Read Annihilation of Caste: The Annotated Critical Edition Online
Authors: B.R. Ambedkar
16
Lord (Arthur James) Balfour was a British conservative politician who served as Prime Minister between 1902 and 1905 and as Foreign Secretary between 1916 and 1919. It is not clear where Lord Balfour spoke these words, but there are other citations of this from the same period, each slightly differing in detail.
The World Review
(1936, 67) cites Balfour thus: “Lord Balfour has wisely said that ‘The human brain is as much an organ for seeking food as the pig’s snout.’ After all, the human brain is only an enlarged piece of the spinal column, whose first function is to sense danger and preserve life.”
17
These lines are from the poem “Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse” by Matthew Arnold (1822–88), English poet and literary critic, reflecting the inner conflict of the Victorian era between scientific progress on the one hand, and religion, identity and values on the other. Ambedkar cites Arnold in “Castes in India” (1916) as well, written during his years at Columbia University. It is possible that Ambedkar often turned to Arnold thanks to his mentor Dewey, who was fond of quoting him. According to S. Morris Eames (1969, xxxvii), Dewey’s essay “Poetry and Philosophy” (1890) begins with a long epigraph from Arnold. Eames says: “Dewey is appreciative of many of the insights of Matthew Arnold, and in later years he turns again and again to ideas he attributed to this poet and critic. Arnold once wrote that ‘poetry is a criticism of life’, and while Dewey thinks that poetry is more than this, he was influenced by Arnold’s view in transferring it into philosophy, for he later writes that philosophy ‘is inherently criticism’, and in his own method makes philosophy ‘a criticism of criticisms’.” This idea is also echoed by the Italian political thinker
Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937), a contemporary of Ambedkar: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear” (1971, 276).
If
the Communal Award of 16 August 1932 was a victory of sorts for those who sought to take social difference seriously in India, the Poona Pact of 24 September 1932 was a defeat. At a time of urgent political and ideological contestation over the future of India, the pact abruptly came in the way of more ambitious ways of fashioning a democracy that would suit a subcontinent made up essentially of caste, religious, regional and linguistic
minorities, what B.R. Ambedkar termed a “congeries of communities”.
1
This was a time when Ambedkar, with radical foresight, was trying to stymie the adoption of a first-past-the-post system, which he feared in the Indian context would result in a Hindu communal majority parading as a political majority. M.K. Gandhi, on the other hand, opposed special representation to every other community except the Muslims and the Sikhs. He argued that separate electorates “would simply vivisect and disrupt” Hinduism, and suggested that the Communal Award “will create a division in Hinduism which I cannot possibly look forward to with any satisfaction whatsoever”.
2
It was to oppose the political rights granted to the Untouchables by the Communal Award that Gandhi took a dramatic and coercive step—a fast unto death on 20 September 1932 that culminated in the Poona Pact only four days later.
Indian academia, its intelligentsia and the political establishment have remained, for the most part, indifferent to the complex workings of both the Communal Award and the Poona
Pact. (The few exceptions have mostly been followers of the Dalit movement.
3
) In nationalist histories, the Communal Award, which granted separate electorates not just to Untouchables but to Muslims, Sikhs,
Christians, Anglo-Indians, Europeans, landlords, labourers and traders, continues to be depicted as unambiguously divisive. Since
Annihilation of Caste
is in part a response to the disappointment Ambedkar felt over the Poona Pact, it is important to understand what it practically meant. What led to the Communal Award? What was the thrust of Gandhi’s opposition to it? What were the terms of the Poona Pact? Did the Congress honour these terms? The answers to these questions also hold the key to understanding Ambedkar’s vehement attack on not just the caste system, but on Hinduism itself and its founding texts, in
Annihilation of Caste
.
4
Indeed Ambedkar was so devastated that he also went on to write—thirteen years after the Poona Pact—the strongest indictment of the pact, Gandhi and the Congress in
What Congress and Gandhi Have Done to the Untouchables
.
