Book Title: Jain Gazette 1905 10
Author(s): Jain Student Institute Kolhapur
Publisher: Jain Student Institute Kolhapur

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Page 21
________________ aggrandisement which was the aim of the Brahmin community that ruined the Mahratta power, had not died out and after a short check, it has now arisen polished and refined by the ingenuous sweet application of words and phrases from the liberal propagation. It seeks unity and nationality in the suppression of the non-Brahmins. It seeks equality and liberty in politics while at the same time the non-Brahmins are to be socially doomed to an everlasting inferiority and subordination. It seeks free and representative government while the nonBrahmin masses are as yet absolutely unaware of anything like corporate political existence. It seeks to remove in the name of good Government the only check on caste-animosities that we have, and on the whole its total activity consists in one-sided perversion of liberal ideas. This is the true description of the foremost among our public men but the vast majority of the inferior leaders who are the most powerful constituents and supporters of the party are far more selfish and calculating. Their liberalism is a political weapon against the power that has deprived them of their long ascendency and is bent upon levelling down the authority in whose presence they too sink into an equality with the lower communities. Had this attempt been genuine, it could not have stopped short of perfect social equality between man and man and woman and man. A true principle, whatever it is, knows no one-sidedness and whenever it does so, it must be discarded as a deception. It was this experience in Kolhapur that has exercised the leaders of the various communities during the past few years and has given such a disagreeable odour to public life here. The demand of the hitherto backward communities is for an equality in all directions—in state, in church__and in society, it ought to have been promptly and willingly met by a cordial readiness, on the part of our Brahmin friends to shake hands with the so-called tower classes on a footing of thorough-going, sincere, unreserved fraternity. As you all know, this was not to be and suicidal and desperate attempts are being made persisted in by the priestly community to counter

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