56 DR. BABASAHEB AMBEDKAR : WRITINGS AND SPEECHES
it must leave the weakest to its fate. I do not see therefore how we can expect the Congress to take up our cause and be our partisan when such a course is bound to antagonise it with our opponents without whose support it must cease to subsist.
Those of us who are anxious to serve the Congress believe that the Congress will remove our Untouchability after the attainment of Swaraj as a reward for our services. If we don’t do service to it now we shall be pilloried later on for our default. I need hardly make the comment that gratuitous services are rarely rewarded. But what I am most anxious to point out is that serve the Congress as much as we may, after Swaraj, we shall be searching in vain to find the Congress. We shall then have to depend upon our own resources. For, the Congress having accomplished its purpose will have vanished in to thin air with the advent of Swaraj. And the “Great Beast” to use the expression of Hamilton with which we will be confronted will be the people of this country with their passions and prejudices in full swing. I am afraid that even Mahatma Gandhi to whom we are asked to leave all our woes for redress will find himself unable to protect us against it, assuming that his span of life will be much longer than is allowed by nature to the ordinary mortals of this land.
If I am right in the view I have taken then it follows that we must shape our course for ourselves and by ourselves. I can quite appreciate the nervousness of those of us who fear to take such a course. They smell danger in being independent of both the Government and the Congress. This is a confession of our weakness, and I agree, that for the Depressed Classes to be independent and yet be without the power to make themselves reckoned with is not a happy situation. But what I like to ask is what is the advantage in being dependent either upon the Government or the Congress ? Merely to make yourselves agreeable to any party that happens to be powerful without caring whether you are reckoned with or not is the way of the beggar and amounts to an ignomious surrender which no respectable people ought to tolerate. The question before the Depressed Classes is how they can make themselves into a