha. On 11 December 1949, “it organised a public meeting at the Ram Lila grounds in Delhi, where speaker after speaker condemned the bill. One called it ‘an atom bomb on Hindu society’”.
Speaking to ThePrint, Hilal Ahmed, a scholar of political Islam, underscored that the RSS was “irrelevant” at the time and “largely seen as killers of Gandhi”.
But they did manage to create a commotion.
On 12 December 1949, when deliberations over the Bill resumed, around 500 people protested outside Parliament House. They burned Gandhi caps and effigies, and raised slogans like “Down with the Hindu Code Bill!” and “Down with the Nehru government!”
Guha writes that the Hindu Code Bill was likened to the Rowlatt Act, a draconian colonial law to curtail dissent. RSS members believed that just as the protests against the Rowlatt Act led to the downfall of the British, the anti-Hindu Code Bill fight would signal the downfall of the Nehru government.
A widely used slogan was: “Brothers and sisters will be able to marry each other if the Hindu Code Bill becomes law!”
Little difference exists between the current arguments of the All India Muslim Personal Law Board (AIMPLB) against the UCC and the Sangh Parivar’s opposition to the Hindu Code Bill in 1948-49.
“Reform from within”, “interference in religious, internal matters” — the debate of today echoes the arguments from more than 70 years ago. Only the dramatis personae have been switched.
“As the Hindu Mahasabha is against legislative interference in religious matters, measures like the Hindu Code Bill would be opposed,” argued the Hindu Mahasabha, for instance.
In 1951, the nascent Jana Sangh, the precursor to the BJP, maintained that social reform should not come as an “imposition from above”.
Meanwhile, the Ram Rajya Parishad argued that the government was showing “direct interference in religious matters of the Hindus by adopting the Hindu Code Bill”.
Similarly, the Bengal Provincial Hindu Mahasabha characterised the Bill as “opposed to the tenets of Hindu religion”.
Rhetoric about UCC
As the Sangh Parivar’s resistance to Hindu personal law reforms reached a dead-end, they strategically shifted their focus. They started advocating for a uniform civil code, particularly with the aim of reforming Muslim personal law.
This, they knew, was something Nehru was loath to do because he didn’t want to rock the boat so soon after Partition.
“They first tried to prevent reform in Hindu personal law. When they found that difficult, they suggested reform in Muslim personal law,” says Mohammad Sajjad, professor of history at Aligarh Muslim University.
He points out that “Hindu right wing” opponents of the Hindu Code Bill, both within and outside the Congress, were aware that the Nehru government would not be willing to push for reforms to Muslim personal law.
“They were not sincere about pushing the uniform civil code,” he says—they merely saw it as an impediment to Hindu personal law reform,” he adds.
“Old habits die hard,” says noted jurist and former Law Commission of India member Tahir Mahmood, pointing to the fact that opposition to the Hindu Code Bill by the majority community in the 1940s and 50s was as vehement as it is to UCC by minorities today.
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Resistance from within
It wasn’t just fringe groups who were taking up arms against the Hindu Code Bill — inside the Constituent Assembly, helpless Nehru and Ambedkar heard a chorus of primal Hindu anxieties unfold, accompanied by fissures along class and caste lines.
Rajendra Prasad made a case about class. He argued that his wife would never support the divorce clause and it was only “over-educated” women who favoured the Bill.
That Hindus were in danger was argued back then too. Babu Ramnarayan Singh, for instance, said that the Bill was “a conspiracy…being hatched to disrupt the Hindu society”. He also described it as “a preparation to invade the Hindu society”.
Some members wanted to postpone the Bill until after elections, spending days arguing against the Constituent Assembly’s competence in such matters.
The idea of property rights for women invited particular backlash, with Babu Ram Ramnarayan Singh claiming that love rather than law would serve women better.
“Law cannot help them,” he said. “What can help everybody and also the womenfolk is love and nothing but love.”
He conjectured that if daughters were given a share in their father’s property, “there may be a lot of complications and litigations and the principle of pure love will be killed in our society”.
