ROLE OF ......................... INDIAN DEMOCRACY 131
advice in the matter and asking him about the possibility and possible date of the Premier’s decision on the communal issue. In another letter written during the same week, Dr. Ambedkar poured his disgust upon the Hindu Members of the Franchise Committee and said that he hated their frame of mind which allowed them to be self-centred and aggressive inside their own camp and cowardly and yielding outside. He wrote that he was utterly disgusted with their selfish and thoughtless attitude and that he would try to keep himself away from Hindu Society. He was working under mental and physical pressure. In addition, he was suffering from diarrhoea.
In April the Bengal Namashudra Association held its 14th Annual Session at the Albert Institute Hall, Calcutta, under the presidentship of Dr. Kalicharan Mandal. The session unanimously endorsed Dr. Ambedkar’s demands. Denouced the newspapers which unjustly criticized Dr. Ambedkar’s stand, and declared that the Congress attitude to their problem was unsympathetic and impractical.
The Franchise Committee finished its business on May
1,1932; but, as lord Lothian desired to have some discussion with him on some vital points, Dr. Ambedkar stayed for a day or two more. The Franchise Committee drafted its report giving detailed proposals on which to face the revision of Franchise, and distribution and demar cation of the constituencies for the new legislatures, Central and Provincial. As Dr. Ambedkar differed from the Hindu Members of the Comittee, he submitted to the Committee a separate note. One of the most important decisions of the Committee was on the exact definition of the term Depressed Classes. The Indian Legislature Committee in its decision in 1916, Sir Henry Sharp, the Educational Commissioner under the Government of India, and the Southborough Franchise Committee had all grouped the Depressed Classes with the aboriginals or Hill Tribes, Criminals or with others, but now the Lothian Franchise Committee said that they were of the opinion that the term should be applied only to those who were Untouchables. This was clearly Dr. Ambedkar’s victory as he had insisted in his note to the Committee that the test of Untouchability “must be applied in its notional sense as Untouchability in its literal sense has ceased to obtain.” [1]
1 : Keer Pp. 196-198