Vol. 10 · pages 516–520

495 THE TRANSFER OF POWER Untouchables want separate electorates. The Untouchables will be a minority in the Legislature. They are destined to remain a minority. They cannot overcome the majority which being communal in its making is, so to say, fixed and pre-ordained. All they can do is to place themselves in a position to be able to determine the terms on which they will be prepared to work with the majority and not be compelled to accept the terms prescribed by the majority, and secondly, if the majority refuses to work with them and declines to redress their wrongs, they would at least be free to utter their protest against the majority on the floor of the Legislature. How are the Untouchables to maintain their freedom to protest ? Only if their representatives in the Legislatures do not owe their election to the votes of the majority. This is the basis of their demand for separate electorates. 7. No safeguards are going to be of any value to the Untouchable sunless the Untouchables get a separate electorate. Separate electorate is the crux of the matter. I have before me a copy of the representation submitted to the Cabinet Mission by three Congress Harijans who were interviewed by the Mission on the 9th April 1946. They were no better than the three tailors of Tooly Street who had the audacity to present an address to the Parliament saying : “We the people of England”. Apart from this, it is instructive to note that there is no difference between the demands put forth by me on behalf of the Scheduled Castes Federation and the demands put forth by these Congress Harijans. The only difference that exists relates to the question of electorates. I do not know how you interpret the demands of the Congress Harijans. They are not really demands. They represent what the Congress is prepared to give to the Untouchables by way of political safeguards. This is not merely my understanding. It is my knowledge. For I have been informed by persons who know the mind of the Congress that if I was prepared to accept joint electorates, the Congress on its part would be quite prepared to concede all other demands of mine. You must be wondering why should the Congress be prepared to concede all the demands of the Scheduled Castes and object only to one namely, separate electorates. There will be no wonder if you know what game the Congress is playing. It is a very deep game. Realising that there is no escape from giving the Untouchables some safeguards, the Congress wants to find out some way by which it can

496 DR. BABASAHEB AMBEDKAR : WRITINGS AND SPEECHES make them of no effect. It is in the system of joint electorates that the Congress sees an instrument of making the safeguards of no effect. That is why the Congress is insisting upon joint electorates. For joint electorates means giving the Untouchables office without power. What the Untouchables want is office with power. This, they can only get through separate electorates and that is why they are insisting upon it. 8. I believe the case in favour of separate electorates for the Scheduled Castes is a cast-iron case. Every other party except the Congress accepts it. The arguments in favour of separate electorates have been set out by me in my letter of 3rd May 1946 addressed to Lord Wavell which he must have shown to you and it is therefore unnecessary to repeat them here. The question is : what the Mission is going to do with this demand of the Scheduled Castes. Are they going to make the Untouchables free from political yoke of the Hindus ? Or, are they going to throw them to the wolves by favouring the system of joint electorates in order to make friends with the Congress and the Hindu majority whom it represents ? The Scheduled Castes are entitled to ask His Majesty’s Government that before the British abdicate, His Majesty’s Government shall make sure that Swaraj does not become a strangle-hold for the Untouchables. 9. Allow me to say that the British have a moral responsibility towards the Scheduled Castes. They may have moral responsibilities towards all minorities. But it can never transcend the moral responsibility which rests on them in respect of the Untouchables. It is a pity how few Britishers are aware of it and how fewer are prepared to discharge it. British Rule in India owes its very existence to the help rendered by the Untouchables. Many Britishers think that India was conquered by the Clives, Hastings, Cootes and so on. Nothing can be a greater mistake. India was conquered by an army of Indians and the Indians who formed the army were all Untouchables. British Rule in India would have been impossible if the Untouchables had not helped the British to conquer India. Take the Battle of Plassey

