The Hindu Code Bill was blocked by parliament and religious and economic elites

Evidence

Though Ambedkar was a lawyer, he had no illusions about law-making. As Law Minister in post-independence India, he worked for months on a draft of the Hindu Code Bill. He believed that the caste system advanced itself by controlling women, and one of his major concerns was to make Hindu personal law more equitable for women. The Bill he proposed sanctioned divorce and expanded the property rights of widows and daughters. The Constituent Assembly dragged its feet over it for four years (from 1947 to 1951) and then blocked it. The President, Rajendra Prasad, threatened to stall the Bill’s passage into law. Hindu sadhus laid siege to Parliament. Industrialists and zamindars warned they would withdraw their support in the coming elections. Eventually Ambedkar resigned as Law Minister. In his resignation speech he said: “To leave inequality between class and class, between sex and sex, which is the soul of Hindu society, 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.” — Ambedkar, B R, Annihilation of Caste_ The Annotated…, 111

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to the reader’s question of how caste annihilation was attempted and blocked at the legislative level.
• SEED: Angle: the failure of the Hindu Code Bill as a case study in why formal legal reform fails against caste social structure.
• SHARE: The detail that the President, sadhus, industrialists, and zamindars all mobilized to block one bill is a telling anti-caste-reform coalition.