Read Annihilation of Caste: The Annotated Critical Edition Online
Authors: B.R. Ambedkar
However, Ambedkar, and Dalits today, would have been happier with more juice and less rind.
1
BAWS 4, 13.
2
Cited in BAWS 9, 78.
3
The demand to restore the double vote to Dalits and separate electorates has been made by both fringe and frontline Dalit groups—to no effect. In Tamil Nadu, the initiatives led by
Ravikumar in the mid-1990s, where eleven conferences were held demanding that the Communal Award be re-introduced, are documented in the film
One Weapon
(1997) by Sanjay Kak. The most vociferous attack on the Poona Pact in post-independence India was led by Kanshi Ram even before he founded the
Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) in 1984. On 24 September 1982, he catapulted onto the national stage by mourning the fiftieth anniversary of the signing of the Poona Pact. Less than a year before, Kanshi Ram—then relatively unknown—had founded the Dalit Shoshit Samaj Sangharsh Samiti (known as DS4) on the anniversary of Ambedkar’s death, 6 December 1981. His frontal attack on the Poona Pact, through sixty simultaneous denunciation programmes from Poona to Jalandhar, made Prime Minister
Indira Gandhi abandon her plans to commemorate the occasion. Kanshi Ram believed that it was the Poona Pact that had turned elected Dalit representatives into lackeys of the Congress party. He called them chamchas (stooges), and termed the post-Poona Pact era the ‘Chamcha Age’. For Kanshi Ram, the best representative of Congress-reared chamchas was Jagjivan Ram—projected by Gandhi and the Congress as the ‘
Harijan face’ of their party—who eventually rose to become Deputy Prime Minister. Till date, the BSP remains the only mainstream political party that speaks unambiguously against the Poona Pact and Gandhi.
4
Those keen on an exhaustive engagement with the Communal Award and the Poona Pact would benefit by reading Ambedkar’s 1945 classic,
What Congress and Gandhi Have Done to the Untouchables
(BAWS 9). The essays of
Ravinder Kumar (1985) and
Upendra Baxi (1979, 1995) may also be consulted. For a Gandhian account of the Poona Pact, see his secretary Pyarelal’s
volume (1932), which, Ambedkar says “bears the picturesque and flamboyant title of
The Epic Fast
. The curious may refer to it. I must, however, warn him that it is written by a Boswell and has all the faults of Boswelliana” (BAWS 9, 87).
5
Cited in BAWS 9, 78.
6
BAWS 1, 351–2.
7
CWMG 77, 5.
8
BAWS 9, 81.
9
Baxi explains the workings of a DMC: “On counting of votes, the leading
Scheduled Caste or Tribe candidate got the reserved seat. Thereafter, all the other candidates, including the scheduled groups, were considered to be in competition for the general seat, which was awarded to the candidate who polled the largest number of votes. Thus, if the scheduled groups polled the largest number of votes in the second category the system will produce two of their representatives, instead of one as in the system of reserved constituency” (1979, 19). Even the Poona Pact worked on the basis of such double-member constituencies, and these continued to operate in India till 1961, when they were abolished after two
Scheduled Tribe candidates “got higher votes than the two non-tribal candidates and were declared elected” (Baxi 1979, 19), resulting in the defeat of the Congress stalwart and future President of India
V.V. Giri from the Parvatipuram constituency in Andhra Pradesh in 1959 to Dippala Suri Dora. Giri contested this ‘
injustice’ in the
Supreme Court, which saw nothing wrong with a tribal candidate winning the confidence of the general electorate. As Baxi puts it, “Giri’s election petition, in which he even argued that [the] reservations policies infringe the fundamental right guaranteed under Article 14, was negatived by the Supreme Court in 1959.” The Congress-dominated Parliament then decided to do away with DMCs through the Two-Member Constituencies (Abolition) Act, 1961, putting an end to ninety-one such Lok Sabha constituencies, which were subsequently delimited and converted to single-member constituencies.
10
Pyarelal 1932, 19.
11
BAWS 9, 326.
12
BAWS 10, 166.
13
BAWS 9, 85.
14
Ibid., 253. 259, 312.
15
Ibid., 316.
16
For the full text of the Poona Pact, see ibid., 88–9
17
Ibid., 92.
18
Ibid., 92.
19
Ibid., 92.
20
Ibid., 92.
21
Cited in Khan 1937, 319.
22
See AoC, 2.20, 3.3–3.6.
23
The Poona Pact gave the Untouchables 148 seats, while the Communal Award had given them seventy-eight.
24
Ibid., 90.
25
While 148 was the number agreed upon in the Poona Pact, three seats had to be added to make adjustments to accommodate Bihar and Orissa.
26
Ibid., iii.
27
Ibid., 95.
28
It is worth noting that Khare had been among those who delivered a presidential address to the
Jat-Pat Todak Mandal. See Note 16 to AoC Preface.
29
BAWS 9, 98.
30
CWMG 83, 119.
31
BAWS 9, 101.
32
Ibid., 103.
33
The Poona Pact continues to haunt Dalits and Dalit-led political parties. While pliable candidates can contest and win with a ticket from any of the mainstream parties—Congress, Bharatiya Janata Party, Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam or the communist parties—it took many defeats before
Bahujan Samaj Party stalwarts Kanshi Ram and
Mayawati could win elections, even from reserved constituencies. Even today, it is rare for a Dalit candidate to win from a general, non-reserved constituency—irrespective of the party she represents. In fact, this has not been possible even at the height of the BSP’s popularity in Uttar Pradesh. During the 2007 assembly elections in the state, the BSP fielded only four of its ninety-three Dalit candidates in general constituencies. The non-Dalit vote in a general constituency does not easily transfer
to a Dalit, it seems, as all four lost; meanwhile, sixty-two of the eighty-nine candidates fielded in reserved constituencies won. For an analysis of how the BSP managed to wrest power despite parliamentary democracy, see Anand (2008).
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Zelliot in Kothari 1973, 53.
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