Read Annihilation of Caste: The Annotated Critical Edition Online
Authors: B.R. Ambedkar
Under the Poona Pact, Untouchables had to give up their separate electorate and be part of joint electorates with Hindus. They also had to give up the unique political weapon Ambedkar had won for them—the second vote that would give them a say in the election of caste-Hindu candidates in their constituency. All that remained for
Scheduled Castes was a reserved seat whose holder would be selected by the general population. The Scheduled Caste representative would, in effect, be selected by the very caste-Hindu majority that had already proved its hostility to Scheduled Caste political aspirations.
What was the immediate fallout of the 1932 arrangement? Once the provisions of the Poona Pact were incorporated into the
Government of India Act of 1935—the Constitution of British India—elections to the provincial legislatures took place in February 1937. This was to be the first test of the efficacy of the Poona Pact, whose key provision lay in Clause 2:
Election to these seats shall be by joint electorates subject, however, to the following procedure:
All the members of the Depressed Classes, registered in the general electoral roll in a constituency, will form an electoral college, which will elect a panel of four candidates belonging to the Depressed Classes for each of such reserved seats by the method of the single vote; the four persons getting the highest number of votes in such primary election shall be candidates for election by the general electorate.
16
While the novel concept of ‘primaries’ was thus introduced for the first time in India, the vague wording left a lot to interpretation. The seemingly innocuous “panel of four”, Ambedkar felt, could be misused and abused. Should the panel have a minimum of four members or a maximum of four candidates? And what would be the method of voting in the final election? To address such questions a committee, headed by Sir Laurie Hammond, was constituted. According to Ambedkar, the Hindus maintained that the panel of four was intended to be a minimum. This meant that if four candidates were not forthcoming or available, there could be no primary election, and thus there would be no election for the reserved seat. In his deposition before the
Hammond Committee, Ambedkar asserted that four in the Poona Pact meant “not more than four”, and not “not less than four”. Ambedkar believed that a baggy panel of four meant the Hindus would be at an advantage “to capture the seat for an election of such a representative of the Untouchable candidate who would be their nominee and who would be most willing to be the tool of the Hindus”.
17
That is, the Hindus would ensure a weak and pliable Untouchable candidate in the panel, and further on elect such a person. Suppose there was no panel, and only Untouchables got to decide who would represent them, such a candidate, according to Ambedkar, “would be the staunchest representative of the Untouchables and
worst from the standpoint of the Hindus”.
18
Furthermore, the representative of the Hindus deposing to the Hammond Committee claimed that the “compulsory distributive” vote was the most appropriate, while Ambedkar argued for the “cumulative” system of voting. Under compulsory distributive vote, “the elector has also as many votes as there are seats, but he can give only one vote to any one candidate”. This means the Untouchable voter cannot cast all four votes to one favoured candidate. This could happen under the cumulative system, where “the elector has as many votes as there are seats” and “may give them all to one candidate or he may distribute them over two or more candidates as he may desire”.
19
Ambedkar argued that under the distributive mechanism the possibilities of manipulation were higher:
Their main object was to flood the election to the seat reserved for the Untouchables in the joint electorate by using the surplus votes of the Hindus in favour of the Untouchable candidate who happens to be their nominee. The object was to outnumber the Untouchable voters and prevent them from electing their own nominee. This cannot be done unless the surplus votes of the Hindu voters were diverted from the Hindu candidate towards the Untouchable candidates. There is a greater chance of the diversion of these surplus votes under the distributive system than there is under the cumulative system.
20
In Ambedkar’s reckoning, if the caste Hindus were given a clearer choice under the cumulative system, they would prefer to fight their battles with one another—a caste-Hindu voter could give all votes to his favourite caste-Hindu candidate as against rival caste-Hindu candidates, and leave the Untouchable candidates untouched. But if they were forced to give only one vote per candidate, in the distributive system, their hatred for a radical Untouchable candidate would outweigh, in their minds, the preference for a second, third or fourth caste-Hindu
candidate.
