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DR. BABASAHEB AMBEDKAR : WRITINGS AND SPEECHES
These figures speak for themselves. It is suggested that onefifth of the entire population of British India should be allotted seven seats out of practically eight hundred. It is true that in all the councils there will be roughly a one-sixth proportion of officials who may be expected to bear in mind the interests of the depressed ; but that arrangement is not, in our opinion, what the Report on reforms aims at. The authors stated that the depressed classes also should learn the lesson of self-protection. It is surely fanciful to hope that this result can be expected from including a single member of the community in an assembly where there are sixty or seventy caste Hindus. To make good the principles of paras 151, 152, 154 and 155 of the Report we must treat the outcastes more generously. We think there should be in each council enough representatives of the depressed classes to save them from being entirely submerged, and at the same time to stimulate some capacity for collective action. In the case of Madras, we suggest that they should be given six seats; in Bengal, the United Provinces and Bihar and Orissa, we would give them four; in the Central Provinces and Bombay two and elsewhere one. In these respects we think that the committee’s report clearly requires modification.
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(3)
Extract from Lord Birkenhead’s speech as Secretary of State for India in the House of Lords on the 30th March 1927 on the appointment of Statutory Commission.
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…… Let me take the case of the depressed classes. There is in India a vast population even in relation to the numbers with which we are dealing, a population of sixty millions of the depressed classes. Their condition is not quite as terrible, quite as poignant as it has been in the past, but it is still terrible and poignant. They are repelled from all social intercourse. If they come between the gracious light of the sun and one who despised them the sun is disfigured for that man. They cannot drink at the public water-supply. They must make diversions of miles in order to satisfy thirst and they are tragically known and they have been known for generations as the “untouchables.” There are sixty millions of them in India. Am I to have a representative of them upon this Commission ? Never, never would I form a Commission nor would anyone in a democratic country, nor would my friends opposite recommend it, from which you have excluded a member of this class which more than any other requires representation if you are indeed to put the matter to a mixed jury of the kind I am indicating.