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DR. BABASAHEB AMBEDKAR : WRITINGS AND SPEECHES
them by political power, and by nothing else. Mr. Gandhi, on the other hand, believes that his preaching and the charity and zeal of the Hindus are sufficient panacea for all the ills of the Untouchables. Can the Untouchables rely on a sustained flow of Hindu charity and Hindu zeal ? Charity which has its fury is worth talking about. Zeal which has its vengeance is worth building upon. But which friend of the Untouchables can ask them to depend upon the miserable measure of Hindu charity and the Hindu zeal ? Untouchability has been in existence for the last two thousand years during which period the Hindus have day in and day out sucked the very blood of the Untouchables and have mutilated them and trodden upon them in every way. During these two thousand years what amount of charity have the Hindus done to the Untouchables ? Only 8 lakhs and that too when Mr. Gandhi personally went round the country with a begging bowl !!! Having put his programme to test, Mr. Gandhi might have shown his willingness to concede the Untouchables’ demand for political power as their only means of salvation. Indeed so obvious is the justice of this demand that a man with no more than common sense could have understood that executive power in the hands of the Untouchables could do more in a year than the whole order of preaching friars could be relied upon to do in a century. But the very idea of political power to the Untouchables is hateful to Mr. Gandhi. Why should not the Untouchables say ‘Beware of Mr. Gandhi’ when they know that he would not allow the use of political processes for the emancipation of the Untouchables though Mr. Gandhi is fully alive to the fact that the social processes on which he laid so much store for helping them have completely failed.
In this connection one is reminded of the attitude of President Lincoln in the American Civil War towards the two questions of union and slavery. This attitude is well revealed by the correspondence [1] that passed in 1862 between Mr. Horace Greeley and President Lincoln. In a letter addressed to the President entitled “The Prayer of Twenty Millions,” Mr. Greeley said :
“On the face of this wide earth, Mr. President, there is not one disinterested, determined, intelligent champion of the Union cause who does not feel that all attempts to put down the rebellion and at the same time uphold its inciting cause (namely slavery) are preposterous and futile.”
1 Works of Abraham Lincoln, Vol. XI, pp. xii-xiii