The road to Poona begins with a boycott. In 1928 the British sent out the Simon Commission to report on India's constitutional future; it contained no Indian member, and Congress boycotted it on that ground, meeting it at every station with black flags. Ambedkar did not boycott it. He gave evidence to it, on the reasoning that a body which was going to write the rules would write them whether or not he was in the room, and that the Depressed Classes could not afford a gesture. That decision made him, in the eyes of a great many nationalists, a man who worked with the British. It is the first appearance of a charge that followed him for the rest of his life, and the reasoning behind his choice never varied.

Between 1930 and 1932 the British government held three Round Table Conferences in London to settle what a self-governing India would look like. Ambedkar attended all three as a representative of the Depressed Classes. At the first, from November 1930, Congress boycotted the proceedings entirely and its leaders were in jail. At the second, in the autumn of 1931, Gandhi attended as its sole representative.

The two men met for the first time in Bombay on 14 August 1931, shortly before sailing. The meeting went badly and the conference went worse. Gandhi's position was that the Untouchables were Hindus, that Congress spoke for all Hindus, and that he himself spoke for the Untouchables. Ambedkar's position was that a body led by caste Hindus could not represent the people it excluded, and that he was in London precisely because it did not. Neither man was being disingenuous, and the disagreement was not about facts but about who is entitled to speak for a group — a question no evidence available to either side can settle.

On 16 August 1932 the British Prime Minister, Ramsay MacDonald, announced the Communal Award. It gave the Depressed Classes separate electorates for a period of twenty years, in which only Depressed Class voters could vote for Depressed Class candidates, together with a vote in the general constituencies as well — a double vote. On paper it was everything Ambedkar had argued for since he sat in front of the Southborough Committee in 1919.

Gandhi, imprisoned at Yerwada Jail in Poona, announced that he would fast to the death against it. He did not object to reserved seats, and he had said repeatedly that untouchability was a sin that had to end. He objected to the separate electorate, on the ground that it would sever the Untouchables from Hindu society permanently, convert a social wrong into a constitutional category, and make the division something no future reform could undo. The fast began on 20 September 1932.

What followed is not well described as a negotiation. For five days Ambedkar bargained in a country in which he was being held publicly responsible for the life of the most revered man in it, with crowds outside, with mediators arriving hourly, and with the explicit warning that if Gandhi died his community would answer for it. On 24 September 1932, in Yerwada Jail, he signed what became known as the Poona Pact. Gandhi ended the fast two days later.

The panel provision is the part that is almost always dropped from summaries, and it is the part that shows what he thought he had salvaged. Its whole purpose was to answer the objection to reserved seats — that a seat won inside a joint electorate goes to whichever candidate the majority finds least troubling — by making the community's own voters the gatekeepers of who could stand at all. Whether that would have worked is not knowable. It was a temporary provision, and it did not become a permanent feature of Indian elections.

Two things are not in dispute. He signed, and he never once described it as a victory. And within three years he had concluded that no arrangement of seats inside Hindu society was going to be enough, and said so at Yeola.