From BR Ambedkar to Rahul Gandhi—the unfinished fight against Manusmriti

After B R Ambedkar, then law minister of India, questioned and criticised the treatment of women in Manusmriti in his 1951 Maha Bodhi magazine, it took 75 long years for another Indian politician, this time the leader of the opposition, to raise Manusmriti at a Pune students' event urging women to 'smash the patriarchy'..Ambedkar's critique of Manu was inseparable from his battle to reform Hindu personal law through the Hindu Code Bill. If Rahul Gandhi's intervention is to be more than a political slogan, it too must lead to a consequential legal and social response..Both quoted the same rule, Manusmriti V.148: 'In childhood a female must be subject to her father, in youth to her husband, when her lord is dead to her sons; a woman must never be independent.' The verse encapsulates a system in which women's autonomy is subordinated to perpetual male guardianship..Ambedkar went much further. In his 1951 article, The rise and fall of the hindu woman: who was responsible for it?, he extensively cites Manusmriti's prescription on women, drawing from Chapters II, IV, V, VIII, IX and XI and 32 verses. Ambedkar first exposes Manu's characterisation of women as morally suspect and then showed how that characterisation was followed by rules designed to control them..'Don't poison youth with impure mindset': VHP slams Rahul for 'Manusmriti' remarks.Ambedkar cites Manu as saying that it is in a woman's nature to seduce men and that the wise should, therefore, never be unguarded in her presence. Women, Manu says, can lead astray not merely the foolish but the learned, making them slaves to desire and anger. Another verse warns that a man should not sit alone even with his mother, sister, or daughter. He further describes women as indifferent to beauty and age, ready to give themselves to handsome or ugly men alike; their passion, fickle temper and supposed heartlessness are presented as making them disloyal to their husbands. Manu attributes to women qualities such as impure desire, anger, dishonesty, and bad conduct..Ambedkar's point was that Manu — the law giver— first constructed women as morally deficient and then prescribed a social order to control them. Under that order, women were to remain perpetually under the authority of their fathers, husbands and sons. They were denied independent property rights and the right to divorce. A wife's position in relation to property was reduced to that of a dependent; corporal punishment by the husband was permitted; women were denied access to Vedic learning and sacrificial rites; and Manu treated the killing of a woman as a lesser offence. A wife was expected to worship her husband as a god, even if he was morally corrupt. He imposes on women a perpetual tutelage under patriarchy..The political significance of Ambedkar's criticism lay in its timing. In 1951, as law minister, he was fighting to secure greater equality for women through the Hindu Code Bill. He faced opposition inside Parliament as well as outside it, including from sections of Hindu opinion and, as he himself noted, surprisingly from some women..Though Hindu Code Bill was taken up in February 1951, only limited progress was made. It was set aside for the September session that year. When President Rajendra Prasad opposed the Bill being enacted by a Provisional Parliament (the first Lok Sabha was created in 1952), and Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru expressed the view that parliamentary rules had defeated them, Ambedkar resigned from the Cabinet on September 27, 1951, deeply disappointed at the failure to enact the reform..Eventually, the Nehru government passed the Bill in 1955-1956, granting equal rights to women in marriage, divorce, succession, minority, guardianship, adoption, and maintenance. Daughters' equal rights in their fathers' share of ancestral property were secured through the 2005 amendment to the Hindu Succession Act, although some southern states and Maharashtra had extended such rights earlier..This history gives Rahul Gandhi's intervention in Pune a significance beyond the immediate political exchange. His invocation of Manusmriti and his call to 'smash the patriarchy' and 'break the cage' echo the persistence of a struggle that Ambedkar had connected directly to law and institutional reform..The slogans themselves are not new. The 'Pinjra Tod' (break the cage) movement emerged in Delhi in 2015 against discriminatory hostel rules that restricted women's mobility while allowing men greater freedom. But over the past decade, the attack on women has acquired a particularly vicious digital dimension. Photographs and videos uploaded on social media have become instruments of abuse, sexualisation, morphing, doxxing and threats. Women in public life and women who have participated in protests have repeatedly been subjected to such attacks. From Gurmehar Kaur in 2017 to women wrestlers in 2023 and the women who have emerged from the 2026 NEET protests, the pattern is depressingly familiar. Nor was journalist Gauri Lankesh spared after her death. However, now, Riya Ahir's strength and resilience appear to have rattled the trollers..Rishiraj Sen and Shweta Jha, in their 2025 paper, Women Under Hindutva: Misogynist Memes, Mock-Auction and Doxxing, Deepfake-Pornification and Rape Threats in Digital Space, describe the pattern: first construct the woman as morally deficient; then strip her of bodily autonomy; dishonour her; and finally delegitimise her public presence and her word..Supporters of Manu often point to another verse (Manusmriti III.56): yatra nāryastu pūjyante ramante tatra devatāh (where women are honoured, there the gods are pleased). The verse is indeed there. But its existence does not erase the contradictory prescriptions elsewhere in the text..When politics brought women's rights to the centre of the national debate in 1951, it eventually produced the Hindu law reforms of the 1950s. If 'Smash the Patriarchy' is to be more than a rallying cry in 2026, it must produce concrete measures — including stronger protection against digital sexual abuse, character assassination, doxxing, deepfake pornography and threats..(The writer is associate professor at Jindal Global Law School, O P Jindal Global University, Sonipat).(Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.)