52
DR. BABASAHEB AMBEDKAR : WRITINGS AND SPEECHES
that in the Instrument of Instructions an obligation shall be placed upon the Governor and the Governor-General to endeavour to secure the representation of the Depressed Classes in his Cabinet.
II
What happened to these demands of the Untouchable and how the members of the Minorities Committee reacted to them can be well understood by a perusal of the Report made by the Minorities Committee to the Round Table Conference. I give below a few extracts from that Report :—
“5. Claims were therefore advanced by various committees that arrangements should be made for communal representation and for fixed proportions of seats. It was also urged that the number of seats reserved for a minority community should in no case be less than its proportion in the population. The methods by which this could be secured were mainly three: (1) nomination, (2) electorates and (3) separate electorates.
“6. Nomination was unanimously deprecated.
“7. Joint electorates were proposed with the proviso that a proportion of seats should be reserved to the communities. Thus a more democratic form would be given to the elections whilst the purpose of the electorate system would be secured. Doubts were expressed that, whilst such a system of election might secure the representation of minorities, it provided no guarantee that the representation would be genuine, but that it might, in its working, mean the nomination or, in any event, the election of minority representatives by the majority communities.
It was pointed out that this was in fact only a form of community representation and had in practice all the objections to the more direct form of community electorates.
“8. The discussion made it evident that the demand which remained as the only one which would be generally acceptable was separate electorates. The general objection to this scheme has been subject to much previous discussion in India. It involves what is a very difficult problem for solution, viz., what should be the amount of communal representation in the various provinces and in the Centre ; that, if the whole, or practically the whole, of the seats in a legislature are to be assigned to communities, there will be no room for the growth of independent political opinion or of true political parties, and this problem received a serious complication by the demand of the