Turning Back the Clock

BR Ambedkar rose to speak during the second sitting of the First Round Table Conference’s franchise subcommittee, at St James’s Palace in London on 22 December 1930. Comprising 36 members, including Indian politicians, colonial officers and British legislators, the subcommittee was meant to determine who would be allowed to vote under a new constitution for India. Over a decade had passed since the Montagu–Chelmsford Reforms of 1919, which had introduced direct elections in the colony but restricted voting rights, through property, income, educational and service qualifications, to just three percent of the population. The Depressed Classes, as Dalits were officially known at the time, had almost entirely been denied the vote, as had most women. Ambedkar had hoped this would change soon—until he faced the subcommittee.

“It seems to me that there are only two important questions which this Round Table Conference is going to consider,” he said. “One question is whether India should have responsible government, and the second question is to what people the government should be responsible.” Ambedkar added that he had been “under the impression that the Indian people who came to represent their country at this Round Table Conference were not only united in making a demand for responsible government for India but were also united in the view as to whom that government should be responsible. I am sorry to say, sir, that I have been deluded.”

Most Indian representatives at the conference opposed both universal adult suffrage and the immediate extension of voting rights, arguing that the election machinery was not suitably equipped. The Congress leader MK Gandhi boycotted the conference, but his stance at the second edition, held a year later, reeked of doublespeak. He claimed to be representing all Indian people and said that he supported adult suffrage but argued that the Depressed Classes needed “protection from social and religious persecution” rather than “election to the legislatures.” At another session during the conference, Samuel Hoare, the British secretary of state for India, summarised Gandhi’s position as supporting adult suffrage but favouring indirect elections.

Perhaps it was too much to expect Britain, which had itself adopted universal adult suffrage only in 1928, to do so for a colony whose population was almost six times as large. In a May 1932 report, the Indian Franchise Committee, which the British government had appointed a few weeks after the Second Round Table Conference, acknowledged that adult suffrage was “impracticable at the present time” and recommended that voting rights be gradually extended. The Government of India Act, 1935 extended the franchise for provincial elections to just fourteen percent of the population, with only three percent eligible to vote for the central legislature—up from 0.5 percent under the Montagu–Chelmsford Reforms. It did so by diluting the educational qualifications for women and Depressed Classes, from upper-primary schooling to basic literacy, while keeping most other restrictions unchanged.