An intellectual’s odyssey
The 1920s represent a transitional decade for B. R. Ambedkar from two points of view. First, while he had spent quite some time in the West in the 1910s and in the early 1920s, travelling back and forth between India, the USA, the UK and even Germany, he settled down in Bombay in the mid-1920s. Second, intellectually, while he had started to analyse caste in New York and London, as a student he started in the 1920s to also fight against caste. This fight oscillated between two poles—within the existing order or against it— and he finally moved from one pole to the other. This tension and evolution were evident from Ambedkar’s political thinking as well as from his social reform agenda. On the one hand, he was in favour of reserved seats for Dalits, but attracted by the separate electorate formula—which was to become his official stand in the early 1930s. On the other, he moved away from the legacy of Sanskritisation and mobilised all his energy in the name of equality. In parallel, he also stopped asking for temple entry. Ambedkar spent quite some time in London during the 1920s, and this informed his later work once he returned to India. In this chapter, however, I will focus on his changing thought process and action after his return, in the course of this transitional decade.
Reserved Seats or Separate Electorate?
In 1924, in his famous speech of Barshi Takli, Ambedkar envisaged all the possible strategies for emancipating Dalits from the oppression they were subjected to, ranging from emigration to changing of name, through conversion; but he came to the conclusion that the obtaining of political rights was finally the most important issue. Nevertheless, until the beginning of the 1930s, he favoured social reform at least as much as the struggle for such rights, and did not, in any case, come down in the political arena—except to be heard by the British as the representative of the Untouchables when the Raj organised rounds of consultations. And in this context, he hesitated between two political strategies: separate electorate or reserved seats—a formula he favoured until the 1930s.
Reserved seats were already requested by the few upper-caste reformers who catered to the needs of the Dalits, including the Depressed Classes Mission in Bombay, which had been founded in 1916 by a Brahmin reformer close to the Congress, Narayan Rao Chandavarkar. On 11 November 1917, Chandavarkar held a meeting in which he demanded that the Untouchables be granted a number of reserved seats in the legislative councils in proportion to their demographic weight. Two years later, Ambedkar was consulted by the Southborough Committee, the body which had been entrusted with redefining the electoral franchise within the framework of the constitutional reforms initiated by Montagu and Chelmsford. In his testimony, he explained that the real line of cleavage among the Hindus was set between the ‘touchables’ and Untouchables. He thus rejected an electoral system which would be based on territorial constituencies because the latter would then be in a minority and therefore deprived of representation; all the more so as the criteria on which basis the franchise had been defined were not in their favour. He adduced in support of this reasoning figures from the local authorities of five districts of the Bombay Presidency, where the Brahmins represented 9,077 voters, Marathas 4,741, Muslims 1,830 and Mahars 55.
To mitigate this imbalance, Ambedkar suggested, first of all, the lowering of the taxable rating level applied to the Untouchables. This would allow them to vote in larger numbers and would improve their political education by accelerating their integration in the electoral process. Above all, he recommended ‘either to reserve seats … for those minorities that cannot, otherwise, secure personal representation or grant communal electorates’. The two options then seemed equally valid to him. It was only in an appended document that Ambedkar emphasised the need for a ‘community electorate’
for the Untouchables. Finally, the Untouchables obtained, within the framework of the 1919 reform, only one representative in the Legislative Council of Bombay Presidency; an additional representative was appointed later in 1924. Ambedkar was to join the Council this way in 1927.
The political system of India was expected to be revised every ten years, and therefore the British began in 1928 to consult once again representatives of the various political and social groups to work out a new reform. The Simon Commission (named after its president) charged with these consultations, however, consisted only of British men. Shocked to see the Indians excluded from it, the Congress decided to boycott its meetings. But organisations of minorities (Muslims, Sikhs, etc.) and Dalit associations took part in them. Ambedkar submitted a memorandum on behalf of the Bahishkrit Hitakarini Sabha, set up immediately after his return from London. He argued in favour of a quota of seats for the Untouchables rather than for separate electorates. He asked for twenty-two seats in the Bombay assembly which counted for 140 (fifteen seats only would have been granted on the basis of their demographic weight) and the right to vote for every Untouchable adult. He explained, during his speech before a delegation of the Simon Commission at Poona, that in the case of universal suffrage not being granted for the Dalits, then he would campaign for separate electorates. He justified this position by resorting to arguments which he was not to use any more in the future—arguments which are clear indications that he still nurtured great hopes towards the upper castes and that he still had scruples which prevented him from severing his links with the social and political mainstream:
At any rate, this must be said with certainty that a minority gets a larger advantage under joint electorates than it does under a system of separate electorates. With separate electorates the minority gets its own quota of representation and no more. The rest of the house owes no allegiance to it and is therefore not influenced by the desire to meet the wishes of the minority. The minority is thus thrown on its own resources and as no system of representation can convert a minority into a majority, it is bound to be overwhelmed. On the other hand, under a system of joint electorates and reserved seats the minority not only gets its quota of representation but something more. For, every member of the majority who has partly succeeded on the strength of the votes of the minority if not a member of the minority will certainly be a member for the minority.
Ambedkar’s reservations about separate electorates stem also here from his fears that such a reform would divide the Indian nation: ‘I do contemplate and I do desire, the time when India shall be one; and I believe that a time will come when, for instance, all these things will not be necessary; but all that would depend upon the attitude of the majority towards the minority’.
(Excerpted with permission from William Gould, Santosh Dass, and Christophe Jaffrelot’s ‘Ambedkar in London’; published by Rupa Publications)
