The Communal Award Of 1932

In August 1932, the British policy of "Divide and Rule" found a new expression in the announcement of the Communal Award. The Award allotted a number of seats in legislatures to each minority, each of which would be elected by a separate electorate: Muslims would be elected only by Muslims, Sikhs would be elected only by Sikhs, and so on. Muslims, Sikhs, and Christians had previously been marginalised. The Award declared the Depressed Classes (today's Scheduled Castes) to be a minority community with their own electorate, effectively separating them from the rest of the Hindu community. 

 

•    The Congress opposed a separate electorate for Muslims, Sikhs, and Christians because it promoted the communal idea that they formed separate groups or communities with interests distinct from the rest of India. 

 

•    The unavoidable result was that the Indian people were divided, preventing the development of a common national consciousness. 

 

•    The idea of a separate electorate for Muslims, on the other hand, had been accepted by the Congress as part of a compromise with the Muslim League as early as 1916. As a result, the Congress took the position that, while it opposed separate electorates, it was opposed to changing the Award without minorities' consent. As a result, despite strongly opposing the Communal Award, it chose neither to accept nor to reject it.

 

Poona pact: All nationalists, however, were vehemently opposed to the effort to separate the Depressed Classes from the rest of Hindus by treating them as separate political entities. Gandhiji, who was imprisoned in Yeravada at the time, reacted angrily.

 

•    The Award, he saw, was an attack on Indian unity and nationalism, and it was harmful to both Hinduism and the Depressed Classes, because it offered no solutions to the latter are socially degraded position. 

 

•    The question of abolishing untouchability would not arise once the Depressed Classes were treated as a separate community, and Hindu social reform in this area would come to a halt. 

 

•    Gandhiji argued that no matter how much harm separate electorates caused Muslims or Sikhs, they would continue to be Muslims or Sikhs. Separate electorates would ensure that ‘untouchables remain untouchables in perpetuity,' while reformers like him worked for the total abolition of untouchability. 

 

•    The ‘root arid branch' eradication of untouchability was required, not the protection of the so-called interests of the Depressed Classes in terms of seats in legislatures or jobs. 

 

•    Gandhiji demanded that Depressed Class representatives be elected by the general electorate using a broad, if not universal, common franchise. Simultaneously, he did not object to the demand for a larger number of Depressed Class reserved seats. To enforce his demand, he went on a death-defying fast on September 20, 1932.

 

•    In a statement to the Press, he said: ‘My life, I count of no consequence. One hundred lives given for this noble cause would, in my opinion, be poor penance done by Hindus for the atrocious wrongs they have heaped upon helpless men and women of their own faith.’

 

•    Despite the fact that many political Indians saw the fast as a diversion from the on-going political movement, everyone was deeply concerned and emotionally shaken. Hundreds of thousands of people gathered in almost every city. The 20th of September was designated as a day of prayer and fasting. All over the country, temples, wells, and other places of worship were opened to the poor. 

 

•    Political leaders of various political stripes, such as Madan Mohan Malaviya, M.C. Rajah, and B.R. Ambedkar, became active at this time. They eventually reached an agreement known as the Poona Pact, in which the idea of separate electorates for the Depressed Classes was dropped, but the number of seats reserved for them in provincial legislatures was increased from seventy one in the Award to 147, and in the Central Legislature to eighteen per cent of the total.

 

Initial campaign of Gandhi against untouchability:

•    For nearly two years, he gave up all other interests and waged a frantic campaign against untouchability, first from prison and then from the streets. After his release from prison, he moved to Satyagraha Ashram in Wardha, abandoning Sabarmati Ashram in Ahmedabad, where he had vowed not to return until Swaraj was achieved in 1930. 

 

•    For nearly nine months, beginning on November 7, 1933, and ending on July 29, 1934, he conducted an intensive ‘Harijan tour' of the country, covering over 20,000 kilometres by train, car, bullock cart, and foot. 

 

•    Collecting funds for the newly formed Harijan Sewak Sangh, preaching the abolition of untouchability in all of its forms and practises, and urging social workers to leave everything and go to the villages to help the Harijans — his term for the Depressed Classes — with their social, economic, cultural, and political uplift.

 

•    Gandhiji fasted twice during his Harijan campaign, on 8 May and 16 August 1933, to persuade his supporters of the importance of the issue and the seriousness of his efforts. ‘Either they have to get rid of untouchability or they have to get rid of me.' He justified his fasts by claiming that they were responses to his "inner voice," which he described as "dictates of reason." 

 

•    Gandhiji was attacked by orthodox and social reactionaries throughout his Harijan campaign. 

 

•    They confronted him with black flag protests and snarled his meetings. 

