Vol. 9 · pages 201–205

172 DR. BABASAHEB AMBEDKAR : WRITINGS AND SPEECHES In the third place, the foreigner should have no difficulty in realizing that if anybody is communal it is the Congress and not the Untouchables, and that whatever the philosophic grounds advanced by the Congress the real motive of the Congress in opposing the demand for constitutional guarantees is to keep the political field a free pasture for the Hindu Majority. He should be able to see, though the Congress does not openly say so, how natural it is for the Congress to be communal. The Hindu Communal Majority is the back-bone of the Congress. It is made up of the Hindus and is fed by the Hindus. It is this Majority which constitutes the clientele of the Congress and the Congress, therefore, is bound to protect the rights of its clients. If he realizes this, he will not be deceived by the arguments of the Congress that it is opposing these demands in the name of nationalism. On the other hand, he will realize that the Congress is deceiving the world by using nationalism as a cloak for a free field for rank communalism. Lastly, he will know why the representative character of the Congress has become an issue of such importance in Indian politics. He will realize that nobody would have cared to bother about the representative character of the Congress and to inquire, whom it represents and whom it does not, if the Congress were not to arrogate to itself the right to say what should be the constitution of a free India. But as it does, its right to speak in the name of the country forms a vital issue and those who do not accept this have no alternative but to challenge it. II With all this, foreigners have said—“Why not join the Congress in the ‘Fight for Freedom’ ? ; why make agreement on constitutional safeguards a condition precedent to cooperation with the Congress ? After all, safeguards can come only after freedom is won.” A foreigner who has followed the foregoing discussion as to matters which divide the Congress can be left to understand why the Untouchables have not thought it safe to co-operate with the Congress in this “Fight for Freedom.” But there may be some who may not be able to imagine them and who would like to know what they are. Rather than leave them to find wrong reasons it is better to take the trouble to let them have the right ones. The reasons are various. Only the most important are set out below.

173 WHAT CONGRESS AND GANDHI HAVE DONE TO THE UNTOUCHABLES : A FALSE CHARGE The first reason is founded in commonsense. The Untouchables say: “What harm is there in demanding from the Congress an agreement in advance ? What is lost, if a guarantee is given by the Congress in advance ?” They argue that if the Congress agreed to this demand for safeguards in advance it will have a double effect. In the first place, it will give an assurance to the Untouchables who entertain so much dread as to what their lot would be under a Hindu Communal Majority. Secondly, such an assurance would go a long way in inducing the Untouchables to co-operate with the Congress. After all, why are the Untouchables non-co-operating ? Because, they are afraid that if this freedom is achieved it will enable the Hindu Majority once again to enslave them. Why not remove this fear if it can be done at so small a cost, namely, by an agreement in advance ? The second reason is founded in experience. The Untouchables say that the experience of the world does not justify the hope that when the “Fight for Freedom” ends, the stronger elements have shown the generosity to give security to the weaker elements. Many examples of this betrayal could be cited. The most notorious one relates to the betrayal of the Negroes in the United States after the Civil War. Speaking of the part played by the Negroes in the Civil War Mr. Herbert Apthekar says 1 : “One hundred and twenty-five thousand Negroes from the slave states served in the Federal armies. They, together with the eighty thousand from the North, fought in four hundred and fifty battles, with an inspiring and inspired courage that was of the utmost importance in bringing about the collapse of the Confederacy and the abolition of slavery. “Here were over two hundred thousand armed Negro men fighting within a state built upon and dedicated to the proposition that the Negro was, if at all a human being an innately and ineradicably inferior one, fit only to be a slave. * * * “And the Negro soldiers of the Republic fought notwithstanding shameful discriminations and disadvantages. White soldiers received thirteen dollars a month. Negroes received but seven dollars (until July 14, 1864, when the pay was equalized, retroactively to January 1, 1864); there were enlistment bounties for white recruits, none for Negroes (until June 15, 1864); and there was no possibility for advancement into the 1. The Negro in the Civil War, pp. 35-40,

174 DR. BABASAHEB AMBEDKAR : WRITINGS AND SPEECHES ranks of commissioned officers for Negroes.... The Confederacy never recognised captured Negro soldiers who had been slaves as prisoners of war, and did not accord this status to captured free Negroes until October 1864. The Negroes were either killed, returned to slavery, or confined at hard labour. * * * “Here were these scores of thousands of hitherto enslaved and oppressed masses, armed, and sent forth into their own country, whose every creek and knoll was known to them, to maintain their newly obtained freedom, to prove their manhood and to liberate their own people, their own parents and children and wives, from a slavery that they know only too well.... And let it always be remembered that in the war to save the republic thirty-seven thousand Negro soldiers were killed in action.” What happened to the Negroes after the Civil War was over ? In the first flush of victory, the Republicans, who waged the war for saving the Union and obtained the help of the Negroes to win it, carried the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution. Under it the Negroes ceased to be slaves in the legal sense of the term. But did the Negroes get any right to participate in the Government as voters or officials ? The Republicans did take some action in order to make the Southern States accept that the Negroes were to be treated as the political equals of the Whites. This was done by the Fourteenth Amendment which conferred citizenship, State as well as Federal, on all persons including the Negroes born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, forbade legislation by a State abridging the privileges or immunities of a citizen of the United States, and provided for reducing the representation in the Congress of any State in proportion to the number of its citizens excluded from the suffrage. The Southern States had no intention to respect the Fourteenth Amendment. All except Tennessee had rejected the amendment and had set up governments of the White inhabitants. The Republicans then proceeded (March 2, 1867) to pass the so-called Reconstruction Act (a bill to provide efficient governments for the insurrectionary States) designed to create legitimate governments in the States not yet readmitted to the Union (ignoring the governments set up by the White inhabitants), and to determine the conditions proper for their readmission. By this Act these States, that is the whole

