20 DR. BABASAHEB AMBEDKAR : WRITINGS AND SPEECHES
Programme. The resolution setting out the details of the programme ran as follows :—
“The Working Committee advises all Congress Organisations to be engaged in the following activities :—
(1) To enlist at least one crore members of the Congress.
(2) To popularize the spinning wheel and to organize the manufacture of hand-spun and handwoven khaddar.
(3) To organize national schools.
(4) To organize the Depressed Classes for a better life, to improve their social, mental and moral condition, to induce them to send their children to national schools and to provide for them the ordinary facilities which the other citizens enjoy.
(5) To organize the temperance campaign amongst the people addicted to the drink habit by house to house visits and to rely more upon appeal to the drinker in his home than upon picketting.
(6) To organize village and town Panchayats for the private settlement of all disputes, reliance being placed solely upon force of public opinion and the truthfulness of Panchayat decisions to ensure obedience to them.
(7) In order to promote and emphasise unity among all classes and races and mutual goodwill, the establishment of which is the aim of the movement of non-co-operation, to organize a social service department that will render help to all, irrespectives of differences, in times of illness or accident.
(8) To continue the Tilak Memorial Swaraj Fund collections and call upon every Congress man, or Congress, sympathiser to pay at least one-hundredth part of his annual income for
- Every province to send every month twenty-five per cent of its income from the Tilak Memorial Swaraj Fund to the All-India Congress Committee.”
The resolution was placed before the All-India Congress Committee at its meeting held in Delhi on 20th February 1922 for confirmation, which it did. I am not concerned to set out what happened to the different items in this Programme of constructive work. I am concerned with only one item namely that which relates to the Depressed Classes and it is that part of it which I propose to deal with.