After hearing out all views, the Hammond Committee ruled that the number four in the primaries panel is “neither a maximum nor a minimum, but an optimum”. It further ruled that “if there is only one candidate as the result of the primary election, or on account of subsequent withdrawals, that candidate should be returned unopposed for the reserved seat at the final election”.
21
Another crucial decision was that the “primary election should take place two months before the final election”, thus providing ample scope for the caste Hindus to back their preferred Untouchable candidate.
The tug of war since the Round Table Conferences was about who would have the ‘final say’. The caste Hindus wanted to have the final say in the lives of Untouchables even in the new paradigms of electoral democracy and representation. However, given that they were a persecuted
minority, the Untouchables—represented by Ambedkar—wanted to reverse this historical logic and have a final say in the lives of caste Hindus, the majority community. For the Hindus, led by Gandhi, this radical idea was anathema. Ambedkar reflects on this conundrum in
Annihilation of Caste
by comparing the Communal Award with the republican constitution of Rome, where he argues that the patricians and the plebeians “formed two distinct castes”. The plebeians “never could get a plebeian consul who could be said to be a strong man, and who could act independently of the patrician consul”. Ambedkar likens the manner in which the plebeians lose their rights to how Untouchables lose out in the Poona Pact—the caste Hindus and patricians offer some concessions but retain a final say in the lives of Untouchables and plebeians respectively.
22
Although Ambedkar conceded that the number of seats Untouchables got after the Poona Pact had almost doubled compared to what he had bargained for in the Communal Award,
23
he was alert to its true import. Ambedkar lamented the
loss of the “priceless privilege” of the double vote whose “value as a political weapon was beyond reckoning”:
No caste-Hindu candidate could have dared to neglect the Untouchable in his constituency or be hostile to their interest if he was made dependent upon the votes of the Untouchables. Today the Untouchables have a few more seats than were given to them by the Communal Award. But this is all that they have. Every other member is indifferent, if not hostile. If the Communal Award with its system of double voting had remained the Untouchables would have had a few seats less but every other member would have been a member for the Untouchables. The increase in the number of seats for the Untouchables is no increase at all and was no recompense for the loss of separate electorates and the double vote.
24
At the heart of Ambedkar’s approach to democracy was the question of how to ensure that all minorities—especially, but not only, the Untouchables—could successfully bargain for adequate protections. Democracy, in theory, was premised on the idea of ‘one person, one value’ and hence ‘one person, one vote’. But Untouchables, treated as lesser humans, were not accorded the same value as Touchables. To make democracy substantive in a caste-differentiated society, therefore, it required modification. In such a redesigned democracy, the value of a devalued Untouchable had to be deliberately raised through special provisions such as the double vote or the adoption of the principle of reservation, or both.
In the 1937 elections, there were 151 reserved seats
25
from which only Untouchables could be elected. The Congress won seventy-eight of these, and in Ambedkar’s words, it “left only 73 seats to be filled by true and independent representatives of the Untouchables” (BAWS 9, 92). For, he argued, the majority of seventy-eight seats won by the Congress “were won with the help of Hindu votes and they do not therefore in any way represent
the Scheduled Castes” (BAWS 9, iii). Significantly, the Congress, despite its financial muscle, lost out to non-Congress Untouchable candidates in Bombay and Bengal, where the Dalit movement was strong. Ambedkar formed the Independent Labour Party only five months before the February 1937 election, despite which the ILP “obtained an astonishing degree of success. Out of the 15 seats assigned to the Scheduled Castes in Bombay Presidency it captured 13 and in addition it won 2 general seats”.
26
More crucially, according to Ambedkar, the Congress provincial ministries across the country decided not to offer any cabinet posts to a single one of the seventy-eight Untouchable legislators. At the Round Table Conferences, Ambedkar had “pressed the claim of the Untouchables for the recognition of their right to representation in the Cabinet with the same emphasis” as he had done for “the recognition of their right to representation in the Legislature”.
