I would like you to consider this business, whether it is reservation or any other kind of safeguard for the minority, objectively. There is some point in having a safeguard of this type of any other type where there is autocratic rule or foreign rule. As soon as you get something that can be called political democracy, then this kind of reservation, instead of helping the party to be safeguarded and aided, is likely actually to turn against it. But where there is a third party, or where there is a n autocratic monarch, or some other ruler, it is possible that these safeguards may be good. Perhaps the monarch may play one off against the other or the foreign ruler. But where you are up against a full-blooded democracy, if you seek to give safeguards to minority, and a relatively small minority, you isolate it. May be you protect it to a slight extent, but at what cost? At the cost of isolating it and keeping it away from the main current in which the majority is going,-I am talking on the political plane of course-at the cost of forfeiting that inner sympathy and fellow-feeling with the majority. Now, of course, if it is a democracy, in the long run or in the short run, it is the will of the majority that will prevail. Even if you are limited by various articles in the Constitution to protect the individual or the group, nevertheless, in the very nature of things in a democracy the will of the majority will ultimately prevail. It is a bad thing for any small group or minority to make it appear to the world and to the majority that “we wish to keep apart from you, that we do not trust you, that we look to ourselves and that therefore we want safeguards and other things“. The result is that they may get one anna in the rupee of protection at the cost of the remaining fifteen annas. That is not good enough looked at from the point of view of the majority either. It is all very well for the majority to feel that they are strong in numbers and in other ways and therefore they can afford to ride rough-shod over the wishes of the minority. If the majority feels that way, it is not only exceedingly mistaken, but it has not learnt any lesson from history, because, however big the majority, if injustice is done to minorities, it rankles and it is a running sore and the majority ultimately suffers from it. So, ultimately the only way to proceed about it-whether from the point of view of the minority or from he point of view of the majority-is to remove every barrier which separates them in the political domain so that they may develop and we may all work together. That does not mean, of course, any kind of regimented working. They may have many ways of thinking; they may form groups; they may form parties, but not on the majority or minority or religious or social plane, but on other planes which will be mixed planes, thus developing the habit of looking at things is mixed groups and not in separate groups. At any time that is obviously a desirable thing to do. In a democracy it becomes an essential thing to do, because if you do not do it, then trouble follows- trouble both for the minority and for the majority, but far more for the minority.
