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on the corner of the platform, and he became so enraged, so angry, that he tried to take the microphone away from my hand and fell from the platform. He fell twenty feet from the platform and survived.
He was the president of the conference and he wanted me not to speak at all. I had to tell the one hundred thousand people who had gathered for the conference that if they wanted me to speak, they should raise their hands, so that the Shankaracharya could see whether people wanted to hear me or not. When he saw a hundred thousand hands raised in favor of me, I said to him, "This cancels you as a president. I don't care now about you. The people who are here want to listen to me, and you can go and jump in any well that you want to."
Since then he has been angry -- twenty years! If he comes here, it will be a delicious moment for you all. But he has to come with the negative AIDS certificate. And that he cannot bring, because it will be below his dignity even to ask for his blood to be checked, he is such an egoist. But these egoists have been dominating humanity for centuries, and still they go on dominating.
Rather than arresting him, the government has arrested those two hundred harijans who were trying to enter the Nath Dwara temple. The government's act is absolutely unconstitutional. The constitution gives equality to everybody as a birthright. If the government wanted to be legal and constitutional, then the people who were preventing the entry of harijans, like the Shankaracharya and the priests of Nath Dwara, they should be arrested. But what an irony! Those poor two hundred harijans have been arrested to protect the vested interests of the higher, richer Hindu society.
I am simply amazed that harijans go on remaining part of the Hindu society. For ten thousand years at least they have been exploited; they are the most exploited and oppressed part of humanity. They should get out of Hinduism, there is no need of any `ism'. They don't have to be Hindus. It is so undignified that the Hindu scriptures deny them the right even to read the scriptures; the Hindu scriptures forbid them to worship in the temples; they are even forbidden
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