Azariah and Gandhi Unite in Opposition to the Communal Award

Azariah and Gandhi both opposed British plans to divide the growing Indian electorate along communal lines. In the early 1930s, Gandhi had reached the high point of his career in India. His leadership of the civil disobedience campaign in 1930, with its brilliant attacks on the government's salt monopoly and the boycott of foreign cloth, had propelled him to the peak of his all-India political influence by early 1931. But his position rapidly eroded shortly thereafter at least partly because of his failure to win the allegiance on the subnational level of communalist Muslims and communalist Hindus.'?

Gandhi failed to break the deadlock over minority demands for separate electorates at the Second Round Table Conference in London in September 1931. This prepared the way for the Labour government of Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald to grant the separate communal electorate to the depressed classes in August 1932 for an experimental period of twenty years. Disagreements over the `Communal Award' helped to eclipse the faltering civil disobedience movement and, by 1934, led Gandhi to withdraw from active parry leadership in order to refocus his attentions on social and religious reform.18 By contrast, the Communal Award brought Azariah increasingly, albeit reluctantly, into the political arena to address the problems and heightened communal tensions brought on by these changes.

By separating the electorate along caste and religious lines in a time when the franchise was expanding to include new voters and new electorates, the government threatened to undermine the Congress Party's already tenuous claim to represent the Indian nation rather than merely caste Hindus. Gandhi objected publicly to separate electorates on the religious grounds that they would divide Hinduism without solving untouchability, but privately he was more concerned about their political ramifications. As Gandhi's biographer, Judith Brown, has written:

... the political implications of separate electorates were very important to him. Compounding separate electorates for Muslims, a similar concession to untouchables would shatter the united polity for which he had worked so long, and would cast Congress in the role of sectarian religious party rather than representative of an Indian nation. But he did not want to publicize this dimension of the problem for he felt it would only exacerbate communal conflict.19

A political crisis seemed imminent but was averted by the drastic measure of Gandhi's `fast unto death' against separate electorates for untouchables that began on 20 September 1932.20 Capitulation to Gandhi's suicide threat resulted in the Poona Pact negotiated with the Mahar leader, B. R Ambedkar. By this agreement, separate electorates for depressed classes were abandoned and replaced by a system in which untouchables and caste Hindus were to vote jointly to elect untouchable candidates (who would be selected in primary elections among untouchables) to a total of 148 reserved seats in the provincial legislatures (twice as many seats as had been granted under the Communal Award).21 Depressed class representatives would now serve in Legislative Councils as members of the `Hindu community' - a newly conceived single entity or monolithic bloc which had expanded from the urban gentry of Calcutta, Madras, and Bombay to include more and more non-Muslim peoples, lower and lower castes, and more rural backgrounds.

Gandhi's fast helped to ensure the inclusion of the depressed classes within the powerful Hindu electorate, while other religious communities such as Muslims, Sikhs, and Indian Christians were left within their own separate electoral categories. This `co-opting by definition' of untouchables into the Hindu fold was greatly resented by many untouchable lead- ers.22 There was now growing competition for depressed class political allegiance, and this raised the potential danger that Christian evangelism and its mass conversions of untouchables might be used as political instruments. Gandhi stepped up attacks on Christian missions, implying that their work was secretly political because it was stealing Harijans from the Hindu fold. This propelled Bishop Azariah into a heated debate with the Mahatma over the extent and legitimacy of mass conversions among depressed classes.

The Indian Christian community, especially its Protestant branch, was widely opposed to the 1932 Communal Award.23 Bishop Azariah had earlier testified before the Simon Commission that communal electorates did not serve the interests of either Christianity or Christians; he advocated merging Indian Christians into the general electorate (with reservation of seats for the community only if absolutely necessary).24 In addition to allying the interests of Indian Christians with those of the nation as a whole, inclusion of Indian Christians in general constituencies would help to prevent discrimination against Indian Christians on religious grounds. As it was, conversion to Christianity disqualified the still-poor and underprivileged mass movement converts from Depressed Class benefits. In his testimony, Azariah criticized the Education and Labour Departments of the Madras government for denying scholarship aid to untouchables who converted to Christianity, arguing that `religion should not become a disqualification. It is the social and economic condition that ought to determine it.'21

