WHAT CONGRESS AND GANDHI HAVE DONE TO THE UNTOUCHABLES : A FALSE CLAIM 155
winning the seat reserved for the Scheduled Castes in a Joint Electorate it is not necessary that the majority of voters should belong to the Scheduled Castes for whom the seat is reserved.
How these weaknesses in the system of joint electorate were exploited by the Congress in the Elections which took place in 1937, will be explained later on. For the moment, I am only drawing attention to the Electoral plan devised for the purpose of giving representation to the Scheduled Castes and how vulnerable some of its features are.
III
W E may now proceed to examine the Election Returns. It may be well to begin by asking a simple question: What do Congressmen mean when they say that the Election of
1937 shows that the Congress represents the Untouchables ? A clarification is necessary, because quite obviously the question can have two meanings. It may mean that those Untouchable candidates who stood on the Congress ticket for seats reserved for the Untouchables were elected as against those Untouchable candidates who did not stand on the Congress ticket. It may also mean that more votes were cast by the Untouchable voters in favour of those Untouchable candidates who stood on the Congress ticket than other Untouchable candidates. I propose to examine the returns from both points of view.
The results of the Election, in terms of seats won, have already been presented. It is not necessary to repeat those figures here. It was shown that out of 151 seats the Congress won 78. One cannot say that this result of the contest between the Congress and the Untouchables is a strong piece of evidence : to support the Congress claim that it represents the Untouchables. If the Congress got 78 the Untouchables got 73. It was a neck to neck race.
Let us examine the claim of the Congress to represent the Untouchables in term of votes cast in favour of the Congress Untouchable candidates. The total number of votes cast by the Untouchable Voters in the election of 1987 numbered
1,586,456.
The following table shows how they were distributed, now many were cast in favour of the Congress Untouchable