THE MORLEY-MINTO REFORMS
A British Government of a more advanced type of liberalism than any of
its Liberal predecessors found itself confronted as soon as it took
office with a more difficult situation in India than had ever been
dreamt of since the Mutiny, and the difficulties grew rapidly more
grave. When Mr. Morley went to the India Office during the respite from
agitation against the Partition of Bengal, procured by the visit of the
Prince and Princess of Wales to India even more than by Lord Curzon's
departure from India, the new Secretary of State allowed himself to be
persuaded that an agitation directed, so far, mainly against a harmless
measure of mere administrative importance must be largely artificial,
and he determined to maintain the Partition. He was entirely new to
Indian affairs, and his _Recollections_ show him to have been often
sorely perplexed by the conflict between his own political instincts and
the picture of Indian conditions placed before him by his official
advisers at home and in India. He felt, however, on the whole fairly
confident that he could deal with the situation by producing a moderate
measure of reforms which would satisfy India's political aspirations and
by keeping an extremely vigilant eye on Indian methods of administration
of which "sympathy" was in future to be the key-note rather than mere
efficiency. But when in the course of 1907 the agitation broke out
afresh with increased fury and began to produce a crop of political
outrages, Mr. Morley found himself in a particularly awkward position.
He was known from his Irish days to be no believer in coercion. But the
Government of India was not to be denied when it insisted that a
campaign of murder could not be tolerated and that repression was as
necessary as reform. The Secretary of State agreed reluctantly to
sanction more stringent legislation for dealing with the excesses of the
Extremist press in India, but he was only the more resolved that it must
be accompanied by a liberal reforms scheme. The Viceroy himself shared
this view and lent willing assistance. But the interchange of opinions
between India and Whitehall was as usual terribly lengthy and laborious.
A Royal Proclamation on November 28, 1908, the fiftieth anniversary of
Queen Victoria's Proclamation after the Mutiny, foreshadowed reforms in
"political satisfaction of the claims of important classes representing
ideas that have been fostered and encouraged by British rule." But not
till the following month, _i.e._ three years after Mr. Morley had taken
over the India Office, did the reforms scheme see the light of day.
It bore his impress. He had a ready ear for Indian grievances and much
understanding for the Moderate Indian point of view. He was prepared to
give Indians a larger consultative voice in the conduct of Indian
affairs, and even to introduce individual Indians not only into his own
Council at Whitehall but even into the Viceroy's Executive Council, the
citadel of British authority in India. He was determined to enforce far
more energetically than most of his predecessors the constitutional
right of the Secretary of State to form and lay down the policy for
which his responsibility was to the British Parliament alone, while the
function of the Government of India was, after making to him whatever
representations it might deem desirable, to carry his decisions
faithfully and fully into execution. He was prepared to exercise also to
the full his right to control the administrative as well as the
executive acts of the Government of India and its officers. He was not
prepared to devolve upon Indians collectively any part of the
constitutional powers vested in the Indian Executive and ultimately
through the Secretary of State in the British Parliament. He was not
therefore prepared to give India any representative institutions that
should circumscribe or share the power of the Indian Executive. The
Indian Councils Act of 1909 was drawn up on those lines. It enlarged the
membership and the functions of the Indian Legislative Councils, and
placed them definitely on an elective basis without doing away
altogether with nominations by Government. The only point upon which Mr.
Morley yielded to pressure was in conceding the principle of community
representation in favour of the Mahomedans, to whom, at a time when they
not only held rigidly aloof from all political agitation but professed
great anxiety as to political concessions of which the benefit would,
they submitted, accrue mainly to the Hindus, Lord Minto had given a
promise that in any future reforms scheme full consideration should be
given to the historical importance and actual influence of their
community rather than to its mere numerical strength.
The Indian Councils Act, 1909, fell considerably short of the demands
put forward even by the founders of the Congress five-and-twenty years
before, as the new Councils, greatly enlarged, were still to be merely
consultative assemblies. But it did for the first time admit "the living
forces of the elective principle," and to that extent it met the demand
for representative institutions. Indian Moderates could point also to
the presence of an Indian member, Sir Satyendra (now Lord) Sinha, in the
Viceroy's Executive Council and of two Indian members in the Secretary
of State's Council at Whitehall as a definite proof that India would
have henceforth a hearing before, and not as in the past merely after,
the adoption of vital lines of policy. The Act was accepted by the
Moderate leaders as a genuine if not a generous instalment of reform,
and it restored to some extent their influence as the advocates of
constitutional progress by showing that the British Government had not
been altogether deaf to their appeals. It did not of course satisfy the
Extremists, but their influence had suffered a great set-back from the
wrecking of the Surat Congress, their great Deccanee leader was working
out a long term of imprisonment at Mandalay, and with the tide of
anarchism still spreading and visibly demoralising the student class all
over India, even to the undermining of parental authority, the first
feeling of suppressed and largely inarticulate alarm and resentment
developed into a definite reaction in favour of government as by law
established.