Although the bishop apparently condemned Gandhi's 1932 fast,26 he played a major role along with Gandhi in the opposition to the 1932 Award, moving away from his previously apolitical stance to join in battle with more active Indian Christian nationalists such as S. K. Datta, an In dian Christian representative at the second Round Table Conference in London.27 Azariah's first public move was a forceful statement to the English press which argued against separate electorates - seeing them as a divisive force within both the Indian Christian community and the nation as a whole.28 Separate electorates, he protested, would encourage Indian Christians to become a separate communal body with self-centered, inward-focused political ambitions. Such an outcome would undermine his objective of identifying Indian Christians with the aspirations of a prospectively independent and politically unified, though culturally pluralistic, Indian nation. We have permitted ourselves not to be placed on the side of the whole country or the nation, but on the side of a religious sect, a community which seeks self-protection for the sake of its own loaves and fishes,' he wrote.29 Factional caste allegiances which, in keeping with Christian teaching, were submerged by the experience of common life and worship would inevitably resurface during election battles, Azariah argued. Candidates would appeal to fragmentary caste and denominational loyalties in order to win votes.

I am not imagining the impossible; all this has happened before. Peace in many congregations has been wrecked in the past because of Legislative Council elections. Congregations that had lived in peace and unity under one pastor worshipping in one Church, though originally of different caste origins, have been by the elections torn to pieces along caste lines to the great harm of all religion and piety - harm that takes years to mend.3o

The greater national interest would be damaged if communal identities were stressed to the detriment of more important qualities of merit and ability in the determination of political processes and outcomes. However, the most ominous implication of the new policy for the bishop was its potentially negative impact upon the church's efforts to destroy sectarian boundaries and create an inclusive, cross-cultural `gospel' community through its evangelistic program.

The religion of Christ ... refuses to be confined to any one race, class or caste. It seeks to embrace all. It is most true to itself when it refuses to be restricted by human fear or prejudice; if it ever becomes petrified and static, it is dead! The inclusion of Christians in `a communal award' is a direct blow to the nature of the Church of Christ.31

Under the first electoral system proposed (before the Poona Pact), members of the depressed classes would lose their unique double voting privileges (along with other government benefits) at baptism.

The Government in recent years has been showing special favours to the Non-Christian Depressed Classes - favours which are denied to their brethren who have become Christians. The Award itself affords an illustration of this partiality. The Depressed Class voter (who has not changed his religion) has two votes - one in a special constituency and the other in the general electorate. His Christian brother however must be content with one vote and he must vote for the Christian candidate only.... The Award puts serious strain on his loyalty to the Christian re- ligion.32

The Poona Pact eliminated the double voting privilege, but it did not include Christians in the general electorate, and in most elections caste converts had to vote for Christian candidates of untouchable background. Although caste and outcaste converts shared the same religion, Azariah argued, they did not share the same social and political interests. The problems of caste converts `are those of the farmer and the capitalist, not those of labour!'33

Immediately following the termination of Gandhi's `epic fast,' the Mahatma asked Azariah - through a deputation from the Christa Seva Sangha, a Christian ashram in Poona - to lead a nationwide, interdenominational effort to revoke the separate electorates for Indian Christians. In response, on October 6, Azariah published a second plea to Christians for united action against the Communal Award and in favor of joint elector- ates.34 Next, he called together a meeting of the All-India Christian Conference at Poona in late October, which produced an agreed-upon policy of cooperative efforts among leaders of Hindu, Muslim, Christian, and other communities to establish a joint electorate for all.35 Azariah's vocal opposition failed to stop separate electorates, which remained in effect until after Independence,36 but he continued his unavailing protests throughout the remaining years of his life. In a 1938 address to the clergy in Dornakal Diocese, Azariah charged:

The civic interests of the Indian Christians are not different from those of other communities. We are as much people of India as any others. We ought to have had the privilege of voting in the General Electorate, and all the members so elected ought to be the guardians of our interests as well as those of any others; we are one with our nonChristian brethren.... It is therefore the duty of all Indian Christians not to rest until this great disability is removed at the next favourable opportunity.37

The bishop was never an enthusiastic advocate of the later `Quit India' phase of the independence movement. He wrote: With trembling conviction, Indian Christians see that they must be on the side of India's freedom,' but he opposed `civil disobedience ... non-cooperation and ... rebellion' as means for achieving swaraj.38 However, Azariah's popular reputation as a nationalist was greatly reinforced by this earlier conflict over the electoral system. A broader, non-Christian audience discovered him as a forceful figure seeking to break down the barriers between the Indian Christian community and the nation at large.39

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