"Still It Goes On"

In New Delhi one morning last week, a plump, bespectacled little man in a conspicuously Western suit rose before India's bored Constituent Assembly. Dr. Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, Law Minister and chairman of the constitutional drafting committee, was proposing the eleventh of the new Indian Constitution's 315 articles: "Untouchability is abolished and its practice in any form is forbidden. The enforcement of any disability arising out of untouchability shall be an offense punishable according to law."

The chairman announced that Article 11 was passed without opposition. The chamber came alive resounding with handclapping and shouts of "Mahatma Gandhi Ki Jai! (Victory to Mahatma Gandhi)." In 1931, Gandhi had said: "I would far rather that Hinduism died than that untouchability lived." Now, ten months after his death, Gandhi had won a victory he would have cherished as much as India's freedom.

Abolition was also a triumph for Untouchable Dr. Ambedkar. Years ago, Columbia-educated Ambedkar, appointed to an official post by the Gaekwar of Baroda, was overwhelmed by humiliation and forced to resign. "Papers had to be flung to me," he once said of this experience, "and the carpet had to be rolled back lest higher castes stood on the same material as I did."

Nationwide abolition of untouchability will not go into effect until the constitution does. It would not end the problem. One assemblyman remarked: "It is like declaring lying unconstitutional. Everyone says he's against it, but still it goes on and no law by itself can stop it."

According to official estimates, there are 45 million Untouchables in India and slightly less than three million in Pakistan. Their touch, their shadow, even their mere presence is considered polluting by some caste Hindus. In some villages they must wait by the well, pot in hand, till a charitable upper-caste Hindu (standing at a careful distance) pours some water for them. Occasionally an Untouchable will gather enough money to hire an upper-caste villager to draw his water for him regularly. Caste Hindu employers sometimes wrap up the money to be paid Untouchable workers, drop the pay into their hands (see cut).

Last week in New Delhi's Bhangi colony, where municipal sweepers are lodged and where Mahatma Gandhi once lived, one turbaned Untouchable said: "Thirty years ago, if I entered a shop, I had to stand apart from other customers; if I touched a piece of cloth, I had to buy it. Now I can go anywhere and my children go to school, but I am still a sweeper, and my pay of 65 rupees a month does not buy me what 20 used to." The sweeper had not even heard of the Constituent Assembly, which was sitting only three miles from his mud hut. Told about the abolition of untouchability, he said sourly: "I would like to see the day when some of these words are turned into action."

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