“Secondly there are agencies which are already engaged in some sort of social service without any confines as to class or purpose and may be prepared to supplement their activity by taking up the work of the Anti-Untouchability League in consideration of a grant-in-aid. I am sure this hire-purchase system of work, if I may use that expression, can produce no lasting good. What is wanted in an agency is a single-minded devotion to one task only. We want bodies and organizations which have deliberately chosen to be narrow-minded in order to be enthusiastic about their cause. The work if it is to be assigned must be assigned to those who would undertake to devote themselves exclusively to the work of the Depressed Classes.
“Before closing this I wish to say just this.- it was Balfour, I think, who said-that what could hold the British Empire together was love and not law. I think that observation applies equally well to the Hindu society.
The touchable and the untouchables cannot be held together by law, certainly not by any electoral law substituting joint electorates for separate electorates. The only thing that can hold them together is love.
*Outside the family, justice alone, in my opinion can open the possibility of love, and it should be the duty of the Anti-Untouchability League to see that the touchable does, or failing that, is made to do justice to the Untouchable. Nothing else in my opinion can justify the project or the existence of the League”.
This letter was not even acknowledged by the Secretary. That not a single suggestion of mine was accepted goes without saying. Even my suggestion that the workers of the Sangh should be drawn largely from the Untouchables themselves was not accepted. indeed, when the attention of Mr. Gandhi was drawn to the fact that the Harijan Sevak Sangh had be- come the hive of mercenary Hindus, he defended it on the ground which are clever if not honest.
He said to the deputation of the Untouchables (This quotation is taken from Dr. Ambedkar’s book “What Congress & Gandhi have done to the Untouchables’, p.142 );
“The welfare work of the Untouchables is a penance which the Hindus have to do for the sin of Untouchability. The money that has been collected has been contributed by the Hindus. From both points of view the Hindus alone must run the Sangh. Neither ethics nor right would justify Untouchables in claiming a seat on the Board of the Sangh.”
Not only were all my proposals rejected by Mr. Gandhi and his advisers but in framing the constitution of the Sangh, aims and objects were adopted which are quite opposed to those which I had suggested.
At the meeting held in Cowasjee Jehangir Hall in Bombay on the 30th September 1932 the aims of the organization were stated to be:
“Carrying propaganda against Untouchability and taking im- mediate steps to secure as early as practicable that all public wells, dharmshalas, roads, schools, crematoriums, burning ghats and all public temples be declared open to the Depressed Classes, peaceful persuasion shall be adopted towards this end.”
But in the statement issued by Mr. G.D. Birla and Mr. A.V. Thakkar on the 3rd November, two months after its inaugural – ration it was stated:
“The League believes that reasonable persons among the Satanists are not much against the removal of Untouchability as such, as they are against inter-caste dinners and marriages. Since it is not the ambition of the League to undertake reforms beyond its own scope, itis desirable to make it clear that while the League will work by persuasion among the caste Hindus to remove every vestige of Untouchability, the mainline of work will be constructive, such as the uplift of Depressed Classes educationally, economically and socially, which itself will go a great way to remove untouchability. With such a work even, a staunch Sanatana’s can have nothing but sympathy. And it is for such work mainly that the League has been established. Social reforms like the abolition of the caste system and inter-dinning are kept outside the scope of the League.”
These aims and objects are described in one of the Annual Reports of the Sangh. It says:
*According to its constitution the aim and the object of the Society is the abolition of untouchability by reason of birth and the acquisition of equal rights of access of public temples, wells, schools and other public institutions for Harijans are enjoyed by other Hindus”. (To be continued)
