In juridical terms, ownership of a person, he conceded, made slavery worse than untouchability. But in practice, the slave, being property with value, gave the master an incentive to take ‘care of the health and well being of the slave’. Whereas, ‘No one is responsible for the feeding, housing and clothing of the untouchable.’ Furthermore, ‘slavery was never obligatory’, it only ‘permitted’ one to hold another as slave. ‘But untouchability is obliged,’ he wrote. A Hindu ‘is ‘enjoined’ to hold another as untouchable’, a ‘compulsion [that the Hindu] cannot escape’.
