WHAT CONGRESS AND GANDHI HAVE DONE TO THE UNTOUCHABLES : A PLEA TO THE FOREIGNER
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freedom is the Congress fighting ?’ The question whether the Congress is fighting for freedom has very little importance as compared to the question, ‘for whose freedom is the Congress fighting ?’ This is a pertinent and necessary inquiry and it would be wrong for any lover of freedom to support the Congress without further pursuing the matter and finding out what the truth is. But the foreigner who takes the side of the Congress does not care even to raise such a question. One should have thought that he would very naturally raise such a question and if he did raise it and pursue it, I am confident, he will find abundant proof that the Congress far from planning for democracy is planning to resuscitate the ancient form of Hindu polity of a hereditary governing class ruling a hereditary servile class.
The attitude of the foreigner to the cause of the servile classes and particularly to the cause of the Untouchables is a vital matter and no party can leave it out of consideration, as a case of idiosyncrasy. For any one representing the Untouchables it is necessary to take note of it and do his best to convince the foreigner that in supporting the Congress he is supporting a wrong party.
III
Apart from the question of likes and dislikes, the real explanation for this strange attitude of the foreigner towards the Congress seems to be in certain notions about freedom, self-government and democracy propounded by western writers on Political Science and which have become the stock-in-trade of the average foreigner.
As to freedom, the foreigner does not stop to make a distinction between the freedom of a country and the freedom of the people in the country. He takes it for granted that the freedom of a country is the same as the freedom of the people in the country and once the freedom of the country is secured the freedom of the people is also thereby assured.
As regards self-government he believes that all that is wanted in a people is a sense of constitutional morality, which Grote [1 ] defined as habits of “paramount reverence for the form of
- History of Greece, Vol. III, p. 347.