Caste Pride: Battles for Equality in Hindu India by Manoj Mitta

Author:Manoj Mitta [Mitta, Manoj]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9789357762946
Publisher: Published by Westland Publications Private Limited
Published: 2023-04-23T18:30:00+00:00

Legislative advancements, such as they were, led to a high-level acknowledgement that untouchability prevailed across British India in varying degrees. The 1930 report of the Simon Commission said: ‘The disabilities of the Depressed Classes are undoubtedly most severely felt in Madras, and especially in Malabar. In the latter district is still found the phenomenon—now almost unknown elsewhere—of “unapproachability”.’ The next in order of severity, according to the Simon Commission, were the neighbouring Bombay and Central Provinces. In those two provinces, ‘the position’, it said, ‘though no doubt less acute, is probably more or less comparable to that in Madras’.39

The Simon Commission, otherwise known as the Indian Statutory Commission, was the first official body to recommend that the dyarchy be replaced by provincial autonomy. In November 1930, the British government invited Indian leaders from across the political spectrum to the Round Table Conference in London, where this and other findings of the commission would be discussed.

But Gandhi and his associates were in jail at the time for their participation in the Civil Disobedience Movement, and so, the Congress boycotted the conference. This resulted in the failure of the First Round Table Conference. The negotiations that followed his release in January 1931 culminated a few weeks later in the famous Gandhi–Irwin pact. The Civil Disobedience Movement was called off, and the prospect of the Congress participating in the Second Round Table Conference opened up.

As part of its preparations, the Congress held a special session from 26 to 31 March 1931 at Karachi, where it adopted a resolution on Fundamental Rights for what it called the ‘Swaraj Constitution’. Echoing the Motilal Nehru report of 1928, the Congress Resolution envisaged ‘equal rights to all citizens in regard to public roads, wells, schools and other places of public resort’.

The day after the Karachi session had concluded, the Congress Working Committee announced two major decisions. One was to appoint Gandhi as its representative at the next Round Table Conference. The other was to equip Gandhi for his London mission with material elaborating on the Karachi Resolution. To this end, it appointed a Fundamental Rights Committee under C. Rajagopalachari, inviting opinions from provincial units and others.

From this consultative exercise emerged a more nuanced clause on access inequality, enriched by previous debates over the two Madras enactments. On 25 June 1931, the Rajaji committee proposed: ‘All citizens have equal rights and duties in regard to wells, roads, schools and places of public resort, maintained out of State or local funds, or dedicated by private persons for the use of the general public.’40 In doing away with the usual qualification of roads and wells with the term ‘public’, and in coming up with the deft insertion of the term ‘private’ in relation to persons, the Rajaji Committee’s formulation turned out to be more expansive than those early laws.

Around this time, perhaps driven by the breakthrough in Madras, the Central Provinces saw an attempt to legislate on the access issue. The foremost leader of the untouchables in that province, Ganesh Akaji Gavai, introduced a bill that was more audacious than anything that had been tried in Madras.

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