"The other side of the coin is equally important. Before using hyperbolic pejoratives to describe how oppressive Indian society has been for ‘thousands of years’, and basing the most far-reaching policy prescriptions on that construction, should the judges, who quote a sentence or two from Manusmriti, not adduce evidence to establish, first, that the half a dozen verses that are cited again and again are representative of the work; second, that the smritis are intrinsic to Hinduism; third, that the kind of oppression and differentiation that these verses imply actually prevailed in practice? Manusmriti is said to have been compiled over seven to eight hundred years. Which verse is authentic and which an interpolation? Second, what is the evidence that this text was in fact being lived out in practice? Even the ‘eminent historians’ who have built their careers on such assertions have not been able to point to any evidence that even vaguely suggests that Indian society was characterized by the tales of caste oppression that are their stock-in-trade.50 With these ‘historians’ unable to adduce any evidence to substantiate their assertions, on what do the judges base their characterizations? And yet, not only do our judges repeat the assertions, they do so in grandiloquent prose, and they base their policy prescriptions on those very assertions."