An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India

by Shashi Tharoor

defying Salt March, the British felt obliged to grant improved measures of self-governance through the Government of India Act, 1935. Even then, however, the franchise was extended to less than 10 per cent of the population and, as before, Indians voted not as citizens of a single country but as members of different religious groups, with Muslim voters choosing Muslim members from a reserved list—a further confirmation of divide et impera. Separate electorates were part of the British attempt to thwart Mahatma Gandhi’s mass politics, which for the first time had created a common national consciousness not just among the educated elite who had formerly dominated the Congress but amongst the general public he had successfully mobilized. The British decision to declare the community then known as ‘Untouchables’ (today as Dalits, or more bureaucratically as ‘Scheduled Castes’) to be a minority community entitled to separate representation, distinct from other Hindus, in a new category called the ‘Depressed Classes’, was seen by Indian nationalists as a ploy to divide the majority community in furtherance of imperial interests. Dalits, in turn, saw the nationalist movement as dominated by the same ‘upper’ castes that had long discriminated against them, and Dalit leaders like Ambedkar, a brilliant constitutional scholar who had risen from hard-scrabble poverty by sheer dint of merit, embraced separate electorates as a means of asserting their right to choose their own represent...