What was the Hindu Code Bill, and why did he resign over it?
Personal law — marriage, divorce, inheritance, adoption, guardianship, maintenance — is administered separately for each religious community. For Hindus it was, in 1947, uncodified. Under it a woman had no right to divorce, a wife no share in her husband's property, a daughter none in her father's, a widow's interest was limited and reverted on her death, and a man could take more than one wife.
The Hindu Code Bill would have replaced all that with a single statute: monogamy, divorce on equal grounds, a daughter's share in her father's property, an absolute estate for widows, and rights of adoption and maintenance. The codifying work had begun before him, under a 1941 committee chaired by B.N. Rau; Ambedkar, as Law Minister from 1947, took the bill and carried it. It was the largest social reform proposed in independent India, and aimed squarely at the majority community.
Why it failed, in the objections actually made
- That the state had no business legislating on religion.
- That codifying Hindu law alone, leaving other communities' personal law untouched, was itself discrimination against Hindus. The same argument is still made about the same subject.
- That an unelected provisional parliament had no mandate for a change of this size and should leave it to the first elected one.
- And, said quietly and often, that it was being drafted by a man who had announced he would not die a Hindu.
Rajendra Prasad, the President, raised objections of his own and let it be understood he might decline assent. Nehru supported the Bill but, in Ambedkar's judgement, did not spend his authority on it when it needed spending — a judgement historians have argued about since. In September 1951 it was talked out: four clauses passed and the rest was abandoned. He resigned on 27 September. Rising to explain himself on 10 October, he was ruled out of order for want of an advance copy; he walked out and gave the text to the press. In it he wrote that "to leave inequality between class and class, between sex and sex, which is the soul of Hindu society, untouched and to go on passing legislation relating to economic problems is to make a farce of our Constitution and to build a palace on a dung heap."
The statement went well beyond the Bill: no portfolio of substance beyond Law; left off the Planning Commission; the Scheduled Castes no better than under the British; disagreement with the government's foreign policy, including on Kashmir. The Bill was defeated and its contents became law anyway. Between 1955 and 1956, after Congress returned with a large majority, Parliament passed the Hindu Marriage Act, the Hindu Succession Act, the Hindu Minority and Guardianship Act and the Hindu Adoptions and Maintenance Act — the Code broken into four pieces and carried after he had gone. Whether the resignation forced the question into an election, or the reform simply outlasted him, is a fair question and not one this site answers.