134 DR. BABASAHEB AMBEDKAR : WRITINGS AND SPEECHES
live in this Religion. Nobody can blame them for this helplessness. Rather anyone will pity them. But now nobody can force any type of slavery upon the present generation. They have all sorts of freedom. By availing of such freedom, if they do not free themselves, one will have to call them, most regretfully, as being most mean, slavish and dependent people to have lived on earth.
Difference between man and animal
it is fitted for a fool only to say that one should cling to ones own Religion only because it is ancestral. No wise person can have such an argument. This will be a worthy advice for animals, and not for man to tell him, to live in the same circumstances in which he is living. The difference between a man and an animal is that—a man can make progress while an animal cannot. Our progress is not possible without change. The Conversion is a sort of change. And if no progress is possible without the conversion, the conversion becomes essential. The only being a matter of ancestral religion can never occur as a hindrance in the path of a progressive man.
There is still one more argument against the Conversion. It is, ‘the Conversion is a sort of escapism.’ Today, a number of Hindus are bent upon improving the Hindu Religion. They claim that the Untouchability and the casteism can be eradicated with the help of these people. It is, therefore, not proper to change the Religion at this juncture. Whatever opinion anybody may possess about the Hindu Social Reformers, I personally have a nausea for them. I have much experience of them and I feel disgust about these half-witted people. It is really astonishing that those people, who want to live in their own caste, die in their own caste, marry in their own caste, are able to fool people with false slogans, like saying they will break the caste and if the Untouchables do not believe them, they get annoyed with them. When I hear such slogans shouted by these Hindu Social Reformers, I recollect the efforts made by the American white people for the emancipation of the American Negroes. Years ago, the condition of the Negroes in