WHAT CONGRESS AND GANDHI HAVE DONE TO THE UNTOUCHABLES : A FALSE CLAIM 153
voters in the General Electorates, i.e., even voters of communities other than the one for which the seat is reserved are free to vote for the election of the candidate for the Reserved Seat.
(4) In declaring the result of the election to the reserved seat, there is no requirement that the successful candidate must have obtained a specified quantum of votes of the voters of this community. The rule is that the candidate of the community for which the seat is reserved if there is only one or if there be more than one candidate then the one who polls the highest number of votes must be declared to be elected even if another candidate belonging to the general community has secured a greater number of votes than the community’s candidate.
Such is the Electoral system which obtains in India. The system made applicable to the Untouchables is the one referred to as the system of Joint Electorates with Reserved Seats and described under 7 above. To give effect to the principle of reservation for the Untouchables what is done is to pick out a requisite number of General Electorates, convert them into plural member electorates and reserve in each such electorate one or two seats for the Scheduled Castes. Different Provinces have different number of such Joint Electorates. Their actual number is determined by the number of seats allotted to the Scheduled Castes in the Provincial Legislature and by the number of seats reserved for them in each Joint Electorate. Attention may also be drawn to some features of the plan, which from the point of view of results are of crucial character.
The Joint Electorate is a general electorate. But it must not on that account be supposed that it is a constituency consisting of the generality of voters. As has already been pointed out, the Muslims, Indian Christians, Anglo-Indians and Europeans have been given separate electorates and consequently, the Muslim, Indian Christian, Anglo-Indian and European voters are excluded from a Joint Electorate. The result is that the Joint Electorate is a constituency in which the only voters who are included are those belonging to the Scheduled Castes, Hindus, Parsis and Jews. As the Parsis and Jews are negligible except in Bombay, the Joint Electorate consists of Hindus and Scheduled Castes only.