 

•    They circulated slanderous and incendiary leaflets against him, filling his mouth with fantastical utterances. 

 

•    They accused him of being anti-Hindu. 

 

•    They set fire to his portraits in public. 

 

A bomb was detonated on a car believed to be carrying Gandhiji on June 25, 1934, in Poona, injuring its seven occupants. If the government did not support the anti-untouchability campaign, the protesters offered the government full support against the Congress and the Civil Disobedience Movement. In August 1934, the Government complied by defeating the Temple Entry Bill in the Legislative Assembly.

 

•    They are worse in terms of economics. 

 

•    They are denied religious access to what we call "houses of God." 

 

•    They are denied access to public roads, public schools, public hospitals, public wells, public taps, public parks, and similar facilities on the same terms as Hindus. 

 

•    They are relegated to the poorest areas of cities and villages, where they are denied access to social services.

 

•    The ‘root and branch removal of untouchability' was theme. In this regard, the symbolic or rather the entering wedge was to be the opening of all temples to Harijans. 

 

•    Gandhiji's entire campaign was founded on the principles of reason and humanism. However, he also claimed that untouchability as it is practised today was not sanctioned by the Hindu Shastras. Even if this were not the case, the Harijan worker should not be discouraged. The truth could not be contained within a book's pages. If the Shastras violated human dignity, they should be disregarded.

 

•    He warned caste Hindus that unless this atonement was made, Hinduism would perish: ‘Hinduism dies if untouchability lives, and untouchability must die if Hinduism is to live.' 

 

•    Gandhiji did not believe that the issue of untouchability should be conflated with issues of inter-dining and inter-marriage. The latter should be free of restrictions, as ‘dining and marriage restrictions stifle Hindu society.' They were, however, practised by caste Hindus as well as the Harijans among themselves.

 

•    He claimed that the current pan-India campaign should be focused on the Harijans' specific disabilities. He also distinguished between the end of the caste system and the end of untouchability. 

 

Gandhiji’s view on caste system: When Dr. Ambedkar stated that "the outcaste is a by-product of the caste system," he disagreed. As long as castes exist, there will be outcasts. And nothing short of the abolition of the caste system can emancipate the outcaste. Gandhiji, on the other hand, stated that despite the Varnashram's "limitations and defects," "there is nothing sinful about it, as there is about untouchability." He believed that if the caste system was free of untouchability, which he saw as a result of ‘the distinction of high and low,' not the caste system, it could function in a way that made each caste ‘complementary to the other and none inferior or superior to any other.' In any case, he said, both proponents and detractors of the Varna system should join forces to combat untouchability, because both oppose the latter.

 

•    Gandhiji also emphasised the positive impact that untouchability struggles would have on communal and other issues. Hindus treated non-Hindus as untouchables in some way or another, especially when it came to food and drink, and non-Hindus were well aware of this. As a result, ‘if untouchability is abolished, all Indians must be brought together.' 

 

•    He began to emphasise that untouchability was only one form of society's distinctions between man and man; it was a result of society's grading into high and low classes. To oppose ‘this high-and-lowness,' it was necessary to attack untouchability. As a result, "the phase with which we are currently dealing does not exhaust all the possibilities of struggle." 

 

•    Gandhiji was opposed to exercising compulsion even on the orthodox supporters of untouchability, whom he referred to as the Sanatanists, in keeping with his basic philosophy of nonviolence and being essentially a 19th century liberal and believer in rational discussion. They, too, had to be tolerated, converted, and persuaded, ‘by appealing to their reason and their hearts.' His fasts, he explained, were not intended to force his opponents to open temples and wells; rather, they were intended to provoke and inspire his friends and followers to redouble their anti-untouchability efforts.

 

Significance: Gandhiji's Harijan campaign included an internal reform programme for Harijans, which included promoting education, cleanliness, and hygiene, abstaining from eating carrion and beef, abstaining from liquor, and abolishing untouchability among them. 

 

•    It did not, however, include a militant struggle by the Harijans themselves, such as Satyagraha, caste taboo breaking, mass demonstrations, picketing, and other forms of protest. 

 

•    Simultaneously, he was aware that his Harijan movement "must cause daily increasing awakening among the Harijans" and that "whether the savarna Hindus like it or not, the Harijans will make good their position."

 

•    Gandhiji repeatedly stated that the Harijan movement was a movement to purify Hinduism and Hindu society, not a political movement. But, just as untouchability poisoned "our entire social and political fabric," he recognised that the movement "will produce great political consequences."

 

•    In fact, not only did Harijan work, along with other constructive work, keep the Congress cadre occupied during non-mass movement phases, but it also gradually spread the message of nationalism to the Harijans, who were also agricultural labourers in most parts of the country, leading to their increased participation in national and peasant movements.