The Round Table Conferences and the Poona Pact

Alongside the Civil Disobedience Movement, the British tried to settle India's constitutional future through three Round Table Conferences in London (1930-32). They achieved little, but out of them came two momentous events: the Communal Award, which extended separate electorates even to the depressed classes, and the Poona Pact (1932) between Gandhi and Ambedkar that replaced separate electorates with reserved seats. This is a high-yield topic.

With the Simon Report clearly inadequate, the viceroy and the British Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald agreed to hold round-table talks.

A point of precision that examiners love: strictly speaking, this was one Round Table Conference held in three sessions (1930, 1931 and 1932), not three separate conferences. The phrase "First, Second and Third Round Table Conferences" is convenient shorthand, and this reading uses it, but it is technically incorrect. Keep that distinction in mind when a question asks why the usual naming is wrong. The three sessions were:

• First Round Table Conference (Nov 1930 - Jan 1931): held in London and chaired by MacDonald. The Congress boycotted it (its leaders were in jail), so it achieved little, though it agreed in principle that India should become a federation with safeguards. The British realised that no settlement was possible without the Congress.
• Second Round Table Conference (Sep - Dec 1931): after the Gandhi-Irwin Pact, the Congress nominated Gandhi as its sole representative. It failed. The session deadlocked over the minorities question: Muslims, depressed classes, Christians and Anglo-Indians all demanded separate electorates (a "Minorities Pact"), which Gandhi opposed. Gandhi claimed the Congress alone spoke for all India. The other delegates disagreed, and so did a now-Conservative British government under the new viceroy Willingdon. It ended with MacDonald's promise of a unilateral Communal Award if Indians could not agree.
• Third Round Table Conference (Nov - Dec 1932): boycotted by the Congress and ignored by most leaders; little was achieved. Its recommendations, published in a White Paper (1933), were worked into the Government of India Act of 1935.

Between the first and second conferences, the Congress met at its Karachi Session in March 1931, presided over by Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel. The session endorsed the Gandhi-Irwin Pact (the March 1931 agreement that ended the first phase of Civil Disobedience) and authorised Gandhi to attend the Second Round Table Conference as the sole Congress representative. It met just days after the execution of Bhagat Singh, Rajguru and Sukhdev, and amid public anger it passed a resolution admiring their bravery while reiterating its disapproval of political violence.

The session is best remembered for the Resolution on Fundamental Rights and Economic Programme, drafted by Jawaharlal Nehru. For the first time, the Congress spelt out what Swaraj would mean for the ordinary citizen.

• Fundamental rights: free speech and association, equality before the law, neutrality of the state in religious matters, and universal adult franchise.
• Economic programme: state ownership or control of key industries, reduction of land revenue and rent, relief from agrarian debt, and protection for industrial workers.

Note the division of labour the questions test: Patel presided, but Nehru drafted the resolution.

On 16 August 1932, Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald announced the Communal Award. It extended the system of separate electorates (already given to Muslims) to Europeans, Sikhs, Indian Christians, Anglo-Indians, and, most controversially, to the depressed classes (granted 78 reserved seats and a "double vote"). To the national leaders it was another stroke of divide and rule.

The Congress was opposed to separate electorates. But it did not want to alter the Award without the minorities' consent. So it decided neither to accept nor reject it. The one exception was the provision separating the depressed classes from the rest of the Hindus, which all nationalists fiercely opposed.

Gandhi saw the Award as an attack on Indian unity and on Hinduism. He argued that treating the depressed classes as a separate political entity would freeze untouchability forever and undermine any effort to abolish it. What was needed, he said, was not separate electorates but the eradication of untouchability. He wanted the depressed classes elected through a joint electorate (with no objection to more reserved seats).

To press the point, Gandhi began an indefinite fast in Yerawada jail on 20 September 1932. As his life ebbed, leaders including B.R. Ambedkar, M.C. Rajah and Madan Mohan Malaviya hammered out a compromise. This was the Poona Pact, signed by Ambedkar on 24 September 1932:

• it abandoned separate electorates for the depressed classes;
• but it raised their reserved seats from 71 to 147 in the provincial legislatures and to 18 per cent in the central legislature.

The government accepted it as an amendment to the Communal Award.

Impact and debate. The Pact gave the depressed classes political representation. But Ambedkar continued to criticise it until 1947. He argued that the joint electorate left them dependent on caste-Hindu majorities and unable to elect their own true representatives. He also argued it denied them a separate, distinct existence, pre-empting safeguards in the Constitution.

Gandhi's Harijan campaign. To undo the divide-and-rule design, Gandhi launched a whirlwind campaign against untouchability. He founded the All India Anti-Untouchability League (1932) and the weekly Harijan (1933), and toured the country (1933-34) for the Harijan Sevak Sangh. He called for temple entry, declared that "Hinduism dies if untouchability lives," and based the campaign on humanism and reason. He differed from Ambedkar, who sought the annihilation of caste. Gandhi held that untouchability, not the caste system itself, was the evil. He also believed change must come by persuading orthodox Hindus, not by compulsion.