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DR. BABASAHEB AMBEDKAR : WRITINGS AND SPEECHES
“That is to say, they go to the electorate with a view to pandering to the prejudice of the masses whom they have misled, so much so, that they have got themselves into a bog., Lord Willingdon came to their rescue, to take them out of the bog by announcing the dissolution of this Assembly and giving them an opportunity, as a Constitutional Viceroy, to return to the sheltered paths of constitutionalism. Therefore, they have run away from their own convictions and are playing every trick to come back to the Legislature with as large a number as possible. Had they gone on with the Temple Entry Bill or the Untouchability question, they would have lost many votes, for it is not a popular issue. I said so, though Mahatma Gandhi contradicted me publicly at the time, I said so when Shankaracharya was staying in Malabar in my brother’s house at Palghat. My brother came on a deputation to the Viceroy to oppose the Bill. I said : ‘I know, the reformer is not in a majority in Malabar.’ Nowhere else are the reformers in a majority but the reformers believe in persuading the majority to their way of thinking. Then, I said—whatever the result of a referendum, the Congress people might have taken in Guruvayur in Malabar, might be, I could not for a moment believe that the majority of the temple-going people in Malabar were in favour of admitting the Untouchables into the temples: but I was prepared to fight the in, also to argue with them and to persuade them and to make them take an interest in the cause and the case of the Untouchables, for, I feel, the Untouchables are a part of my community. Sir, if one-third of my community is to remain submerged in exclusion in the name of religion, I feel, as I have always felt and said, that that community has no right to existence. It is with a view to the unification of the Hindu community, it is with a view to building up the greatness of the future of that community on the past of that community, when Untouchability was quite unknown as in the Vedic ages, that I have taken up their cause. And now, I find Congressmen, so keen about Untouchability yesterday, explaining why they are not taking it up today. Mr. Rajagopalachariar has driven the last nail into the coffin of the Temple Entry Bill as Raja Bahadur Krishnamachariar, the Raja Saheb of Kollengode or Sir Satya Charan Mukherji would perhaps like to say, representing as they do the various Sana-tanist groups of the country.
“Sir, Mr. Rajagopalachariar goes on to say that they asked to be returned ‘on no other issue,’ that is to say, not on Temple Entry issue, but merely on a political Anglo-phobia issue, an anti-British issue, because, having traded on public feeling,