Another proponent of “love” was HV Kamath, who argued in favour of both polygamy and polyandry in the new code, provided there was spousal consent.
He said that this should be done “from the standpoint of love and humanity”. In response, Tajamul Hussain pointed out that “only an unmarried man can say so”, and agreed with polyandry.
Opposing the Bill, Pandit Lakshmi Kanta Maitra claimed that only a “few ultra-modern persons, who are vocal, but have no real support in the country” were interested in it.
He also raised the issue of a UCC, questioning the government’s intentions: “Bring a universal civil code applicable to Hindus, to Christians, to Parsis, to Sikhs, to Jains, to Buddhists, to Muslims. You dare not touch the Muslims, but you know that Hindu society today is in such a bad way that you can venture to do anything with it.”
Ram Sahai from Gwalior, meanwhile, felt that the Bill was bad news for men’s rights. In his view, “the women have been given more rights here than men…[They] are, thus, being subjected to the same injustices which has uptil now been done to women.”
Assam’s Rohini Kumar Chaudhuri was also worried about acquisitive sisters and daughters getting free run.
“I know that some women of our country are very anxious to snatch away a portion of inheritance from their brothers… But for whom are you doing it and who is going to be benefitted by it? Are the poorer Hindus in our villages clamouring for divorce? Are they clamouring for properties to be got from their parents? Not at all,” he said in the Assembly.
A lone female voice, Sucheta Kripalani, spoke at length in front of the Constituent Assembly in support of the Bill, and called on all her “brother members” to support it.
‘It does not go far enough’
Women’s responses to the Hindu Code Bill could be classified into three broad groups, according to Sinha’s Debating Patriarchy.
The first group consisted of women from the aristocracy. Most did not support the Bill because they were generally “at peace” with the status quo.
The second category comprised women who were generally “committed to the religious ways of life” and often affiliated with larger Hindu bodies.
Finally, there were women’s organisations who were vocally in favour of the Bill’s proposals although they felt the provisions “didn’t go far enough”.
“It does not go far enough. A daughter who is recognised as an heir inherits the property, but she inherits half the share of the son. This violates the principle of equality,” argued feminist activist and diplomat Hansa Jivraj Mehta in 1947. She also noted that the code had not “made any changes” to the existing law for guardianship and that the whole chapter on adoption “should be scrapped”.
Ashok Gopal says that scholars even today point out lacunae in the Bill.
“Ambedkar considered the Hindu Code Bill as the greatest social reform ever undertaken by legislature. However, that claim has since been disputed by some scholars and feminist writers like Nivedita Menon — their argument is that the bill was not as progressive as it was made out to be,” Gopal notes.
“In the name of uniformity, the legislation erased progressive customs of some communities. Certain provisions like legalisation of divorce aroused the ire of many Savarnas, but divorce was already an accepted practice among many social groups. And women’s right to family property, as proposed in the bill, was only a partial measure,” he adds.
Notably, Muslim women leaders lauded the Bill. They saw it as a progressive step that elevated Hindu women’s status by aligning more with the Shariat than the Shastras.
“The Muslims have taken pride in the fact that the Shariat law gives (women) great rights. This piece of legislation… will put Hindu women on a par with Muslim women,” said Begam Aizaz Rasul from UP.
From Bill to four laws
The Hindu Code Bill wasn’t devised overnight. It took decades of drafts, discussions, and debates.
Even the British gave up and dropped the hot potato after an 18th century push to codify Hindu law.
In 1921, when a member of the Viceroy’s Legislative Council, Mahamahopadhyaya Ganganath Jha, put forward the demand for the codification of Hindu law, the matter was shelved — the British considered it too difficult to handle.
Although there was some ground support for reform, momentum tended to ebb when it moved to the policy level, relegated to the realm of politicians and lawyers.
And given that women’s rights were so closely linked to religious practices, any change was excruciatingly slow and incremental.
