CONGRESS AND COMMUNAL ELECTORATES

Looking back 13 years to the time when the 25th Indian National Congress was held at Allahabad in 1910, one must regard it as genuinely pathetic that after what took place on that memorable occasion, there should be, in 1923, the necessity for a round-table conference to examine afresh the question of a fair and equitable basis for municipal representation in Punjab. At that Congress, Dr Satish Chandra Banerji moved a resolution to remove anomalous distinctions between different sections of His Majesty’s subjects, with due provision for ‘fair and adequate representation on the Legislative Councils for the Mahomedans and other communities where they are in a minority,’ but without separate electorates, and in doing so referred to the Lahore Congress which had discussed the rules and regulations promulgated the year before by the government with regard to separate electorates. Men who were competent to speak and write on the point, he said, had then rejected these rules as being based on principles which were not only ‘erroneous but mischievous’ and one of which was strongly repudiated, that of representation based on religious differences. But if the opinion of such stalwart politicians as those who spoke on this question in 1910, Dr Tej Bahadur Sapru, Sir Harchandrai Vishindas and Sir Surendranath Banerjea, all of whom condemned separate electorates, is not convincing, let the Mahomedans who addressed that Congress speak. Nawab Sadiq Ali Khan joined his Hindu friends in “their just protest against the separatist policy that pervades the Reforms Scheme.” He termed the principles of that scheme ‘a departure from the traditional policy of just and equal treatment of all classes’.

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