190 DR. BABASAHEB AMBEDKAR : WRITINGS AND SPEECHES
necessary for bringing relief to the class of people whom they represent is not merely making speeches in this House but to suggest remedies for the removal of their grievances. To make speeches and to ventilate grievances is a very easy matter but to formulate remedies is a very difficult matter. It requires education and therefore education even from the standpoint of the backward classes, scheduled classes or tribal areas is a very necessary ingredient. How can we ensure it ? When I examined the suggestion that there ought to be some kind of educational qualification, I found that a proposition which is very good in theory or in its academic aspect cannot be given effect to without producing other evils. That is my difficulty. Where will you fix the standard? Will you say that only B.As. should be qualified to be Members of this House ? Supposing you do that, what is the result ? Members probably might know that there are many people who are educationally and intellectually far more competent than any graduate, although they have never been inside any college or university. There are any number of them. Are you going to shut out these people who have privately educated themselves, who are equally competent or better than B.As. or M.As., merely because they have not been able to obtain a certificate from a university ? I think that would be a very unfortunate result.
Take another consequence. In this country education is in the lowest grade. Not only that is so but for some reason which all of us know, education has not been universally spread among all the communities in this country. There are communities which are highly educated and there are communities where education is very, very low. Supposing you make B.A. or even matriculation as a standard, are you not making the membership of this House to be a monopoly of the few ? I fear that will be the consequence, Supposing you lower down your standard, say, for instance, to the fourth standard, to the study of the three Rs. or to literacy in order that no community may be excluded from the opportunity of sending its members to this House. Is That qualification any good? It is of no value at all.
Therefore, my submission is this, that it is a good thing. I am not going to outcry the feeling that there ought to be