Periyar, Ambedkar and the Poona Pact

The Cambridge Companion to Periyar, edited by AR Venkatachalapathy and Karthick Ram Manoharan, is a recent collection of essays that examines the intellectual legacy of EV Ramasamy, popularly known as Periyar. The rationalist, social reformer and founder of the Dravidar Kazhagam quit the Congress in late 1925. He founded the Self-Respect Movement soon afterwards, along with the socialist and rationalist S Ramanathan. The volume looks at several aspects of his life and thought, including his centrality to the Vaikom Satyagraha; his campaigning for atheism, commitment to Dalit emancipation and support for women’s liberation; the expression of his views in the weekly Kudi Arasu; and the goals of the Self-Respect movement. The following excerpt focusses on the Poona Pact, 1932, and the stance taken by Periyar and the Self-Respect Movement towards “what BR Ambedkar described as a ‘mean deal.’”

The political idea of “separate electorates” had its origins in the introduction of local self-government bodies, limited enfranchisement (as opposed to universal adult franchise), and such other rudimentary democratic institutions under colonialism. The idea emerged in the context of conflict between democratic principles and a hierarchical caste society. Given the infirmities flowing from an unequal, hierarchical society, Depressed Classes demanded representation that was both quantitatively and qualitatively different from representation for other communities. The model was the separate electorates granted to Muslims by the India Councils Act, 1909, as part of the Morley–Minto reforms. As the Communal Award of 1932 stated, the logic of separate electorates was that based on a vote in general constituencies alone, it would be unlikely “for a considerable Period” of time for the Depressed Classes to acquire adequate representation.

By the late 1920s, such a demand was fully articulated in Dravidian movement journals. This demand conceived of a separate electorate that would exist alongside a joint electorate in the same electoral constituency. Thus, a voter from the Depressed Classes would exercise two votes: one as a voter in the joint electorate where they would vote for candidates belonging to any community along with other voters and another for electing a representative from among candidates from the Depressed Classes by casting a vote along with members of their community. The corollary of such a scheme was that a Depressed Classes representative did not require the vote of other communities. As a result, the representative would be able to articulate the political demands of the Depressed Classes without any compromise. If Ambedkar called this double vote “a priceless privilege” and argued that “its value as a political weapon was beyond reckoning,” Periyar called it “the very life breath of the Depressed Classes.”

The importance of the demand for separate electorates was two-pronged. On the one hand, it sought to shape the Depressed Classes as a separate political group. On the other, it precluded the absorption of the Depressed Classes within a monolithic Hindu identity being forged by Brahmins and upper castes.