मनु स्मृति पर गांधी और नेहरू के विचार!!

India is governed by its Constitution, not the Manusmriti. The Constitution of India was framed by the Constituent Assembly under the chairmanship of Babasaheb Dr B. R. Ambedkar and is the supreme law of our Republic.

Yet Rahul Gandhi repeatedly misquotes and selectively invokes the Manusmriti to peddle an anti-Hindu narrative.

What makes this even more ironic is that he seems not to know what Mahatma Gandhi and his own great-grandfather Jawaharlal Nehru actually said about Manu and the Manusmriti.

On 4 May 1928, Gandhi wrote to P. T. Pillay:

“I do not regard Manusmriti as an evil. It contains much that is admirable, but in its present form it undoubtedly contains many things that are bad and these appear to be interpolations. Whilst a reformer would therefore treasure all excellent things in that ancient code, he would expurgate all that is injurious or of doubtful value.”

Reference: M. K. Gandhi, Letter to P. T. Pillay, 4 May 1928, The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi, Vol. 36, Letter No. 348, p. 294.

Then, on 1 May 1955, Nehru said at a public meeting in New Delhi:

“There is no doubt about it that Manu and Yagnavalkya were great souls and we must read what they have written with respect and think about it.”

He immediately added that the India of their time was entirely different and that he could not accept the social organisation of two thousand years ago as necessarily appropriate for the present.

Reference: Jawaharlal Nehru, Peaceful Transition to Socialism, speech at a public meeting on May Day, New Delhi, 1 May 1955, Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru, Second Series, Vol. 28, pp. 60–70.

And four days later, during the Lok Sabha debate on the Hindu Marriage Bill, Nehru said:

“He quoted, he referred to Manu and Yagnyavalkya, very great men in our history, who have shaped India’s destiny. We admire them. They are among the heroes of our history.”

Nehru then made his position clear: Manu and Yagnyavalkya could not simply be invoked as “a witness as to what should be done in the present conditions of India,” because society had changed dramatically.

Reference: Jawaharlal Nehru, The Hindu Marriage Bill, speech during the third reading in the Lok Sabha, 5 May 1955, Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru, Second Series, Vol. 28, pp. 468–478; Lok Sabha Debates, Vol. IV, Part II, 22 April–7 May 1955, cols. 7954–7968.

The lesson is simple.

Respecting civilisational inheritance does not mean treating every ancient prescription as immutable law. Hindu civilisation has survived precisely because it has the intellectual and spiritual capacity to debate, reform and evolve from within.

The least Rahul Gandhi can do is read and learn from what even his own family members have said, rather than remain a prisoner of the Dimaagi Naxals who seem determined to feed him a caricature of Hinduism.

Hinduism has reformed from within for millennia and it will continue to do so.

But selective quotation and deliberate misrepresentation are not reform. They are propaganda.