115. It thus being our duty to safeguard the rights of the minorities, it is necessary to take into consideration their wishes in declining whether we should have separate, or joint, electorates. One would normally expect the minorities, especially in a country where people are basically religious, to ask for separate electorates and that was what we did when we were a minority in West Pakistan asked for separate electorates and. Though the National Assembly, acting under the late Constitution; once granted their demand at the end of 1956, it ultimately decided in favor or joint electorates for the whole country, mainly because, in East Pakistan, the caste Hindus were for joint electorate and the then Prime Minister apparently did not like to dispel them, and it was considered that it would not be proper have separate electorates in one part of Pakistan and joint in the other. As regards East Pakistan, the speeches' delivered in National Assembly at its Dacca session of 1956 give the impression that the entire Hindu population of East Pakistan was desirous of having a joint electorate, but the following account in 'Constitutional Development in Pakistan' by Dr. G. W. Chowdhury of the Dacca University, clearly points out that, in 1952. the scheduled castes asked for an electorate separate from that of the Caste Hindus:—
“Before the establishment of Pakistan, Quaid-i-Azam on several occasions extended his support to the scheduled-caste Hindus in their demand for separate electorates. The scheduled-caste Hindus who constituted the largest minority group in Pakistan naturally expected that their grievance would be redressed by the Constituent Assembly of Pakistan. The matter came up for discussion in 1952 when the election in East Bengal was due and it was demanded that the original provisions of the Act of 1935 should be changed and a separate electorate should be granted to the scheduled caste Hindus. The proposal naturally met with vehement opposition from the Hindu members of the Constituent Assembly who could see in it a threat to their hold over the scheduled castes. They began to describe it as an attempt to divide Hindu society. It may he pointed out here that out of sixteen districts of East Bengal in ten districts the scheduled-caste Hindus outnumbered the caste Hindus. Yet they had few real representatives in the Constituent Assembly and in the provincial legislature of East Bengal. This was the effect of the joint electorate system under the Act of 1935. Very few real leaders of the scheduled-caste Hindus could expect to be elected under the system of joint electorates. In India no less a person than Dr. Ambedkar himself was defeated under India's new electoral system. If one confines oneself only to the debate of the Constituent Assembly where the caste Hindu members were very vocal it would appear that separate electorates were opposed by all Hindus in Pakistan. But this is far from true. Various memoranda and representations were submitted by the scheduled-caste Hindus of East Bengal, outside the Constituent Assembly, in favor of a separate electorate for themselves. They demanded a separate political entity.”
Considering the observations made by Dr. Ambedkar, the accredited leader of the scheduled castes, time and again, with regard to the place or that section of the Hindu community in the hierarchy of the caste system and the fact that, since 1952, there has been no change in the Hindu social structure in East Pakistan, we have no reason to think that the scheduled castes changed their attitude on this question. We have it from one of
