10 DR. BABASAHEB AMBEDKAR : WRITINGS AND SPEECHES
they tell us that it is a Hindu Congress, although the presence of our Mahomedan friends completely contradicts the statement. Let it not be said that this is the Congress of one social party rather than that of another. It is the Congress of United India, of Hindus and Mahomedans, of Christians, of Parsis and of Sikhs, of those who would reform their social customs and those who would not. Here we stand upon a common platform—here we have all agreed to bury our social and religious differences and recognise the one common fact that being subjects of the same Sovereign and living under the same Government and the same political institutions, we have common rights and common grievances. And we have called forth this Congress into existence with a view to safeguard and extend our rights and redress our grievances. What should we say of a Faculty of Doctors who fell out, because though in perfect accord as to the principles of their science, they could not agree as to the age at which they should marry their daughters, or whether they should remarry their widowed daughters or not...Ours is a political and not a social movement ; and it cannot be made a matter of complaint against us that we are not a social organization any more than it can be urged against any of my lawyer friends that they are not doctors. Even in regard to political matters, such is our respect for the opinions of minorities, that so far back as 1887, I think it was at the instance of Mr. Badruddin Tyabji, who once was our President and whose elevation to the Bench of the Bombay High Court is a matter of national congratulation, a resolution was passed to the effect that where there is practical unanimity among a class, though in a minority in the Congress, that a question should not be discussed, it should forthwith be abandoned.”
“There is special danger to which an organization such as ours, is exposed and which must be guarded against,... the danger of there being developed from within the seeds of dissension and dispute.”
II
There are two questions about these statements which need explanation. First is to know what the Social Reform party was to which the Presidents refer. The second is why Mr. Surrendranath Bannerjee’s address to the Congress in 1895 was the last occasion when a Congress President found it necessary to refer to the relation of the Congress to the problem of Social Reform and why no president after 1895 thought it necessary to dwell on it.