Gandhi, Ambedkar and British policy on the communal award

Abstract

It has now become a fashion among many historians, notably from the West, to denounce Gandhi’s fast and the Poona Pact of 1932 as a great betrayal of the ‘Untouchables’. This view essentially overlooks the constant effort of British imperialism to divide the Indian people into a number of special-interest groups at loggerheads with each other and so weaken the National Movement. This paper weighs the critics’ assertions in the light of the British Government’s own statements and those of the leaders of the Depressed Castes. It is also forgotten that the Poona Pact greatly increased Depressed Castes’ representation; and that no separate electorates have been ever established in Western democracies to avoid majoritarian rule.

Gandhi and Ambedkar against Untouchability: A Reappraisal

“…Thakkar, proposing a programme of action that the HSS should undertake and the HSS Constitution of 1935, drafted by Gandhi, demonstrates that the two leaders’ programmes show much similarity in the intent and content of their welfare programmes towards the upliftment of ‘Harijans’. Similarly, the Poona Pact between Gandhi and Ambedkar defeated British attempts to divide Indian society by proposing caste-based separate electorates to create fissures in the Indian National Movement (Biswas, 2018a). The Pact greatly increased the representation of ‘Untouchables’ in the legislatures.…”

“…The Pact greatly increased the representation of ‘Untouchables’ in the legislatures. Ambedkar not only highly praised Gandhi, but also called him ‘Mahatma’ (Mitra, 1932: 253) for offering a much better deal for ‘Untouchables’ in terms of reserved seats than Ambedkar himself had asked or hoped for (Biswas, 2018a: 63–4).…”

Did the Poona Pact Disenfranchise the ‘Depressed Classes’? An Analysis of the 1936–1937 and 1945–1946 Provincial Elections

“…The bitterness also continues as part of that discourse. Three interrelated and overlapping issues constituted the core of their exchanges—the issue of representation of the ‘Depressed Classes’ (Biswas, 2018a), the removal of untouchability (Biswas, 2021) and the caste question (Biswas, 2018b). Among their partisan inheritors, there is ‘a standardised positioning of [Gandhi and Ambedkar] as each other’s enemies’, (Palshikar, 1996, p. 2070) particularly on the issue of Gandhi’s ‘fast-unto-death’ against separate electorates for the ‘Depressed Classes’.…”