In 30 Seconds
Story
Between 1930 and 1932 the British government convened in London, in three sessions around the literal round tables of St James’s Palace, the conference that was to write India’s next constitution with Indians at last in the room. The Round Table Conferences brought together, across their sittings, princes and untouchables, Muslim leaguers and Hindu sabhaites, women delegates, liberals, and for one session the Congress in the single person of Gandhi, and their tangled failure produced, in the end, both the Act of 1935 and the demonstration, useful to every party for opposite reasons, that Indians assembled by Britain could not agree on India.
The first conference, from November 1930, met while its indispensable guest sat in Yeravda jail, the Congress boycotting and civil disobedience burning at home, and the assembly of the others, some seventy four delegates, achieved despite itself one genuine transformation. The princes, led by Bikaner and Bhopal, declared themselves ready to join a federation of all India, states and provinces together, and the announcement, welcomed by the Muslim delegations as diluting the majority they feared and by the British as ballast for conservatism, made federation the frame of every scheme thereafter. But a constitution without the Congress was a treaty without the other belligerent, and the session adjourned into the negotiation the previous chapter told, the Gandhi Irwin Pact its true product.
The second conference, from September 1931, held the drama. Gandhi came as the Congress’s sole delegate, lodging in the East End’s Kingsley Hall among the poor, charming the Lancashire mill hands his boycott had idled, visiting the King in his loincloth, answering the ensuing fuss with the era’s best joke, that His Majesty had worn enough for both of them, and failing, in the committee rooms, at everything he had come to do. His claim that the Congress spoke for all India, including the minorities and the untouchables, met its organised refutation, the Muslim delegations under the Aga Khan holding to separate electorates, Ambedkar demanding them now for the depressed classes as well, the princes cooling, and the Minorities Committee dissolving into the pact of the minorities against the Congress claim, a combination the government, whose new National coalition had meanwhile lurched rightward at home, was under no temptation to overrule. Gandhi’s own retrospect gave the session its epitaph, that he had returned empty handed, and his warning to the plenary, that the alternative to a settlement was a struggle to the end, was answered within a fortnight of his landing, the new ordinances, the Working Committee arrested, the movement resumed and repressed.
The third conference, in the winter of 1932, was the shadow of a shadow, forty six delegates, no Congress, no Labour Party, the princes hedging, a clearing of files whose only function was to feed the drafting of the White Paper. The real decisions had moved elsewhere, to the Communal Award of August 1932, by which the British government, invoking the Indians’ failure to agree, imposed its own allocation of separate electorates, the Poona Pact that amended it under Gandhi’s fast, and the committees of Westminster, where the Joint Select Committee ground the conference’s residue, against Churchill’s diehard siege, into the Government of India Act of 1935.
The conferences’ audit has two honest columns. They failed in their announced purpose, no agreed constitution emerging, and the failure’s uses were cynical on every side, the British reading eternal division as the warrant for eternal arbitration, the minorities discovering that the veto was worth more at London’s table than votes at India’s, the Congress concluding that constitutions offered from above were traps and mass pressure the only pen that wrote. Yet the three winters also fixed the architecture within which everything to 1947 moved, federation as the form, safeguards and communal weightage as the currency, the untouchable question forced by Ambedkar onto the constitutional agenda it never afterward left, and Indian women, Begum Shah Nawaz and Radhabai Subbarayan at the tables, arguing their own franchise. And they left one photograph the century kept, the man in the shawl at the palace table among the frock coats, the empire’s guest and its besieger at once, the round table’s shape conceding, whatever its committees decided, that the head of the table was gone.
