478 DR. BABASAHEB AMBEDKAR : WRITINGS AND SPEECHES
nature of your concern for these classes, but is like placing the cart before the horse. One would expect you as President of the Hindu Mahasabha to ameliorate the social condition of the Depressed Classes by removing civic and social disabilities of these classes, not to speak of securing for them the right of worship in Hindu temples on an equal footing with other worshippers, and to further the Harijan movement started by Gandhiji all over the country. Instead of doing this, what is it, that you are doing ? You are dissecting the Depressed Classes and affiliating them religiously to the Sikhs while retaining them politically as Hindus.
The whole thing seems to me not to be conceived in the interest of the Depressed Classes but on the other hand to be planned in the communal interests of the Hindus and the Sikhs. We are not sheep and cattle to be bartered away in this fashion, driven from one political fold to another as a result of a bargain between the leaders of different communites. We want to remain so solid community moving of our own accord in the direction of progress and this we can best do by not throwing away our birth rights as Hindus but by remaining within Hinduism and changing it so as to make it more comfortable not only to our communities which are suffering from similar liabilities, though our hardships are greater and more palpable. It is not our purpose to weaken the Hindu community but to strenghthen it by reforming it from within. We do not wish to be pawns in the game of communal conflicts and competition.
Your proposal involves of electoral fortunes of Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims. If you want us to shift religion from the Hindu fold, we shall have to choose religion between the Sikhs and the Muslims who are the bidders for our communal migration, wrongly called conversion. Why should we antagonise and stand arrayed against Muslims? They are our brothers as much as the Sikhs and the Hindus. If the Depressed Classes all to become Sikhs and call themselves Neo-Sikhs, it will create all over the India a Sikh-HinduMuslim problem, as in the Punjab, made move complicated by the fact that the so-called Neo-Sikh belongs to the Depressed Class even among Sikhs.