The first Round Table Conference (RTC) was convened in London by the Labour government of Ramsay MacDonald from 12 November 1930 to 19 January 1931 to discuss the future constitution of India. Since Gandhi had initiated the Civil Disobedience Movement in 1930, the Congress abstained from the first round, which was eventually attended by Ambedkar and
Rettamalai Srinivasan representing the Untouchables,
M.A. Jinnah (among others) representing the Muslims, and representatives of various minority communities as well as of the princely states. However, by the time of the second RTC, Lord Irwin came to an agreement with the Congress, and it decided to attend the conference (from 7 September 1931 to 1 December 1931), with Gandhi as its representative.
At the conference, Gandhi impugned the leaders of the Muslim, Sikh, Untouchable and Christian communities,
ridiculing their claims to self-representation. While he eventually came around to accepting the communal scheme of representation for Sikhs and Muslims, Gandhi was particularly opposed to Ambedkar, who made a case for “separate electorates” for the
Depressed Classes. What for Ambedkar was a matter of securing the political rights of the Untouchables was for Gandhi a matter of religion. In a letter to
Sir Samuel Hoare, then Secretary of State for India, on 11 March 1932, he said: “For me the question of these classes is predominantly moral and religious. The political aspect, important though it is, dwindles into insignificance compared to the moral and religious issue.”
5
Ambedkar’s report on the seriousness with which Gandhi attended the conference is worth quoting at length:
I am sure I am not exaggerating or misrepresenting facts when I say that the Congress point of view at the Round Table Conference was that the Congress was the only party in India and that nobody else counted and that the British should settle with the Congress only. This was the burden of Mr Gandhi’s song at the Round Table Conference. He was so busy in establishing his own claim to recognition by the British as the dictator of India that he forgot altogether that the important question was not with whom the settlement should be made but what were to be the terms of that settlement. As to the terms of the settlement, Mr Gandhi was quite unequal to the task. When he went to London he had forgotten that he would have before him not those who go to him to obtain his advice and return with his blessings but persons who would treat him as a lawyer treats a witness in the box. Mr Gandhi also forgot that he was going to a political conference. He went there as though he was going to a Vaishnava Shrine singing Narsi Mehta’s songs. When I think of the whole affair I am wondering if any nation had ever sent a representative to negotiate the terms of a national settlement who was more unfit than Mr Gandhi.
6
Gandhi held on to the view that the Congress was the
sole representative of all Indians. In an article in
Harijan
on 21 October 1939, tellingly captioned “The Fiction of Majority”, he wrote with the conviction that only a Mahatma can summon:
I know that many have been angry with me for claiming an exclusive right for the Congress to speak for the people of India as a whole. It is not an arrogant pretension. It is explicit in the first article of the Congress. It wants and works for independence for the whole of India. It speaks neither for majority nor
minority. It seeks to represent all Indians without any distinction. Therefore those who oppose it should not count, if the claim for independence is admitted. Those who support the claim simply give added strength to the Congress claim … In other words and in reality, so far as India is concerned, there can only be political parties and no majority or minority communities. The cry of the tyranny of the majority is a fictitious cry.
7
In this piece, Gandhi goes on to mock all claims to minority rights, saying
Brahmins and zamindars (landlords) too could claim the minority tag.
Notwithstanding Gandhi’s opposition, the Communal Award of 16 August 1932 allotted, among other things, separate electorates and two votes to the Depressed Classes/Untouchables for twenty years, though Ambedkar had sought them only for ten years. Clause 9 of the Award read:
Members of the ‘Depressed Classes’ qualified to vote will vote in a general constituency. In view of the fact that for a considerable period these classes would be unlikely, by this means alone, to secure any adequate representation in the Legislature, a number of special seats will be assigned to them … These seats will be filled by election from special constituencies in which only members of the ‘Depressed Classes’ electorally qualified will be entitled to vote. Any person voting in such a special constituency will, as stated above, be also entitled to vote in a general constituency. It is intended that these constituencies should be formed in selected
areas where the Depressed Classes are most numerous, and that, except in Madras, they should not cover the whole area of the Province.