497 THE TRANSFER OF POWER which laid the beginning of British Rule or the battle of Kirkee which completed the conquest of India. In both these fateful battles the soldiers who fought for the British were all Untouchables. 10. What have the British done to these Untouchables who fought for them ? It is a shameful story. The first thing they did was to stop their recruitment in the army. A more unkind, more ungrateful and more cruel act can hardly be found in history. In shutting out the Untouchables from the Army the British took no note that the Untouchables had helped them to establish their rule and had defended it when it was menaced by a powerful combination of native forces in the Mutiny of 1857. Without any consideration as to its effects upon the Untouchables the British by one stroke of the pen deprived them of their source of livelihood and let them fall to their original depth of degradation. Did the British help them in any way to overcome their social disabilities ? The answer again must be in the negative. The schools, wells and public places were closed to the Untouchables. It was the duty of the British to see the Untouchables, as citizens, were entitled to be admitted to all institutions maintained out of public funds. But the British did nothing of the kind and what is worst, they justified their inaction by saying that untouchability was not their creation. It may be that untouchability was not the creation of the British. But as Government of the day, surely the removal of untouchability was their responsibility. No Government with any sense of the functions and duties of a Government could have avoided it What did the British Government do ? They refused to touch any question which involved any kind of reform of Hindu society. So far as social reform was concerned, the Untouchables found themselves under a Government distinguished in no vital respect from those native Governments under which they had toiled and suffered, lived and died, through all their weary and forgotten history. From a political standpoint, the change was nominal. The despotism of the Hindus continued as ever before. Far from being curbed by the British High Command, it was pampered. From a social point of view, the British accepted the arrangements as they found them and preserved them

498 DR. BABASAHEB AMBEDKAR : WRITINGS AND SPEECHES faithfully in the manner of the Chinese tailor who, when given an old coat as a pattern, produced with pride an exact replica, rents and patches and all. And what is the result ? The result is that though 200 years have elapsed since the establishment of the British Rule in India the Untouchables have remained Untouchables, their wrongs remained unredressed and their progress hampered at every stage. Indeed if the British Rule has achieved anything in India it is to strengthen and reinvigorate Brahmanism which is the inveterate enemy of the Untouchables and which is the parent of all the ills from which the Untouchables have been suffering for ages. 11. You have come here to announce that the British are abdicating. It cannot be wrong for an Untouchable to ask “to whom are you leaving this legacy of authority and power ?” To the protagonist of Brahmanism, which means to the tyrants and oppressors of the Untouchables. Such a method of liquidating the British Empire in India need not raise any qualms of conscience among members of other parties. But what about the British Labour Party ? The Labour Party claims to stand for the unprivileged and the down-trodden. If it is true to its salt, I have no doubt that it will stand by the sixty millions of the Untouchables of India and do everything necessary to safeguard their position and not allow power to pass into the hands of those who by their religion and their philosophy of life are unfit to govern and are in fact the enemies of the Untouchables. It will be no more than bare act of atonement on the part of the British for the neglect of the Scheduled Castes whose trustees they always claimed to be. 12. What has led me to unburden myself at such length is the anxiety caused by the apparent silence of the Mission over the question of constitutional safeguards raised by the Untouchables. This anxiety has been deepened by the attitude taken by the Mission towards the pledges given to the Untouchables and to the minorities by His Majesty’s Government. The attitude of the Mission in regard to these pledges reminds one of Lord Palmerston who said, “We have no permanent enemies; we have no permanent friends; we have only permanent interest.” You can well imagine what a terrifying prospect it would

499 THE TRANSFER OF POWER present to the Untouchables if the impression was created that the Mission was adopting this Palmerston maxim as its guide. You came from the under-privileged classes of Great Britain and I have full faith that you will do your best to prevent a possible betrayal of the 60 millions of India’s under-privileged. That is why I have thought of placing their case before you. If you will allow me to say, the Untouchables have got a feeling that they have no greater friend in the Mission than yourself. I am, Yours sincerely, B. R. Ambedkar. The Rt. Hon’ble Mr. A. V. Alexander, C.H.M.P., Member, Cabinet Mission, Viceroy’s House, New Delhi. zz