This would mean that if the Public Service Commission say that mew passing University or other Examination is the final criterion of merit, that will have to remain there irrespective of the fact that the State Legislature or Parliament thinks otherwise. I have always contended that these University qualifications have been made a fetish by the British Government because they wanted to reduce the Indian Nation to a clerkdom. There is no other criterion still thought of by our present Government. This is most unfortunate. People’s capacities cannot be measured by mere passing of examinations or obtaining the highest possible marks. But those communities who have had the advantage of English education, because they were prepared to be more servile than the rest, think it is a preserve of theirs, and whenever anybody gets up and speaks on behalf of the millions who have had no chances of education, they consider it as a threat to their monopoly on the part of the rest of the communities and accuse the advocates as communal and communally minded. There is no communalism in this. Neither I nor anybody who speaks on their behalf want any particular community to dominate, where as those who oppose this move are interested only in particular communities. They want to preserve communalism while accusing us of communalism because they have had the advantage of education which they fear will be taken away. They think and urge that merit is or can be tested only by examinations. But so far as the masses of the country are concerned, the millions of our populations who have not had even the chance to get primary school education, they have no place so far as the public services are concerned, so long as the present system lasts.
