I am very happy at the thought that I have spoken the mind of my honourable Friend the Prime Minister. Certainly if their efforts had succeeded, whatever they said, or whatever the Father of the Nation said had succeeded, no person could have been happier than myself. Do not conceive for a moment that I am a communal-minded man. When I oppose Hindustani I do so, not on account of my lack of love for those people, but because of my love and affection for them, the honest love that an honest man has for his brethren. Today if you speak for Hindustani, it will not be heard. You will be misrepresented, you will be misunderstood and therefore my honest advice to Maulana Hifzur Rahman is that he should wait for two or three years and he will find that he will have his Urdu language, he will have his Persian script; but today let him not try to oppose this, because our nation. the nation which has undergone so many sufferings is not in a mood. to hear him. I have heard him, I appreciate him and I know how he feels. I am myself a Persian scholar and I have read Urdu and I have loved it. I can say that I have written more in Persian and Urdu than my Friend Maulana Hifzur Rahman. I had a clerk for twenty years who was a Muhammadan, all along when there was fight between Hindus and Muslims at Jhansi and other places. So many of my friends came to me and said “You have got a Muslim clerk, turn him out I said “No, he is my brother, he is my own kith and kin and blood of my blood.” I believe that all Muslims who are in India and all those who are in Pakistan are my own blood, they are my own brethren. it is because of my abiding faith in my country and in myself that I am in the, Congress. The Congress does not-belong to Hindus or Muslims, it belongs to all. It may be surprising and strange that a person who claims that Hindi should be the national language of this country’ should at the same time claim to be a friend of Urdu or Persian. I have the widest sympathies……..
