To this letter I sent the
following reply :
27th April 1936
I am in
receipt of your letter of the 22nd April. I note
with regret that the Reception Commitiee of the Jat-Pat-Todak Mandal " would prefer to postpone the Conference sine die " if I insisted upon
printing the address in toto. In
reply I have to inform you that I also would prefer to have the Conference
cancelled—1 do not like to use vague terms—if the Mandal insisted upon having
my address pruned to suit its circumstances. You may not like my decision. But
I cannot give up, for the sake of the honour of
presiding over the Conference, the liberty which every President must have in
the preparation of the address. I cannot give up
for the sake of pleasing the Mandal the duty which every President owes to the Conference over which he presides to give it a lead
which he thinks right and proper. The issue is one of principle and I feel I
must do nothing to compromise it in any way.
I would not have entered into any controversy as regards the propriety of
the decision taken by the Reception Committee. But as you have given certain
reasons which appear to throw the blame on me. I am bound to answer them. In the first place, I must dispel the notion
that the views contained in that part of the address to which objection has
been taken by the Committee have come to the Mandal as a surprise. Mr. Sant Ram, I am sure, will bear me out when I say that
in reply to one of his letters I had said that the real method of breaking up
the Caste System was not to bring about inter-caste
dinners and inter-caste marriages but to destroy
the religious notions on which Caste was founded and that Mr. Sant Ram in
return asked me to explain what he said was a novel
point of view. It was in response to this invitation from Mr. Sant Ram that I thought I ought to elaborate in my
address what I had stated in a sentence in my letter to him. You cannot,
therefore, say that the views expressed are new. At any rate, they are not new
to Mr. Sant Ram who is the moving spirit and the
leading light of your Mandal. But I go further and
say that I wrote this part of my address not merely
because I felt it desirable to do so. I wrote it
because I thought that it was absolutely necessary
to complete the argument. I am amazed to read that you characterize the portion of the speech to which your Committee objects as " irrelevant and off
the point ". You will allow me to say that I
am a lawyer and I know the rules of relevancy as well
as any member of your Committee. I most emphatically maintain that the portion
objected to is not only most relevant but is also
important. It is in that part of the address that I have discussed the ways and
means of breaking up the Caste System. It may be that the conclusion I have
arrived at as to the best method of destroying Caste is startling and painful.
You are entitled to say that my analysis is wrong. But you cannot say that in
an address which deals with the problem of Caste it
is not open to me to discuss how Caste can be destroyed.
Your other
complaint relates to the length of the address. I have pleaded guilty to the
charge in the address itself. But, who is really responsible for this ? I fear you have come rather late on the scene. Otherwise
you would have known that originally I had planned to write a short address for
my own convenience as I had neither the time nor the energy to engage myself in
the preparation of an elaborate thesis. It was the Mandal who asked me to deal
with the subject exhaustively and it was the Mandal which sent down to me a
list of questions relating to the Caste System and
asked me to answer them in the body of my address
as they were questions which were often raised in the controversy between the
Mandal and its opponents and which the Mandal found difficult to answer
satisfactorily. It was in trying to meet the wishes of the Mandal in this
respect that the address has grown to the length to which it has. In view of
what I have said I am sure you will agree that the fault respecting length of
the address is not mine.
I did not
expect that your Mandal would be so upset because I have spoken of the
destruction of Hindu Religion. I thought it was only fools who were afraid of
words. But lest there should be any misapprehension in the minds of the people
I have taken great pains to explain what I mean by religion and destruction of
religion. I am sure that nobody on reading my address could possibly
misunderstand me. That your Mandal should have taken a fright at mere words as "destruction of religion etc." notwithstanding the
explanation that accompanies .them does not raise
the Mandal in my estimation. One cannot have any respect or regard for men
who take the position of the Reformer and then refuse even to see the logical
consequences of that position, let alone following them out in action.
You will agree that I have never
accepted to be limited in any way in the
preparation of my address and the question as to what the address should or
should not contain was never even discussed between myself and the Mandal. I had always taken for granted that I was free
to express in the address such views as I held on
the subject Indeed until, you came to Bombay on the 9th April the Mandal did
not know what sort of an address I was preparing. It was when you came to
Bombay that I voluntarily told you that I had no desire to use your platform
from which to advocate my views regarding change of religion by the Depressed
Classes. I think I have scrupulously kept that promise in the preparation of
the address. Beyond a passing reference of an indirect character where I say that " I am sorry I will not be here. . . etc." I have said nothing about the subject in
my address. When I see you object even to such a passing and so indirect a
reference, I feel bound to ask ; did you think that
in agreeing to preside over your Conference I would be agreeing to suspend or
to give up my views regarding change of faith by the Depressed Classes ? If you did think so I must tell you that I am in no
way responsible for such a mistake on your part. If any of you had even hinted
to me that in exchange for the honour you were doing me by electing as
President, I was to abjure my faith in my programme
of conversion, I would have told you in quite plain terms that I cared more for
my faith than for any honour from you.
After your
letter of the 14th, this letter of yours comes as a surprize
to me. I am sure that any one who reads them will feel the same. I cannot
account for this sudden volte face on
the part of the Reception Committee. There is no difference in substance
between the rough draft which was before the Committee when you wrote your
letter of the 14th and the final draft on which the
decision of the Committee communicated to me in your letter under reply was
taken. You cannot point out a single new idea in the final draft which is not
contained in the earlier draft. The ideas are the same. The only difference is
that they have been worked out in greater detail in the final draft. If there
was anything to object to in the address you could have said so on the 14th.
But you did not. On the contrary you asked me to print off 1,000 copies leaving me the liberty to accept or not the verbal changes
which you suggested. Accordingly I got 1,000 copies printed which are now lying
with me. Eight days later you write to say that you object to the address and
that if it is not amended the Conference will be cancelled. You ought to have
known that there was no hope of any alteration being made in the address. I
told you when you were in Bombay that I would not alter a comma, that I would
not allow any censorship over my address and that you would have to accept the
address as it came from me. I also told you that the responsibility. for the
views expressed in the address was entirely mine and if they were not liked by
the Conference I would not mind at all if the Conference passed a resolution
condemning them. So anxious was I to relieve your Mandal from having to assume
responsibility for my views and also with the object of not getting myself entangled by too intimate
an association with your Conference, I suggested to
you that I desired to have my address treated as a sort of an inaugural address
and not as a Presidential address and that the Mandal
should find some one else to preside over the Conference, and deal with the
resolutions. Nobody could have been better placed to take a decision on the
14th than your Committee. The Committee failed to do that and in the meantime
cost of printing has been incurred which, I am sure, with a little more
firmness on the part of your Committee could have been saved.
I feel sure
that the views expressed in my address have little to do with the decision of
your Committee. I have reasons to believe that my presence at the Sikh Prachar Conference held at Amritsar
has had a good deal to do with the decision of the Committee. Nothing else can
satisfactorily explain the sudden volte
face shown by the Committee between the 14th and the 22nd April. I must not
however prolong this controversy and must request you to announce immediately
that the Session of the Conference which was to meet under my Presidentship is
cancelled. All the grace has by now run out and I shall not consent to preside
even if your Committee agreed to accept my address
as it is- in toto.
I thank you for your appreciation of the pains I have
taken in the
preparation of the address. I certainly have profited by the labour if no one
else docs. My only regret is that I was put to such hard labour at a time when my health was not equal to the strain it has
caused.
Yours sincerely,
Comments
Social Counter