27
When
Narayan Bhaskar Khare,
28
the Prime Minister of the Congress ministry in the
Central Provinces, formed a Cabinet with
R.G. Agnibhoj, an Untouchable, as one of his ministers, the Congress Working
Committee met in Wardha and passed a resolution on 26 July 1938 condemning Khare. Ambedkar says:
Dr Khare openly said that according to Mr Gandhi the act of indiscipline consisted in the inclusion of an Untouchable in the Ministry. Dr Khare also said that Mr Gandhi told him that it was wrong on his part to have raised such aspirations and ambitions in the Untouchables and it was such an act of bad judgement that he would never forgive him. This statement was repeatedly made by Dr Khare from platforms. Mr Gandhi has never contradicted it.
29
In 1942, an Untouchable member of the Congress, having attended the All-India Scheduled Castes Conference, wrote a letter to Gandhi and signed it as “Five Questions by a
Harijan M.L.A.” He sought to know from Gandhi if in the future
constitution of India he would ensure the representation of Untouchables by agreeing “to fix the five seats from a Panchayat Board upwards to the State Council on population basis”; if, “in view of the backwardness of the Harijans”, Gandhi would advise the government to ensure that executive posts in the “Local Boards and Municipal Councils be held on communal rotation, so as to enable the Harijans to become Presidents and Chairmen”; if he would advise Congress ministries to ensure that Scheduled Caste legislators are made Cabinet ministers; and if he could “fix some percentage of seats for Harijans from District Congress Committee upwards to the Working Committee of the Congress”. Gandhi’s reply, given on 2 August 1942 in his mouthpiece
Harijan
, resorted to the logic of meritocracy used often by those opposed to any form of affirmative action:
The principle is dangerous. Protection of its neglected classes should not be carried to an extent which will harm them and harm the country. A cabinet minister should be a topmost man commanding universal confidence. A person after he has secured a seat in an elected body should depend upon his intrinsic merit and popularity to secure coveted positions.
30
Ambedkar also saw a pattern in the manner in which the Congress oversaw the selection of non-
Brahmin and Untouchable candidates:
From candidates who came from high caste Hindus, such as Brahmins and the allied communities, those with the highest qualifications were selected. In the case of the Non-Brahmins those with low qualifications were preferred to those with higher qualifications. And in the case of the Untouchables those with little or no qualifications were selected in preference to those who had.
31
He came to the conclusion that “the Congress sucked the juice out of the Poona Pact and threw the rind in the face of the Untouchables”.
32
The ghost of the Poona Pact was to haunt the man who knew how the caste Hindus would use its logic to ensure the defeat of the best of Dalits.
33
Thus the man who from 1946 to 1950 piloted the drafting of the Indian Constitution was humiliated twice at the hustings in independent India, both times by less able candidates that the Congress fielded. In the first ever polls to the Lok Sabha in 1951, contesting on the ticket of his party, the
Scheduled Castes Federation, from the reserved part of the double-member Bombay North constituency, Ambedkar was defeated by 14,374 votes by Narayan Sadoba Kajrolkar of the Congress. The Congress deliberately fielded a candidate who was a
Chambhar, the largest Untouchable caste after the Mahars in the region. He was also a known opponent of Ambedkar, a Mahar.
34
Kajrolkar had opposed Ambedkar on the Communal Award as well as over his call for conversion, saying “we are shocked at the advice given to us, Harijans, by our veteran leader Dr Ambedkar, to abandon the Hindu religion … It breaks our hearts to see…[that] Dr Ambedkar who gave us a prominent lead in the past, should ask us to commit suicide by abandoning our religion.”
35
When Ambedkar tried his luck in the 1954 by-election from Bhandara, Maharashtra, he lost again, this time to another Congress candidate,
Bhaurao Borkar, someone who earlier used to organise workers for the Scheduled Castes Federation, the party founded and led by Ambedkar.
Today, India boasts of having a system of political reservations that ensures that Scheduled Castes and
Scheduled Tribes are elected to all legislative bodies—from the panchayat upwards—in proportion to their share in the population. In the case of the Lok Sabha, the Lower House of Parliament, of its 543 seats, seventy-nine are reserved for Dalits, and forty-one for Adivasis.