The great wave of unrest which had swept over India was already
subsiding when Lord Minto left India in 1910 amidst genuine
demonstrations of returning goodwill, and the appointment of Lord
Hardinge of Penshurst as his successor was welcomed in the same spirit,
not because Lord Kitchener, who had run him very hard for the
Viceroyalty, was personally unpopular in India, but because he owed to
reactionary supporters the quite unmerited reputation of being "the man
with the big stick."
The visit of the King and Queen to India at the end of 1911 was
therefore well timed, and it provoked a still greater outburst of
popular enthusiasm than their visit as Prince and Princess of Wales in
1905. For it was the first time that the Sovereign to whom it was given
to rule over India from a remote Western island travelled out to receive
on Indian soil the homage of his Indian subjects and appeared before
them in the full majesty of crown, orb, and sceptre. Apart entirely from
the merits of the measure, the dramatic transfer of the capital of his
Indian Empire from Calcutta to Delhi appealed to the imagination of
Indians as a demonstration of the Royal power no less impressive than
the splendours of the great Durbar at which the Royal command went
forth. Equally did their Majesties fulfil another of the time-honoured
conceptions of royalty by knowing, so to say, when to step down from
their throne and mix freely with the people. It has been from times
immemorial one of the principles of Indian rulership that the ruler
cannot deny to his subjects the privilege of access to his person, and
many are those who have gained more popularity by giving ample
opportunity to their subjects for stating to them their grievances in
the royal presence than by ever actually redressing them. In Calcutta
especially when the King and Queen moved cheerfully amongst the
delirious crowds that had thronged to the Maidan to worship them, the
scene surpassed all previous experiences. For had not one of the
measures announced as the Royal will at the Delhi Durbar been the
revision at last of Lord Curzon's detested Partition of Bengal? The
furious agitation of the first few years had broken in vain against the
dead wall of the _chose jugée_ which Mr. Morley had upheld, and it had
gradually died down. The wound, however, had been still there, and now
the King's hand had touched and healed it. The old Province of Bengal
was not indeed restored within its former limits, but Eastern Bengal,
created as the Hindu Bengalees believed, in favour of Mahomedan
ascendancy, disappeared, and in its stead Behar and Orissa, where a
large part of the population was of a different stock and spoke a
different tongue, were detached to the west and south of Bengal proper
and formed into a separate province which served equally well to relieve
administrative congestion without doing violence to Bengalee sentiment.
On the very first anniversary, however, of the day of the great Delhi
Durbar an audacious attempt to murder the Viceroy at the moment when he
was making his solemn entry into the new capital came as a painful
reminder that the fangs of Indian anarchism had not yet been drawn. From
one of the balconies of the Chandni Chauk, the chief thoroughfare of the
native city, a bomb was thrown at Lord Hardinge who was riding with Lady
Hardinge on a State elephant, in accordance with Indian usage, on his
way to the Fort where he was to have delivered a message of greeting to
the people of India recalling the memorable results of the Royal visit.
The Viceroy was severely wounded and Lady Hardinge, though she escaped
without any apparent hurt, suffered a shock which at least hastened her
premature death two and a half years later. Lord Hardinge had already
earned the widespread confidence of Indians by his undisguised sympathy
with all their legitimate aspirations, and the Lady Hardinge's School of
Medicine for Indian women stands now at Delhi as an enduring monument,
not only of the keen interest which she took in the cause of Indian
womanhood and in everything that could tend to its advancement, but of
the affection she had won by a rare charm of manner that was, with her,
merely the outward reflection of a gentle and finely tempered nature.