For instance, the first two sessions of the All-India Women’s Conference (AIWC), held in 1927 and 1928 in Pune and Delhi respectively, focused on raising the age of consent of women to 16.
In this period, deputations of women leaders like Kamaladevi Chattopadhyaya, Indira Bhagwat, Sushma Sen, and Rameshwari Nehru petitioned political parties to gather support for legislation that would end child marriage.
Eventually, the Sarda Act was passed in 1929, but the British authorities were not stringent about implementing the law, for fear of alienating loyal Hindu and Muslim communalist groups, according to historian Chitra Sinha’s Debating Patriarchy.
In the 1930s, as women were given franchise, the AIWC opened new fronts.
They broadened their scope to look at issues of women’s ‘legal disability’, such as divorce. They even declared November 24, 1934 as Legal Disabilities of Women Day.
Property rights was another issue that women’s groups had discussed for decades. While in 1937, the Hindu Women’s Right to Property Act, also known as the Deshmukh Act, was passed, it suffered from several defects. For example, a Hindu widow would be disqualified from having property rights if she was found to be “unchaste”.
Then came the immediate forerunner to the Hindu Code Bill.
In 1938, the Indian National Congress constituted a planning committee to outline India’s post-independence development.
One of its subcommittees, comprising leaders like Sarojini Naidu and Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, focused on reviewing the social and legal status of women.
Their report, titled Women’s Role in Planned Economy, emphasised women’s rights in personal laws, particularly Hindu law, and played a key role in prompting the colonial government to appoint the Hindu Law Committee under jurist BN Rau in 1941, according to historian Sinha.
Caught in the dilemma of choosing between orthodox and liberal views, this committee, which didn’t have a single woman member, distributed an elaborate questionnaire across the country to collect views and eventually submitted its report on June 19, 1941.
For a few more years, Committee Raj prevailed.
After a study of the Rau committee report and the draft bills it had prepared, the government set up another Hindu Code Committee under Rau in 1944. This committee toured the country in 1945 and prepared a revised version of the draft Bill — now officially the Hindu Code Bill.
Notably, the 1947 Hindu Code Committee report shows that public opinion in 1945 showed significant opposition to the bill, with approximately 66.6 per cent of the population expressing their disapproval.
In 1948, the Hindu Code Bill was referred to a select committee of the Constituent Assembly.
Parliament took over in 1950, with months of an impasse leading to Ambedkar’s resignation in 1951.
Ultimately, four acts were passed: first the Hindu Marriage Act in 1955, and then the Hindu Succession Act, the Hindu Minority and Guardianship Act, and the Hindu Adoptions and Maintenance Act in 1956.
The enduring Muslim question
The discourse around the Hindu Code Bill, as shown above, quickly devolved into an all-too-familiar Hindu vs Muslim debate.
But even those who advocated for changes in Muslim personal laws knew it was not going to happen anytime soon.
Nehru wanted to assuage the anxieties of Muslims who chose to stay in India rather than migrating to Pakistan. He also believed that the Hindu majority should carry the burden of social reform in a secular state.
Najmul Hoda, a scholar of Islam, argues that the Congress’s treatment of Muslims as a separate category during the debate on personal law reforms for Hindus inadvertently safeguarded “Muslim communalism” and hindered the community’s progress.
The Shariat Act 1937 and the Muslim Marriages Dissolution Act 1939, which govern the community’s personal laws exacerbated this situation, according to him.
“Any reform from within was a lie, an excuse. The Muslim community is essentially revivalist, not reformist. Reform na kabhi aana tha, na aayega (Don’t wait for reform, it’s not coming),” he says.
In the present day, Muslim personal law has become a tool for the community’s identity politics, Hoda adds.
However, some historians argue that the decision to exclude Muslims from certain reforms was crucial in preserving communal and political stability in newly independent India, particularly considering the bitter taste left by Partition.
“The framing of the Constitution wasn’t just about law-making. It was about a nation-in-making — granting Muslims authority in civil laws was about upholding the stability contract,” says Dilip Mandal, former managing editor of India Today Hindi Magazine.