8
In these double-member c
onstituencies (DMCs), one member was to be selected from among Untouchables (or
Adivasis/
Scheduled Tribes as the case may be), and one from among the Hindus.
9
This meant, first, that Untouchables, and only Untouchables, would choose their representatives to legislatures. Second, they would be able to cast a second ballot to have a say in who among the caste Hindus was best suited—or least inimical—to represent Untouchable interests in a legislative body. Such safeguards were necessary, argued Ambedkar, since not only were Untouchables outnumbered by
savarnas (caste Hindus), sometimes to the tune of “one to ten”, they were also physically vulnerable to attacks by caste Hindus during elections—the kind of violence that continues to take place in most parts of India even today. Since the Untouchables did not enjoy civil, economic or religious rights on a par with the caste Hindus, and they were widely and routinely stigmatised, Ambedkar believed that a mere right to vote would do them no good, and that they would be subject to the manipulations and machinations of Hindus. The double vote, with the right to exclusively elect their own representatives, would ensure that the savarnas and the rest of society came to regard Untouchables as worthy of respect and dignity. Indeed, Untouchables would become politically consequential citizens—Dalits.
Gandhi’s response to the Communal Award was to deploy the most powerful weapon in his arsenal. He announced that he would fast—unto death—until the Award was revoked. The nation flew into panic. Gandhi’s lieutenant, C. Rajagopalachari, suggested that the “20th of September should be observed as a day of fasting and prayer all over India”.
10
The British government said it would revoke the Award only if Ambedkar agreed. At first, Ambedkar asked Gandhi to weigh in the truth: “If the Mahatma chooses to ask the Depressed Classes to make a choice between Hindu faith and possession of political power, I am quite sure that the Depressed Classes will choose political power and save the Mahatma from self-immolation.”
11
Ambedkar was making a point he had always made—about his unease with being told that the Untouchables belong to the ‘Hindu’ fold. “I’m not a part of the whole. I am a part apart,” he was to say as a member of the Bombay Legislative Assembly in 1939.
12
As Ambedkar stood his ground, the British Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald tried to reassure Gandhi that the provisions of the Communal Award did not in any way divide the Depressed Classes and the Hindus. In a letter dated 8 September 1932, he explained to Gandhi that “the Depressed Classes will remain part of the Hindu community and will vote with the Hindu electorate on an equal footing”. MacDonald pointed out that in the “limited number of special constituencies” meant to safeguard the “rights and interests” of the Untouchables, “the Depressed Classes will not be deprived of their votes in the general Hindu constituencies, but will have two votes in order that their membership of the Hindu community should remain unimpaired”. He further argued that such safeguards were not applicable to Muslims who “cannot vote or be a candidate in a general constituency, whereas any electorally qualified member of the Depressed Classes can vote in and stand for the general constituency”.
13
On 19 September, one day before the commencement of Gandhi’s fast, Ambedkar said, “I can never consent to deliver my people bound hand and foot to the Caste Hindus for generations to come.” He described Gandhi’s epic fast as an “extreme form of coercion”, a “foul and filthy act”, and a “vow of self-immolation”.
14
Gandhi nevertheless went ahead with his religious “vow”. Almost all the leaders of the national movement rallied behind him, and by implication, against Ambedkar. Gandhi’s son Devdas publicly begged Ambedkar to save his father’s life. Pleading with the Mahatma to relent, Ambedkar pointed out that should Gandhi die, it would “result in nothing but terrorism by his followers against the Depressed Classes all over the country”.
15
Vulnerable and hated and living on the margins of a society that routinely resorted to collective punishment against them, this was not a chance Ambedkar could, in good conscience, afford to take on behalf of the Untouchables. He had been placed in an impossible position, and forced into a decision that would haunt him for the rest of his life. On 24 September 1932, Ambedkar gave in and signed the Poona Pact as the principal signatory on behalf of the Depressed Classes, while the right-wing
Hindu Mahasabha leader,
Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya, represented Gandhi and the Hindus. Gandhi did not sign the pact.