175 WHAT CONGRESS AND GANDHI HAVE DONE TO THE UNTOUCHABLES : A FALSE CHARGE seceding South except Tennessee, were divided into five military districts, each to be governed by a BrigadierGeneral of the Federal Army, until such time as (1) a State convention had framed a new constitution, (2) the Fourteenth Amendment had been ratified and (3) the States had been duly readmitted. The Republicans carried another amendment called the Fifteenth Amendment, forbidding the voting right of citizen to be denied or abridged on account of race, colour or previous condition of servitude which also became by similar acceptance part of the Constitution and binding on all the States. The Whites in the South had no intention to admit the Negroes to equal citizenship. Disfranchisement of the Negro proceeded apace. It was undertaken as a solemn duty both by the State Governments of the South as well as by the Whites of the Southern States. To evade the Fifteenth Amendment the State Governments spent their ingenuity in framing franchise laws which denied the Negroes the right to vote on grounds other than race or colour. Most of them decided upon the grandfather clause 1 which effectively excluded the Negroes but fully included the Whites. On the people’s side the process was carried out by the Ku Klux Klan. The Klan was in its origin a secret combination formed in Tennessee by youths for purposes of amusement. It was transferred into an organization to suppress the Negroes and prevent them from exercising their political rights. It started committing outrages upon Negroes, and (less frequently) upon Whites supposed to be in sympathy with the Negroes, in the rural South. These gang-men were never discovered. This shows that the whole of the White population of the South supported the Klan men. No open resistance to the Federal troops was attempted ; but neither their activity nor the penal laws passed by the Congress were effective in checking the flogging, house-burnings, and murders which during these years disgraced some districts. The purposes of the Southern States and the Southern Whites were facilitated by the decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States. The Supreme Court held that the State laws disfranchising the Negroes were valid notwithstanding the Fifteenth Amendment because the disfranchisement was not based on race and colour. Similarly the Supreme Court held 1. Grandfather clause is so-called because it restricted the right to vote to a person whose grandfather had enjoyed it.

176 DR. BABASAHEB AMBEDKAR : WRITINGS AND SPEECHES that if the activities of the Ku Klux Klan prevented the Negro from exercising his electoral rights there was no redress: for the Fifteenth Amendment, while it prevented the States from interfering with the electoral rights, did not prevent interference by private bodies. What did the Republicans do ? Instead of amending the Constitution to give better and more effective guarantees to the Negroes, they agreed to recognize the Southern States and admit them to the Union, to grant general amnesty to the rebels and to withdraw the troops stationed therein leaving the Negroes to the tender mercy of their masters. As Mr. Apthekar says 1: “But the heoric fight of the Negro people and their allies for democracy, land and civil rights in the South was defeated chiefly as a result of shameful betrayal by the industrial and financial bourgeoise of the North. In 1877, the latter came to an understanding with the reactionary plantocracy of the South. Working through the reactionary wing of the Republican Party, the Northern big bourgeoise sold out the Revolution by giving the old slave oligarchy a free hand (home rule) in the Southern States. This ‘gentleman’s agreement’ meant disenfranchisement for the Negro, sharecropping peonage, lynch terrorism, and the loss of civil liberties and educational opportunities.” The story of the betrayal is not complete. It is necessary to add that if the Republicans were to carry their party opposition with the Democrats into the South, the Negro could still be saved from damnation. For it is the opinion of those who know that if the Whites of the South were divided into Republicans and Democrats as they are in the North there is hardly a State in the South which would not be largely controlled by the Negro voters. Even the Republicans will not do. The Republicans seem to have entered into a compact with the Democrats not to canvass for the votes of the Negroes. Indeed, the Republican Party in the South does not exist. It does not exist because it is afraid of having to take sides with the Negroes. The Untouchables cannot forget the fate of the Negroes. It is to prevent such treachery that the Untouchables have taken the attitude they have with regard to this “Fight for Freedom.” What is wrong in this ? Are they doing anything 1. The Negro in the Civil War, pp. 45-46.