WHAT CONGRESS AND GANDHI HAVE DONE TO THE UNTOUCHABLES : A MEAN DEAL 101
classes of candidates. From candidates who came from high caste Hindus as Brahmins and the allied communities those with the highest qualifications were selected. In the case of the Non-Brahmins those with low qualifications were preferred to those with higher qualifications. And in the case of the Untouchables those with little or no qualifications were selected in preference to those who had. I don’t say that is true in every case. But the general result was that of the candidates selected by the Congress, the candidates from the Brahmin and allied communities were the most highly educated, candidates from the non-Brahmins were moderately educated and those from the Untouchables just about literates. This system of selection is very intriguing. There seems to be a deep laid game behind it. Any one who studies it carefully will find that it is designed to allow none but the Brahmins and the allied castes to form the main part of the ministry and to secure for them the support of a docile unintelligent crowd of non-Brahmins and Untouchables who by their intellectual attainments could never dream of becoming rivals of the minister-folk but would be content to follow the lead for no other consideration except that of having been raised to the status of members of the Legislatures. Mr. Gandhi did not see this aspect of the case when he said that to be a minister the Untouchable aspiring for it must be a qualified person. Otherwise, he would have seen that if there were no qualified persons among the Untouchable Congressmen, it was because the Congress Parliamentary Board did not choose well-qualified candidates from the Untouchables.
If the present system of election continues the Congress can always prevent educated Indians from becoming members of the Legislature which is the stepping-stone for becoming a member of the Cabinet. It is a very grave prospect and some steps will have to be taken to retrieve the position. In the meantime, it is enough to say that the scheme of selecting candidates adopted by the Congress dealt the Untouchables a severe blow by depriving them of Executive power under the cover of there being no qualified men to hold it which it created for itself by such clandestine and subterranean means.
The second misdeed of the Congress was to subject the Untouchable Congressmen to the rigours of party discipline. They were completely under the control of the Congress Party