He also points out that while Muslims had the Shariat Act 1937 to refer to, Hindu society’s scriptural stances were “chaotic”.
But the question of reforming Muslim personal law remaining unaddressed in Parliament is what has created a tinderbox today.
Meanwhile, the burden of addressing questions related to personal law has shifted to the courts.
Take, for instance, a 1995 Supreme Court judgment on bigamy by non-Muslims converting to Islam. The court in this case said that while the desirability of a uniform civil code cannot be doubted, “it can concretise only when social climate is properly built by the elite of the society and the statesmen, instead of gaining personal mileage, rise above and awaken the masses to accept the change”.
But does India currently have “secular” personal laws that should be applied to all?
Mahmood emphasises that modern Hindu law is still “replete with religion-based discriminations and gender inequalities”.
For instance, Hindu succession law still prioritises a woman’s husband and his family over her parents and siblings when dealing with her self-acquired property in the absence of a will. Mahmood asserts that a “constitutional provision for UCC does not mean nationalisation of a chosen law of this nature to replace all others”.
In his view, the minority community today should demand a “hundred percent secular draft” of the proposed UCC and “see where the shoe pinches”.
Mahmood believes that the way to bring about a UCC is to pick and choose socially beneficial provisions from all prevalent laws.
His advice is to “let the new law be limited to the basics of family law, leaving latitude for innocuous customs and usages”.
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‘Politics will work, even if draft doesn’t’
Perhaps radical reforms were more acceptable and people more amenable to change in newly independent India.
Perhaps that is why the discourse over the Hindu Code Bill and the current debate over the UCC are so different in tone and tenor.
“With the Hindu Code Bill, Nehru and Ambedkar wanted to prepare Indian society to accept reformative laws. Social acceptability could be achieved later,” says Ahmed. “But today, the UCC is not about nation-building. It’s about communal reflection.”
And that did happen — the 1950s were a transformative era.
The Nehru government gained new vigour, establishing the Planning Commission and initiating Five Year Plans. The Hindu Code Bills became a matter of nation-building, economic progress, and individual rights.
Even the Hindi movie industry played a part, bolstering the Nehru government’s popularity. Hit films such as Mr. and Mrs. ’55, Awaara, Naya Daur, and Jaagte Raho made reforms fashionable and influenced public discourse in favour of the socialist agenda.
The current proposed reforms, however, lack specificity and clarity.
“The present moment is interesting because, unlike in the past, it hasn’t been one where we’ve seen a blueprint of the reforms that are being proposed,” says Majumdar. “That’s where there’s a big difference between the moment of the founding of the Indian nation state and now. The Nehruvian vision was utopian, one in which equality was enshrined in the Constitution. But today, without a draft or a plan, I’m not even sure what we are debating.”
Legal scholar Upendra Baxi says that the the idea of the Hindu Code Bill is comparable to only one other instance in modern human history — Napolean’s civil code, which is still in force in France despite several amendments.
“The importance of the discussion around the Hindu Code Bill and the Uniform Civil Code is the use of law as a dialogue. But the paradox is that UCC may only be achieved piecemeal,” he adds. Additionally, says Baxi, simply reducing the demand for a civil code to two religions — Hinduism and Islam — takes focus away from other communities in India.
Other scholars echo this view.
As Hilal Ahmed wrote in ThePrint this month, the UCC is situated within “an invisible apparatus” that presents it merely as a “Muslim issue”.
Within this invisible apparatus lies what Mandal calls the “subtext” of the BJP government.
“There is a difference between the text and meaning. It is not at all about laws — the ground reality at the barber’s shop, the pawn store, is that it (UCC) is about targeting Muslims and a grudge about why they should enjoy exclusive privileges like polygamy. Inheritance, property rights, divorce, death are no concerns,” he says.
That, Mandal claims, explains why there has been no draft yet for a legislation. “The politics will work, even if the draft doesn’t.”
(Edited by Asavari Singh)