Vol. 9 · pages 241–245

212 DR. BABASAHEB AMBEDKAR : WRITINGS AND SPEECHES The Congress promises to do wonders for the servile classes— the Congress speaks of masses, it ought really to speak of them as the servile classes held in bondage by the governing classes—when Swaraj comes. It says that it would like to make revolutionary changes but it has no power to make them and it must wait for Swaraj. It is this glib talk which goes to deceive the gullible foreigner. Leaving aside the boast and bluster which lie behind the statement, one may ask what really can happen if India does become a sovereign and an independent state ? One thing is certain. The governing class will not disappear by the magic wand of Swaraj. It will remain as it is and having been freed from the incubus of British Imperialism will acquire greater strength and vigour. It will capture power as the governing classes in every country do. In short, Swaraj will not be government by the people but it will be a government run by the governing class and in the absence of Government by the people, government for the people will be what the governing class will choose to make of it. What will the governing class do when India becomes a sovereign and independent state ? Some hope that they will undertake reform of tenancy laws, enlarge factory legislation, extend primary education, introduce prohibition and train people to ply charkha, construct roads and canals, improve currency, regulate weights and measures, open dispensaries and undertake other measures to ameliorate the condition of the servile classes. No one from the servile class can be very enthusiastic about such a programme. In the first place, there is nothing very great in it. In the world of today, no governing, class can omit to undertake reforms which are necessary to maintain society in a civilized state. Personally, I have grave doubts about the governing class in India coming forward to carry out even such a modest programme of social amelioration. Most people forget that what leads the Congress today to mouth such a programme is the desire to show that the Congress is better than the British Bureaucracy. But once the bureaucracy is liquidated, will there be the same incentive to better the lot of the masses ? I entertain very grave doubts on the point. Apart from this, is social amelioration the be all and end-all of Swaraj ? Speaking for the servile classes, I have no doubt that what they expect to happen in a sovereign and free India is a complete destruction of Brahmanism as a philosophy of life and as a social order. If I may say so, the

213 WHAT CONGRESS AND GANDHI HAVE DONE TO THE UNTOUCHABLES : A PLEA TO THE FOREIGNERS servile classes do not care for social amelioration. The want and poverty which has been their lot is nothing to them as compared to the insult and indignity which they have to bear as a result of the vicious social order. Not bread but honour, is what they want. The question therefore is : Will the governing classes in India having captured the machinery of the State, undertake a programme for the reform of the social order as distinguished from a programme of social amelioration ? The statement by Congressmen that Congress can do wonders if only India was a sovereign and an independent State, supposing that it is an honest aspiration and not mere propaganda, proceeds on the assumption that for a man to do what he wants, nothing more is necessary than power. Such a belief is not only pitiable but is really a dangerous illusion. Those who are inclined to cherish such an illusion forget that there are serious limitations on sovereignty, no matter how absolute it is. None has described these limitations in more telling language than Dicey. In his Law of the Constitution, he says:— “The actual exercise of authority by any sovereign whatever, and notably by Parliament, is bounded or controlled by two limitations. Of these the one is an external, the other is an internal limitation. “The external limit to the real power of a sovereign consists in the possibility or certainty that his subjects or a large number of them, will disobey or resist his laws. “This limitation exists even under the most despotic monarchies. A Roman Emperor, or a French King during the middle of the eighteenth century, was (as is the Russian Czar at the present day) in strictness a “sovereign” in the legal sense of that term. He had absolute legislative authority. Any law made by him was binding, and there was no power in the empire or kingdom which could annul such law... But it would be an error to suppose that the most absolute ruler who ever existed could in reality make or change every law at his pleasure... “The authority, that is to say, even of a despot, depends upon the readiness of his subjects or of some portion of his subjects to obey his behests; and this readiness to obey, must always be in reality limited. This is shown by the most notorious facts of history. None of the early Caesars could at their pleasure have subverted the worship of fundamental institutions of the Roman world,.. The Sultan could not

214 DR. BABASAHEB AMBEDKAR : WRITINGS AND SPEECHES abolish Mahommedanism. Louis the Fourteenth at the height of his power could revoke the Edict of Nantes, but he would have found it impossible to establish the supremacy of Protestantism, and for the same reason which prevented James the Second from establishing the supremacy of Roman Catholicism....What is true of the power of a despot or of the authority of a constituent assembly is specially true of the sovereignty of Parliament; it is limited on every side by the possibility of popular resistance. Parliament might legally establish an Episcopal Church in Scotland; Parliament might legally tax the Colonies ; Parliament might without any breach of law change the succession to the throne or abolish the monarchy; but everyone knows that in the present state of the world the British Parliament will do none of these things. In each case widespread resistance would result from legislation which, though legally valid, is in fact beyond the stretch of Parliamentary power. * * * “The internal limit to the exercise of sovereignty arises from the nature of the sovereign power itself. Even a despot exercises his powers in accordance with his character, which is itself moulded by the circumstances under which he lives, including under that head the moral feelings of the time and the society to which he belongs. The Sultan could not if he would, change the religion of the Mahommedan world, but if he could do so it is in the very highest degree improbable that the head of Mahommedanism should wish to overthrow the religion of Mahomet; the internal check on the exercise of the Sultan’s power is at least as strong as the external limitation. People sometimes ask the idle question why the Pope does not introduce this or that reform ? The true answer is that a revolutionist is not the kind of man who becomes a Pope, and that the man who becomes a Pope has no wish to be a revolutionist..” None can gainsay the truth of what Dicey has said. What the governing class may do depends not so much upon the degree of its sovereignty as upon what Dicey calls the external and internal limitations in sovereignty. Of these two, if the failure to do good arises out of the external limitations, nobody need blame the governing class. The fear of external limitations blocking progress need not cause much apprehension. For it is the internal limitations of the governing class that have a greater determining force than the external limitations. Progress depends more upon internal limitations of the governing class than upon external limitations. What

