Making Claims for Power: A New Agenda in Dalit Politics of Uttar Pradesh, 1946-48

Abstract

‘. . . [T]he awakened untouchable today is repeatedly asking them [the Congress] if they could not remove the ‘social evil’ of their own creation without political power, how do they expect us [the untouchables] to liberate ourselves without political power’. (Shastri, Poona Pact. 1946, p. 24)‘This is 1946, not 1932’. (Shastri, Poona Pact. 1946, p.76)Shankaranand Shastri's statements help us locate two related propositions that came to constitute Dalit politics in Uttar Pradesh in the 1940s. The first proposition deals with claims made by Dalits to acquire political power—specifically in the form of adequate representation in the provincial legislative assemblies and in the Constituent Assembly. They demanded positive discrimination in the form of reservations within legislative and executive institutions. Safeguards for Dalits, it was argued, should be incorporated into the proposed constitution for Indian citizens. The second proposition concerns achhut identity, through which Dalits hoped to reconstitute their polity in UP. The Scheduled Castes Federation (SCF) and even a section of Congress Harijans staked a claim for achhut identity to distinguish their difference from ‘other communities.’ Dalit writings increasingly depicted the Poona Pact as a great betrayal by the Congress and the British. From their experience of the two general elections of 1937 and 1946, they argued that the electoral mechanism worked out under the aegis of the Poona Pact was structured against the Dalits.