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DR. BABASAHEB AMBEDKAR : WRITINGS AND SPEECHES
such an easy conversion. It serves a double purpose. It enables the Congress to account for a strange phenomenon and it gives an explanation to which circumstances lend an apparent plausibility.
Had it not been for the fact that even influential foreigners have been infected by this idea, one would hardly bestir himself to take notice of such malicious propaganda. For the explanation given by the Congress for the non-participation by the Untouchables in what is called “the Fight for Freedom” is an absurd explanation. It is an explanation which only a knave can venture to offer and which none but a fool can be expected to accept as satisfactory. But as it is almost certain that in the events that are coming, what foreigners think about India’s problems will be a matter of some moment, I think it necessary to explain the correct situation and allow no room for such erroneous notions about the Untouchables to take roots in their mind especially when there can be no difficulty in proving that it is a false charge against the Untouchables and to prove that if the Untouchables have not joined the “Fight for Freedom” it is not because they are the tools of the British Imperialism but because they fear that freedom of India will establish Hindu domination which is sure to close to them and for ever all prospect of life, liberty and pursuit of happiness and that they will be made the hewers of wood and drawers of water.
That the Untouchables should have refused to join the Congress in the “Fight for Freedom” is in itself a proof positive that their reason for non-co-operation with the Congress cannot be the puerile one suggested by the Congress. It must be something real and substantial. What is it ? The reason which has led the Untouchables to non-co-operate with the Congress has been popularly expressed by them when they say that they do not wish to be placed under Hindu Raj in which the governing class would be the Bania and the Brahamin with low class Hindus as their policemen, all of whom have been the hereditary enemies of the Untouchables. This language is held to offend against good taste. That may be so. But it must not be supposed that because such slogans are offensive in their tone they are devoid of sense or that the outlook which they typify and the ideals which they embody have no compelling force or that they cannot be made to wear the garb of a true and respectable political philosophy.