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DR. BABASAHEB AMBEDKAR : WRITINGS AND SPEECHES
opinion of a man like Rai Bahadur Khanna, who, to use Dryden’s language, is so various as to be everything by starts, and nothing long, and who in the course of one revolving moon, can be a chemist, fiddler, statesman, and buffoon, must be beneath contempt. If I refer to him it is only because I wish to illustrate what sort of propaganda [1] friends of Mr. Gandhi are carrying on in order to beguile the Untouchables.
I do not know how many Untouchables will be found prepared to swallow such a lie. But this much I think has been proved by the Nazis that if a lie is a big lie—too big for the common man’s intelligence to scrutinize—and if it is repeated continuously, the lie has all the chances of being accepted as truth and if not accepted as truth has all the chances of growing upon the victims of propaganda and win their acquiescence. It is, therefore, necessary for me to expose the part played by Mr. Gandhi in the movement of the Untouchables and to warn the Untouchables against succumbing to this propaganda.
I
In making a survey of the part played by Mr. Gandhi it is well to begin by ascertaining when Mr. Gandhi for the first time realized that Untouchability was an evil. On this point, we have the direct testimony of Mr. Gandhi himself. In an address delivered as President of the Suppressed Classes Conference, held at Ahmedabad on the 14th and 15th April
1921, Mr. Gandhi said :—
“I was hardly yet twelve when this idea had dawned on me. A scavenger named Ukha, an Untouchable, used to attend our house for cleaning latrines. Often I would ask my mother why it was wrong to touch him, why I was forbidden to touch him. If I accidentally touched Ukha, I was asked to perform ablutions, and though I naturally obeyed, it was not without smilingly protesting that untouchability was not sanctioned by religion, that it was impossible that it should be so. I was a very dutiful and obedient child and so far as it was consistent with respect for parents. I often had tussles with them on
1 Another illustration of such propaganda is that carried on by one Parsi gentleman by name Prof. A. R. Wadia. The views of Prof. Wadia have been critically examined and exposed by Mr. E. J. Sanjanna in a series of articles in the Rast-Rahabar —a Gujarathi Weekly published in Bombay from 29th October
1944 to 15th April 1945 under the heading of “Sense aad Nonsense in Politics.”