In 30 Seconds
Story
In August 1932 the British Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald, exercising the arbitration the Round Table’s deadlock had reserved to him, published the Communal Award, the schedule by which the coming constitution’s provincial seats would be divided among India’s communities, and its most consequential line concerned the community at Hinduism’s own base. The depressed classes, the untouchables, were awarded what Ambedkar had demanded at London, separate electorates, their own voters choosing their own members for a term of years, and Gandhi, in his cell in Yeravda, announced that he would fast unto death against it. The three weeks that followed, ending in the Poona Pact of 24 September 1932, produced the strangest of the freedom struggle’s settlements, an agreement signed to save one signatory’s life, expanding the representation of the poorest Indians several fold, and leaving both principals persuaded, with reason, that they had lost.
The quarrel beneath the schedule was the deepest in Indian society. To Ambedkar, the award was the untouchables’ first political property, the guarantee that their spokesmen would owe election to their own people and not to caste Hindu majorities who had never chosen an independent untouchable voice, and he held Gandhi’s objection to be, at bottom, the Congress claim to speak for those it had not freed. To Gandhi, separate electorates for the depressed classes were of a different kind from all others, a vivisection, as he wrote, that would statutorily fix the untouchables outside the Hindu fold forever, ending the possibility of the reform he held Hinduism owed, and his fast, announced from prison for 20 September, was aimed, he insisted, not at Ambedkar but at caste Hindu conscience. Critics then and since have pressed the harder description, that a fast unto death by the age’s most beloved man left the untouchables’ leader no free choice at all, and Ambedkar said as much, in the negotiation and for the rest of his life, describing the coercion in words that still burn.
The country’s response gave the fast its double character. As the Mahatma weakened at Yeravda, temples that had barred untouchables for centuries threw open their doors by the hundred, caste Hindus dined publicly with Bhangis, and the week’s extraordinary theatre of expiation was, depending on the observer, the conscience Gandhi had summoned or the panic he had manufactured. In the jail yard the negotiators worked against the fast’s clock, Sapru and Jayakar shuttling, Malaviya presiding, Ambedkar driving the terms upward with the leverage the emergency gave him, and the pact signed on 24 September traded the award’s separate electorates for a doubled portion, one hundred and forty eight reserved seats in the provinces against the award’s seventy one, eighteen percent of the central seats, primary elections in which depressed class voters would themselves shortlist the candidates, and pledges on services and education, joint electorates preserved, the fold formally unbroken. MacDonald amended the award accordingly, Gandhi broke his fast with Tagore singing at his bedside, and the campaign against untouchability that followed, the Harijan Sevak Sangh, the weekly Harijan, the temple entry tours, absorbed his next years.
The pact’s afterlife has been argued in India ever since, and honestly requires both ledgers. Reserved seats with joint electorates became the republic’s own system, written into the Constitution Ambedkar drafted, and the guarantee of scheduled caste presence in every legislature descends from Poona. Yet Ambedkar’s critique also proved durable, that in joint electorates the general voters, overwhelmingly caste Hindu, decide which scheduled caste candidate wins, selecting, he charged, for accommodation rather than independence, and his conclusion, that the pact had given his people numbers and taken their voice, carried him by 1935 to the Yeola declaration, that he had been born a Hindu but would not die one, the road that ended at Buddhism. The fast had preserved the fold on paper. Whether it preserved or foreclosed the deeper reconciliation, the two men’s unfinished argument, the next chapter’s subject, has outlived them both.
