Summary: CASTE AND COMMUNITY POLITICS AROUND THE ISSUE OF SECONDARY EDUCATION

We have seen in the previous chapter how famine relief was used as a window for communal mobilizations. Bengal was still reeling under the impact of the famine, when a new political issue captured its imagination. This was the tabling of the Secondary Education Bill by the ruling party in the Bengal Legislative Assembly, which immediately intensified the communal divide.

The Secondary Education Bill (henceforth referred to as SEB) was tabled by the Education Minister Tamizuddin Khan on the floor of the Bengal Legislative Assembly on 24 April 1944. Its objective was the ‘regulation, control and development of secondary education in Bengal.’ According to the education minister, secondary education in Bengal was in dire need of reform, yet, no other attempt at reform ‘had met with greater opposition from certain particular bodies and certain particular sections of people.’ The proposed Secondary Education Board was to consist of fifty-three members. The elected members of the board were to be returned by separate electorates of Hindus, Muslims and Scheduled Castes (hereafter referred to as SC). Scheduled Castes would have five representatives, to be elected through separate electorates, including the Special Officer for Scheduled Caste Education (who may or may not be a SC). It was primarily the insistence on separate electorates that resulted in outrage among the largely Caste Hindu opposition comprising the Congress and the Hindu Mahasabha.