30 SOCIAL SCIENTIST THE LAST BID FOR RAPPROCHEMENT The challenge had been posed. The Congress session of 1929 had declared Puma Swaraj as its goal, and in its agitation against the Simon Commission, taken the aggressive forward position in its tussle with the Imperial Government. A compromise was struck with the Gandhi-Irwin pact of 1931, and for the first time, Indians and British met—though on unequal terms—for a round of talks on constitutional reform. The Round Table Conference (RTC) of 1931 was wrecked by the formidable barriers that the communal question presented. It is easy to look askance, from the vantage point of a freedom struggle that was successfully consummated under the Congress vanguard in 1947, at the manoeuvring by the non-Congress interests at this Conference. First there was the formation of a bloc of minorities, composed of Muslim, the Depressed Classes and certain other minute social groupings, which sought to establish a distinct bargaining position. Ambedkar in this venture made common cause with the arch-reactionary Aga Khan, who represented the Muslim sectional interest at the RTC. This is a fact that Indian history writing has fought shy of coming to terms with, perhaps in deference to the man who is revered today as the architect of free India's Constitution. By the canon of nationalist history writing, Ambedkar's doings at the RTC were quite clearly beyond the pale of legitimate political activity. But writing on the events in 1942, Ambedkar was completely unrepentant.75 If anything, his writing only betrayed a sense of regret that the Minorities Pact at the RTC was thwarted by Gandhi. For his part, the Mahatma was furious, and would not countenance any effort to conjoin the interests of the Depressed Classes with that of the Muslims. 'The Congress will always accept any solution that may be acceptable to the Hindus, the Mohammedans and the Sikhs', he said in his speech at the Conference. But it would never be 'party to special electorates for any other minorities'.76 Recollecting the stormy events at the RTC in a later year, Ambedkar made no secret of his rancour: 'When (Gandhi) found that (his) propaganda was not succeeding as well as he expected, he resorted to intrigue*. Disturbed at the possibility of the untouchables making common cause with the Muslims, Ambedkar says, Gandhi 'devised a scheme to isolate the Untouchables'. The story, as Ambedkar narrates it, speaks of a late night confabulation between Gandhi and the Muslim delegation, at which a bargain was sought: the Congress would meet the Muslim demands halfway, provided no other minority grouping was allowed to come in on the deal. The idea, Ambedkar argues, was quite clearly to do the Depressed Classes out of the bargain. But, continues Ambedkar, the Muslims refused to play along, and the entire ploy collapsed.77 Regrettably however, in