There had been abortive plots against Lord Minto's life, but it had been
deemed politic to minimise their importance. This, however, was an
attempt too flagrant and too nearly fatal to be disguised or denied, and
a thrill of horror which hushed even the Extremists went through the
whole of India, for to the office of the Viceroy as the personal
representative of the sovereign there had always hitherto attached
something of the sanctity with which, according to Indian beliefs, all
kingship is invested. All the more grateful was the response elicited by
the assurance which Lord Hardinge hastened to convey from his sick-bed
that what had happened could and would in no way diminish his affection
and devotion to the people of India or modify the policy of goodwill and
progress for which he stood. Neither he nor India ever forgot that
assurance.
Unfortunately the artificial basis upon which the Morley-Minto reforms
had been built revealed itself very soon under the searching test of
practical experience. The Councils Act of 1909 had made no attempt to
organise on an effective and genuine basis "the living forces of the
elective principle." The indirect system of election established under
the Act could only produce haphazard and misleading results. An indirect
chain of elections afforded no means of appraising the true
relationship between the elected members of the Councils and their
original electors. The qualifications of candidates, as well as of
electors, varied widely from province to province, but shared one common
characteristic, that the election was more often a matter of form.
Members of the Provincial Councils were returned partly by Municipal and
Local Boards arranged in various groups, without any connection with, or
mandate from, the constituencies by which these bodies had been chosen,
partly by a land-holding community which did not consider itself bound
by the acts of its constituted representatives. The so-called
electorates were never known to give definite mandates to those who
professed to represent them or to pronounce upon any course of action
which their representatives might pursue. Nobody knew what was the
numerical foundation on which an elected member took his seat. It was
almost impossible to trace it back along the chain of indirect
elections. Before the British Reform Bill of 1832 much play was made of
pocket boroughs of twenty or thirty electors. In India, one constituency
electing a member to the Imperial Legislative Council numbered exactly
seven, and there were cases where the representation was pretty well
known to have been divided by agreement between two individuals. Nor did
the recommendations of a Royal Commission on Decentralisation avail to
break down that spirit of over-centralisation which had of late years
marked the policy of the Government of India. The Provincial Governments
still remained bound hand and foot by the necessity of constant
reference to the Central Government, while the latter in its turn was
forced to make an ever-increasing number of references to Whitehall,
where Mr. Morley enforced, far beyond the practice of any previous
Secretary of State, the principle that the Provincial Governments were
responsible to the Central Government, and the Central Government to the
India Office for every detail of administration.
More galling to Indians was it to have to admit that the expansion of
Indian representation in the Councils had not been followed by any
visible increase of Indian control over the conduct of public affairs.
Whilst disclaiming warmly any intention of paving the way for the
introduction of parliamentary institutions into India, Mr. Morley had
allowed an illusory semblance of parliamentary institutions to be
introduced into the enlarged Councils by requiring their sanction for
legislative measures brought forward by the Executive. The latter had to
go through the same forms of procedure as if its existence depended upon
the support of a parliamentary majority to which it was responsible,
whereas it continued to be irremovable and responsible only to the
Secretary of State. These were in fact mere empty forms, for however
unpalatable any measure might be to the Indian members, or however
powerful their arguments against it, Government could always vote the
Indian opposition down in the Viceroy's Legislative Council, the most
important of all, by mustering the official majority in full force to
deliver their votes according to instructions. In the Provincial
Councils on the other hand in which an unofficial majority had been
conceded, the Indian members were in a position to create a deadlock by
refusing to vote for measures indispensable to the proper conduct of
Government; but whilst the power they could thus exercise might go far
enough to paralyse the Executive, they had no power to turn it out.
These new Councils had been invested with large but mostly negative
powers, and with no positive responsibilities.
For a time the sentiment of trust which underlay the granting of the
reforms had its effect. Both sides seemed to display a more conciliatory
spirit and the relations between the official and unofficial benches in
the enlarged Councils assumed a more friendly character. In many cases
the influence of the non-official members was successfully exerted to
secure modifications in the legislative measures of Government, though
from a mistaken desire to "save its face" Government too often preferred
to make concessions at private conferences with the Indian leaders
rather than as the outcome of public discussion, and lost thereby a good
deal of the credit which it might have secured by a more open display of
its desire to meet Indian objections. On some occasions before the war
the pressure of Indian opinion even deterred Provincial Governments from
introducing legislative measures which they considered essential to
public safety because they apprehended defeat at the hands of the
unofficial majority in the legislative Councils. But the Indian public
remained generally in ignorance of the extent to which the influence of
the Indian representatives made itself felt, either for good or for
evil, on Government. The bureaucracy, more secretive in India than
elsewhere, had never realised the importance of guiding public opinion,
or, _a fortiori_, the necessity of keeping it informed if you wish to
guide it. The politicians, on the other hand, preferred to make capital
out of those questions on which they failed to make any impression upon
Government, though the real difficulty very often lay in the rigidity of
the statutory control exercised by the Central Government over
Provincial Governments, and by Whitehall over the Central Government.
