WHAT CONGRESS AND GANDHI HAVE DONE TO THE UNTOUCHABLES : A PLEA TO THE FOREIGNERS 217
as he is told by his religion that money lending is the occupation prescribed to him by Manu, he looks upon it as both right and righteous. With the help and assistance of the Brahmin judge who is read to decree his suits, he is able to carry on his trade. Interest, interest on interest, he adds on and on and thereby draws families perpetually into his net: Pay him as much as a debtor may, he is always in debt. With no conscience, there is no fraud, and no chicanery that he will not commit. His grip over the nation is complete. The whole of poor, starving, illiterate India is mortgaged to the Bania.
To sum up, the Brahmin enslaves the mind and the Bania enslaves the body. Between them, they divide the spoils which belong to the governing classes. Can anyone who realizes what the outlook, tradition and social philosophy of the governing class in India, is believe that under the Congress regime, a sovereign and independent India will be different from the India we have today ?
V
If the Congress is honest and sincere in its professions as the champion and the guardian of the servile classes the Congress may well be called upon to show what steps it took to destroy the power of the governing class. It is repeated from housetops that the Congress swept the polls in the elections that took place in 1937. Overlooking the hyperbole, a question could legitimately be asked: It is true that the Congress won the victory but which is the class among the Indian people which carried the trophy ? Unfortunately, no Indian publicist has as yet undertaken to compile an Indian counterpart of Dodd’s Parliamentary Manual. Consequently, it is difficult to have precise particulars regarding the caste, occupation, education and social status of members of the legislature elected on the Congress ticket. The matter is so important that I thought of collecting the necessary information on these points relating to members of the Provincial Legislatures elected in 1937 on the Congress ticket. I did not succeed in getting precise information about every member. There are many whom I have had to leave as unclassified. But the information I have been able to gather throws a glaring light upon victory of the Congress and shows what it means to the people of India in terms of their freedom and their well-being.
Table 18 (see page 219) shows the proportion of Brahmins