WHAT CONGRESS AND GANDHI HAVE DONE TO THE UNTOUCHABLES : A MEAN DEAL
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This shows that the Congress got just about fifty-one per cent of the seats reserved for the Untouchables.
The Congress in capturing 78 seats left only 73 seats to be filled by true and independent representatives of the Untouchables. The Untouchables were worse off under the Poona Pact than they would have been under the Prime Minister’s Award. In point of effective representation, the Untouchables got less than what the Prime Minister had given them. The Congress on the other hand gained by the Poona Pact. Although under the Poona Pact it gave 151 to the Untouchables it took back 78 and thereby made a handsome profit on its political transaction.
This is by no means the sum total of the losses which the Congress inflicted on the Untouchables in the elections of 1937. There was another and a greater blow which the Congress inflicted on the Untouchables. It deprived them of any share in the Executive.
From the very beginning, I had been pressing in the discussions in the Round Table Conference that the Untouchables must not only have the right to be represented in the legislature, they must also have the right to be represented in the Cabinet. The woes of the Untouchables are not due so much to bad laws as to the hostility of the administration, which is controlled by the Hindus who import into administration their age-old prejudices against the Untouchables. The Untouchables can never hope to get protection from the police, justice from the judiciary or the benefit of a statutory law from the administration, so long as the Public Services continued to be manned by the Hindus. The only hope of making the Public Services less malevolent and more responsible to the needs of the Untouchables is to have members of the Untouchables in the higher Executive. For these reasons, I had at the Round Table Conference pressed the claim of the Untouchables for the recognition of their right to representation in the Cabinet with the same emphasis as I had done for the recognition of their right to representation in the Legislature. The Round Table Conference accepted the validity of the claim and considered ways and means of giving effect to it. There were two ways of giving effect to this proposal. One was to have a statutory provision in the Government of India Act so as to make it a binding obligation which it would be impossible