The inevitable consequences soon became clear. The enlarged Indian
representation appeared to have less power than it really enjoyed, and,
having no responsibility whatever, it was free to make its own bids for
popularity with constituencies equally irresponsible. Resolutions were
introduced which, if they could have carried them, the unofficial
members would often have been much puzzled to carry into effect, and
grievances were voiced which, even when well founded, it was frequently
beyond the power of any Government to remedy. On the other hand, the
Executive was threatened with the possibility of a complete deadlock,
and the concessions by which it could be averted often alarmed not
merely the innate conservatism of the official world but many Indian
interests scarcely less conservative.
Not till after Mr. Morley had been raised to the peerage and Lord Crewe
had succeeded him at the India Office was anything done to meet the
demand of the Western-educated classes for a larger share in the
administrative work of the country or to redress the very reasonable
grievances of Indians employed in the Government services who were still
for the most part penned up in the Provincial Services as established on
the recommendations of the Aitcheson Committee more than twenty-five
years earlier. In 1912 a Royal Commission went out to India with Lord
Islington as Chairman. It was a body on which the British element in the
Indian Public Services was only represented by a small minority, and
amongst the European members Lord Ronaldshay and Mr. Ramsay Macdonald,
both then in the House of Commons, stood for widely different schools of
politics. Of the three Indian members, Mr. Gokhale, who had become one
of the most influential leaders of the Moderate party, carried by far
the greatest weight, and his premature death before the Commission
completed its Report seriously impaired its usefulness. It spent two
successive winters in taking a mass of evidence from Indians and
Europeans all over India, but its sittings held, except in very rare
cases, in public served chiefly at the time to stir up Indian opinion by
bringing into sharp relief the profound divergencies between the Indian
and the Anglo-Indian point of view, and in a form which on the one hand,
unfortunately, was bound to offend Indian susceptibilities, and on the
other hand was apt to produce the impression that Indians were chiefly
concerned to substitute an indigenous for an alien bureaucracy. Anyhow,
while the Western-educated classes were rapidly coming to the conclusion
that the Minto-Morley reforms had given them the shadow rather than the
substance of political power, they saw in the proceedings of the Public
Services Commission little indication of any radical change in the
attitude of the British official classes towards the question of
training up the people of India to a larger share in the administration.
In such circumstances the Extremists saw their opportunity to pour
ridicule on the new Councils and preach once more the futility of
constitutional agitation. The Indian National Congress, overshadowed for
a time by the new Councils, began to recover its popularity, and though
the split which had taken place at Surat between Moderates and
Extremists had not yet been mended, there was much talk of reunion. Some
of the Moderates had grown once more faint-hearted. The Extremists who
knew their own minds still constituted a very formidable party, and they
were finding new allies in an unexpected quarter.
When the Indian National Congress was founded in 1885 and for nearly
thirty years afterwards, the Indian Mahomedans kept severely aloof from
it, partly because they had kept equally aloof from Western education
which had originally brought the leaders of the new political movement
together, and partly because most of those leaders were Hindus, and the
ancient antagonism between Mahomedans and Hindus led the former to
distrust profoundly anything that seemed likely to enhance the influence
of the latter. One intellectual giant among the Mahomedans had indeed
arisen after the Mutiny, during which his loyalty had never wavered, who
laboured hard to convert his co-religionists to Western education. In
spite of bitter opposition from a powerful party, rooted in the old
fanatical orthodoxy of Islam, who resented his broad-mindedness which
went to the length of trying to explain, and even to explain away much
of, the Koran, Sir Seyyid Ahmed Khan succeeded in founding at Aligurh in
1880 a Mahomedan College which soon attracted students from the best
Mahomedan families all over India. His idea was to create there a centre
which should do for young Mahomedans what he himself had watched Oxford
and Cambridge doing for young Englishmen. Education was not to be
divorced as in most Indian colleges from religion, and he was convinced
that a liberal interpretation of the Mahomedan doctrine was no more
incompatible with the essence of Islam than with that of Western
civilisation, with which British rule had come to bring India into
providential contact. Loyalty to British rule was with him synonymous
with loyalty to all the high ideals which he himself pursued and set
before his students. For a whole generation success appeared to crown
this work to which he brought all the fervour of missionary enterprise.
