In May, 1949, the Constituent Assembly arrived at its final verdict on the question of electoral reservations for India’s communal minorities. On May 11, the Assembly’s Advisory Committee on Minorities convened to confer on a resolution passed by Harendra Coomar Mookerjee—latter-day Governor of West Bengal—which proposed that communal electoral reservations be dropped altogether. For Mookerjee, all that was needed by religious constellations were not additional safeguards in the electoral process but due implementation of the preexisting negative rights that the Constitution had already provided to them. Accordingly, there was no more room to begin conceiving of sub-national minorities. Mookerjee had ‘all along held,’ he said vociferously in the Advisory Committee meeting, ‘that India is one nation.’ Others in the meeting either agreed or chose not to disagree in any remarkable way.
Only an influential member of the Assembly, Sir Hormasji Pherozeshah Mody,[1] was among the rare voices in the Advisory Committee who seemed to clamor for electoral reservations for a minority group—the Parsis—at least initially. Mody had been a member of the Indian legislative Assembly for fourteen years, between 1929 and 1943. In 1941, he was even appointed for the portfolio of Supply in the Viceroy’s Executive Council. Having joined the Constituent Assembly in 1948, Mody’s presence was no less daunting than members who had been there since the beginning. Following the dissolution of the Assembly, Mody would even go on to become the Governor of the United Provinces and, later, Uttar Pradesh, until 1952. Mody’s political career may well have expired in the Assembly’s corridors—but it did not. Perhaps the principal reason for this was that he—under the influence of a fellow-member and fellow-Parsi, Rustom K. Sidhwa—withdrew his claims for a separate electorate for Parsis.
Mody’s compliance with the larger trend laid a powerful precedent for even the Sikhs to withdraw their previous claims for electoral reservations. Of course, they wanted the state to fulfill certain conditions, including the recognition of Sikh Scheduled Castes—an issue that had previously been discussed at a meeting between the Assembly’s Sikh representatives and the East Punjab Legislative Assembly’s members. The Muslims seemed to be the only faction, now, who still hoped to press for a separate electorate. But there were rifts within the Muslim group, as well, in the Assembly. For instance, reportedly, Naziruddin Ahmad, a representative of the Muslim League representative in the Constituent Assembly, wrote to the President, Rajendra Prasad, claiming that West Bengal’s Muslims, apparently, no longer wanted electoral and political reservations. Another representative of the Muslim League, Begum Aizaz Rasul, who was an Assembly member from the United Provinces, was propelled by the political circumstances as a Muslim spokesperson. According to what she spoke, the Muslims had understood that their best interests to agitate for the abolition of the very concept of separate electorates.
After the final nail had been dug into the coffin of electoral reservations—a matter that Prime Minister Nehru called a political ‘poison’—he stated that it was ‘manifestly absurd to carry on with this reservation business,’ in the first place. However, had the minorities pressed further, Nehru may have accepted some form of reservation. That is because, had they indeed pressed any further, they would have been joined by another faction of dissenters—the Scheduled Castes. Speaking on behalf of the community, Muniswami Pillai articulated his astonishment at the fact that Mookerjee’s resolution had so easily bypassed the question of electoral reservations for the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes. It was more astonishing, said Pillai, since when the Advisory Committee’s previous report came out in the August of 1947, Mohandas K. Gandhi had himself whetted reservations for the Scheduled Castes and Tribes. Pillai’s correction of Mookerjee’s resolution was honorably adopted. The Advisory Committee’s resolution now guaranteed that ‘the system of reservation for minorities other than Scheduled Castes in Legislatures be abolished.’
In the third week of May, the Constituent Assembly picked up the Committee’s report. Animated debates followed for two days. The Assembly, at large, seemed to concur with the report’s provisions. The Muslim League members from United Provinces and Assam, Mohammed Ismail Khan and Sir Mohammed Saadulla, respectively, spoke out against the report’s disfavor against communal reservations. Their voices, too, were silenced by the conformity of other Muslims in the Assembly. As history would later record, frictions were dissolved as harmony reigned supreme in the Assembly. ‘Let God give us the wisdom,’ said Sardar Vallabhai Patel, ‘and the courage to do the right thing to all manner of people.’ By the time Granville Austin wrote The Indian Constitution: Cornerstone of a Nation (1966), the Indian Republic was well into its second decade. And the historian remarked that the underrepresentation of the Muslims in India’s politics stemmed from partly their own ‘fault’ in their incapability in fielding enough representatives in the State Assemblies and the Parliament.
Reference
Austin, G. (1966). The Indian constitution: Cornerstone of a nation. Oxford University Press.
Note
[1] Of Sir Hormasji’s sons, Russi Mody, Piloo Mody and Kali Mody, the first would go on to become one of the sworn antagonists of Indira Gandhi in the Indian Parliament.
Arup K. Chatterjee 