The cartoon by Shankar Pillai that caused such pandemonium in the Indian Parliament on 11 May 2012 when various Dalit and non-Dalit members demanded its omission from a Class XI textbook was originally published in 1949. It depicts Dalit leader Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar with a whip riding a snail entitled 'Constitution' while from behind then-Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, also with a whip, looks down at the snail. The cartoon is entitled 'Snail's Pace,' referring to the slow pace of the drafting of the Indian Constitution, in which Ambedkar was involved as the chairman of the drafting committee.
Led by Ramdas Athavale of the Republican Party of India, Dalit activists read the inclusion of the cartoon in textbooks as an insult to Ambedkar. Athavale – who fought the last municipal elections in Mumbai in February in alliance with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and Shiv Sena – demanded not only the recall of the textbooks, but also the arrest of Suhas Palshikar and Yogendra Yadav, advisors for political science textbooks who in the aftermath of the protest resigned from their posts. Furthermore, Athavale even approved of the vandalism of Palshikar's office by four activists from the Republican Panthers Party of India.
Dalit intellectual Hari Narke condemned the vandalism as an insult to Ambedkar's vision, pointing out that 'Ambedkar himself was a hardcore supporter of liberty of thought. It was because of his reverence for the freedom of speech and thought that he specially incorporated Article 19 in the Constitution of India, which assured citizens the right to think and express their thoughts'. Ambedkar's grandson Prakash Ambedkar has also said that his grandfather would not have opposed the cartoon.
Dalits, however, are split on the issue, and one of the reasons is that the image can be interpreted in different ways. Some view the cartoon as showing Ambedkar in a poor light, with Nehru raising the whip at him. But this would have made sense only if Ambedkar had been portrayed as the snail: you do not whip the rider to make a horse run faster! A different reading is that Ambedkar, seated atop the snail, is in a more elevated position than Nehru, who is behind him on the ground, but both men are trying to whip the snail to move faster. Evidently the cartoonist meant to show no disrespect to Ambedkar, and reportedly the latter took no offence.