He died full of years and honour in 1898, and one of his last efforts
was an historical refutation of the Ottoman Sultan's claim to the
Khalifate of Islam. He already realised the reactionary tendencies of
the Pan-Islamic propaganda which Abdul Hamid was trying to spread into
India. So great and enduring was the hold of Sir Seyyid Ahmed's
teachings upon the progressive elements in Mahomedan India that the
All-India Moslem League was founded in 1905, almost avowedly in
opposition to the subversive activities which the Indian National
Congress was beginning to develop. It was in this spirit, too, that the
influential deputation headed by the Agha Khan, who, though himself the
head of a dissenting and thoroughly unorthodox Mahomedan community
claiming descent from the Old Man of the Mountain, was then the
recognised political leader of the whole Indian Mahomedan community,
waited on Lord Minto to press upon the Government of India the Mahomedan
view of the political situation created by the Partition of Bengal, lest
political concessions should be hastily made to the Hindus which would
pave the way for the ascendancy of a Hindu majority equally dangerous to
the stability of British rule and to the interests of the Mahomedan
minority whose loyalty was beyond dispute. It was again in the same
spirit, and fortified by the promise which Lord Minto had on that
occasion given them, that they insisted, and insisted successfully, on
the principle of community representation being applied for their
benefit in the Indian Councils Act of 1909.
A new generation of young Mahomedans had nevertheless been growing up
who knew not Seyyid Ahmed and regarded his teachings as obsolete. The
lessons which they had learnt from their Western education were not his.
They were much more nearly those that the more ardent spirits amongst
the Hindus had imbibed, and they were ready to share with them the new
creed of Indian Nationalism in its most extreme form. Other
circumstances were tending to weaken the faith of the Mahomedan
community in the goodwill, not only of the Government of India, but of
the British Government. Even the most conservative Mahomedans were
disappointed and irritated by the revision of the Partition of Bengal in
1911 when the predominantly Mahomedan Province of Eastern Bengal,
created under Lord Curzon, was merged once more into a largely Hindu
Bengal. The more advanced Mahomedans had been stirred by the
revolutionary upheaval in Constantinople to seek contact with the
Turkish Nationalist leaders who now ruled the one great Mahomedan power
in the world, and they learnt from them to read into British foreign
policy a purpose of deliberate hostility to Islam itself inspired by
dread of the renewed vitality it might derive from the returning
consciousness in many Mahomedan countries of their own independent
nationhood. In that light they saw in the British occupation of Egypt,
in the Anglo-French agreement with regard to Morocco and the
Anglo-Russian agreement with regard to Persia, and last but not least,
in the Italian invasion of Tripoli, the gradual development of a scheme
in which all the powers of Christendom were involved for the extinction
of the temporal power of Islam and, with it inevitably, according to
orthodox doctrine, of its spiritual authority. The Ottoman Empire had
been saved for a time by the protection extended to it for her own
purposes by Germany who had alone stood between it and the
disintegrating machinations of the "European Concert" in
Constantinople, bent on undermining the ascendancy of the ruling
Mahomedan race by its menacing insistence on reforms for the benefit of
the subject Christian races which could result only in the further
aggrandisement of the independent Christian states already carved out of
the Sultans' former dominions in Europe and in the introduction of
similar processes even into their Asiatic dominions. The Balkan wars of
1912-1913 appeared to bear out the theory of a great European conspiracy
directed against Turkey as "the sword of Islam," and whilst the
sympathies of Indian Mahomedans of all classes and schools of thought
were naturally enlisted in favour of their Turkish co-religionists, the
leaders of the advanced Mahomedan party themselves went to
Constantinople in charge of the Red Crescent funds collected in India
and got into close personal touch with the Turkish Nationalists who
ruled in the name of the Sultan but derived their authority from the
"Committee of Union and Progress." The same party had in the meantime
gone a long way towards capturing the All-India Moslem League and
bringing it into line with the advanced wing of the Indian National
Congress. The fusion between the League and the Congress, which was
still very repugnant both to the politically conservative and to the
religious orthodox majority of the Indian Mahomedan community, was not
completed, nor was the reunion of the Moderate and Extremist parties
within the Congress itself, when India was caught up with Great Britain
and most of the nations of the world into the whirlpool of the Great War
on August 4, 1914.