"Be that as it may, the legal arguments had nothing to do with the real motive underlying the change. The real motive was to put a stop to the illicit conversion of women to alien faiths, followed by immediate and hurried marriages with someone professing the faith she happened to have joined, with a view to locking her in the new community and preventing her from going back to the community to which she originally belonged. The conversion of Muslim woman to Hinduism and of Hindu woman to Islam, looked at from a social and political point of view, cannot but be fraught with tremendous consequences. It means a disturbance in the numerical balance between the two communities. As the disturbance was being brought about by the abduction of women, it could not be overlooked. For woman is at once the seed-bed of, and the hothouse for, nationalism in a degree that man can never be./12/ These conversions of women and their subsequent marriages were there-fore regarded, and rightly, as a series of depredations practised by Hindus against Muslims and by Muslims against Hindus, with a view to bringing about a change in their relative numerical strength. This abominable practice of woman-lifting had become as common as cattle-lifting, and with its obvious danger to communal balance, efforts had to be made to stop it. ... Thus what underlies the change in law is the desire to keep the numerical balance and it is for this purpose that the rights of women were sacrificed."