Explanation:

• Simon Commission appointed in November 1927 by the British government to report on the working of the Government of India Act of 1919. In 1930, the Commission published its two-volume report, also known as the Simon Report.
• In response to the inadequacy of the Simon Report, the Labour Government, which had come to power under Ramsay MacDonald in 1929, decided to hold a series of Round Table Conferences in London.  The first Round Table Conference convened from 12 November 1930 to 19 January 1931. Since many of the Congress' leaders were in jail, Congress did not participate in the first conference, but representatives from all other Indian parties and a number of Princes did.
• The outcomes of the First Round Table Conference were minimal: India was to develop into a federation, safeguards regarding defense and finance were agreed and other departments were to  be transferred.
• The British policy of 'Divide and Rule' found another expression in the announcement of the Communal Award in August 1932. The Award allotted to each minority a number of seats in the legislatures to be elected on the basis of a separate electorate, that is Muslims would be elected only by Muslims and Sikhs only by Sikhs, and so on. Muslims, Sikhs, and Christians had already been treated as minorities.  The Award declared the Depressed Classes (Scheduled Castes of today) also to be a minority community entitled to separate electorate and thus separated them from the rest of the Hindus.
• Gandhiji demanded that the representatives of the Depressed Classes should be elected by the general electorate under a wide if possible universal, common franchise. At the same time, he did not object to the demand for a larger number of the reserved seats for the Depressed Classes. He went on a fast  unto  death on 20 September 1932 to enforce his demand. In the end they succeeded in hammering out an agreement, known as the Poona Pact(1932), according to which the idea of separate electorates for the Depressed Classes was abandoned but the seats reserved for them in the provincial legislatures were increased from seventy-one in the Award to 147 and in the Central Legislature to eighteen percent of the total.