215 WHAT CONGRESS AND GANDHI HAVE DONE TO THE UNTOUCHABLES : A PLEA TO THE FOREIGNERS are the factors which determine these internal limitations ? The internal limitations are born out of the outlook, traditions, vested interests and the social philosophy of the governing class. The purpose of this discussion is to warn the foreigner that before believing what the Congress proposes to do for the servile classes, he should make it a point to ask: What is the outlook of the governing class ? What are its traditions ? What is its social philosophy ? To take the Brahmins first. Historically they have been the most inveterate enemy of the servile classes (Shudras and the Untouchables) who together constitute about 80 per cent of the total Hindu population. If the common man belonging to the servile classes in India is today so fallen, so degraded, so devoid of hope and ambition, it is entirely due to the Brahmins and their philosophy. The cardinal principles of this philosophy of Brahmanism are five: (1) graded inequality between the different classes ; (2) complete disarmament of the Shudras and the Untouchables; (3) complete prohibition of the education of the Shudras and the Untouchables ; (4) ban on the Shudras and the Untouchables occupying places of power and authority; (5) ban on the Shudras and the Untouchables acquiring property. (6) complete subjugation and suppression of women. Inequality is the official doctrine of Brahmanism and the suppression of the lower classes aspiring to equality has been looked upon by them and carried out by them, without remorse as their bounden duty. There are countries where education did not spread beyond a few. But India is the only country where the intellectual class, namely, the Brahmins not only made education their monopoly but declared acquisition of education by the lower classes, a crime punishable by cutting off of the tongue or by the pouring of molten lead in the ear of the offender. The Congress politicians complain that the British are ruling India by a wholesale disarmament of the people of India. But they forget that disarmament of the Shudras and the Untouchables was the rule of law promulgated by the Brahmins. Indeed, so strongly did the Brahmins believe in the disarmament of the Shudras and the Untouchables that when they revised the law to enable the Brahmins to arm themselves for the protection of their own privileges, they maintained the ban on the Shudras and the Untouchables as it was without lessening its rigour. If the large majority of people of India appear today to be

216 DR. BABASAHEB AMBEDKAR : WRITINGS AND SPEECHES thoroughly emasculated, spiritless, with no manliness, it is the result of the Brahmanic policy of wholesale disarmament to which they have been subjected for the untold ages. There is no social evil and no social wrong to which the Brahmin does not give his support. Man’s inhumanity to man, such as the feeling of caste, untouchability, unapproachability and unseeability is a religion to him. It would, however, be a mistake to suppose that only the wrongs of man are a religion to him. For the Brahmin has given his support to the worst wrongs that women have suffered from in any part of the world. Widows were burnt alive as sattees. The Brahmin gave his fullest support to Sattee, the burning alive of a widow. Widows were not allowed to remarry. The Brahmin upheld the doctrine. Girls were required to be married before 8 and the husband had the right to consummate the marriage at any time thereafter, whether she had reached puberty or not did not matter. The Brahmin gave the doctrine his strongest support. The record of the Brahmins as law givers for the Shudras, for the Untouchables and for women is the blackest as compared with the record of the intellectual classes in other parts of the world. For no intellectual class has prostituted its intelligence to invent a philosophy to keep his uneducated countrymen in a perpetual state of ignorance and poverty as the Brahmins have done in India. Every Brahmin today believes in this philosophy of Brahmanism propounded by his forefathers. He is an alien element in the Hindu Society. The Brahmin vis-a-vis Shudras and the Untouchables as foreign as the German is to the French, as the Jew is to the Gentile or as the White is to the Negro. There is a real gulf between him and the lower classes of Shudras and Untouchables. He is not only alien to them but he is also hostile to them. In relationship with them, there is no room for conscience and there is no call for justice. The Bania is the worst parasitic class known to history. In him the vice of money-making is unredeemed by culture or conscience. He is like an undertaker who prospers when there is an epidemic. The only difference between the undertaker and the Bania is that the undertaker does not create an epidemic while the Bania does. He does not use his money for production. He uses it to create poverty and more poverty by lending money for unproductive purposes. He lives on interest and