THE BIRTH OF AN INDIAN PARLIAMENT
Only twelve years ago Lord Morley, with all his advanced liberalism and
his broad sympathy for Indian aspirations, could not conceive the
possibility of introducing Parliamentary institutions into India in his
time or for generations to come. He would assuredly have had to revise
his opinion could he have attended the first session of the Indian
Legislative Assembly. In form its proceedings were not unworthy of a
great Parliamentary Assembly. The speeches sometimes rose to a high
level of eloquence all the more noteworthy in that English was not the
mother tongue of those who delivered them. They were, as a rule, sober
and dignified, and if all members did not at once abandon a habit much
favoured in the old Councils of putting long strings of questions and
moving impracticable resolutions in sonorous harangues, often prepared
for them by outside hacks, their own colleagues soon taught them that
such methods were no longer likely to pay even for purposes of
advertisement. The majority quickly acquired a knack of suppressing
wind-bags and bores quietly and effectively. The Act of 1919 reserved to
Government the appointment of the President of the Assembly for the
first four years, after which he will be chosen by the Assembly itself.
Not even the House of Commons could treat the Chair with more unfailing
deference than the Assembly showed to Mr. A.F. Whyte, who brought with
him the prestige of Westminster traditions and experience to which he
from time to time appealed aptly and successfully, and the Assembly
appreciated the tact as well as the firmness with which he discharged
his novel duties. A gentle reminder of what was the usual practice in
the House of Commons was never lost on Indian members whose inexperience
occasionally failed to realise the Parliamentary implications of the
procedure adopted by them, but was always ready to accept guidance that
derived its authority from the wisdom of the Mother of Parliaments.
But the qualities shown by the Assembly transcended mere matters of
form. Mr. Whyte bore testimony at the close of the session to debates
"well worthy to stand by the side of the best debates in the Imperial
Parliament." It was no empty compliment, for they revealed the makings
of real statesmanship, and the circumstances in which the Indian
Legislature met for the first time to give collective expression to the
feelings of the people of India, called for statesmanship. The
King-Emperor's message impressed them with a sense of the great
responsibilities and great opportunities arising for them out of the
far-reaching rights conferred upon them. The personal appeal with which
the Duke of Connaught accompanied the delivery of the Royal message went
far to dispel "the shadow of Amritsar," which had, in his own apt
phrase, "lengthened over the face of India" and threatened even to
darken their own path. For on no subject had Indian feeling been more
unanimous during the elections all over the country than in regard to
the Punjab tragedy. None had been more persistently exploited by the
"Non-co-operationists" to point their jibes at the "slave-mentality" of
candidates and electors who were merely the willing dupes of a "Satanic"
Government. On no subject did the Assembly feel itself under a greater
obligation to give expression to the unanimous sentiments of the people
it represented--all the greater indeed in that opportunity of expression
had been denied to the old Legislative Council. It was the acid test to
which the sincerity and the whole value of the reforms were put. The
atmosphere of the Assembly was never again so tense as when the crucial
debate was opened by one of the ablest of the younger members of the
Moderate party, Mr. Jamnadas Dwarkadas, from Bombay, on the
administration of martial law in the Punjab in 1919. He asked the
Government (1) to declare its adhesion to the principle of equal
partnership for Indian and European in the British Empire; (2) to
express regret that martial law in the Punjab violated this fundamental
principle; (3) to administer deterrent punishment to officers guilty of
an improper exercise of their powers including the withdrawal of their
pensions; (4) to assure itself that adequate compensation is awarded to
those who lost their relatives at the Jallianwala Bagh and elsewhere.
The speaker moved his Resolution with great firmness and power but also
with great self-restraint. Most of the Indian speeches in support of it
were conceived in much the same spirit, though now and again one got a
glimpse of angrier passions just beneath the surface. Happily the
Government of India responded for the first time with the frankness and
generosity which, had it displayed them in a much earlier stage in its
handling of the Punjab troubles, would have averted many of the worst
consequences. By reprobating, either implicitly or explicitly, the worst
abuses of martial law the Home member, Sir William Vincent, the
Commander-in-chief, Lord Rawlinson, and Sir Godfrey Fell on behalf of
the army administration, succeeded in persuading the Assembly that not
only were methods of humiliation and terrorism absolutely repugnant to
all traditions of British rule, but that the censure and punishment
already inflicted upon officers and officials were in reality far more
serious and effective than the Indian mind had been wont to believe.
Indian members were asked to realise that for a British officer a broken
career is virtually the end of life, and Sir Godfrey Fell had no need to
mention General Dyer's name when he said, "As it was put to me the other
day by a very distinguished general officer, to leave the army in these
circumstances would be to many officers a disgrace worse than death."
Government finally accepted the Resolution as it had been moved with the
exception of the third clause asking for further punishment--a question
which it was not prepared nor in a position to reopen. With the eager
approval of a great many of his Indian colleagues the mover withdrew
that clause and the rest of the Resolution was passed unanimously and,
be it noted, with the support of every European member of the Assembly.
The atmosphere was thus cleared before the Assembly approached another
and only less delicate question. Some time before the Budget disclosed
the heavy military expenditure to be defrayed out of Indian revenues,
the recommendations of the Committee appointed under the presidency of
Lord Esher to inquire into the administration and organisation of the
army in India had caused widespread alarm. There were peculiar
circumstances connected with the Committee's Report which were
calculated to excite Indian suspicion. The first part, which laid down
the general principles in regard to organisation and administration, was
drawn up in London and received the approval of the Secretary of State
for India before the British members of the Committee proceeded to
India, where their Indian colleagues for the first time joined them,
whilst the President, Lord Esher, himself never went to India at all. To
carry out these principles the Report stated that "the centre of gravity
of probable military operations has shifted from West to East. In the
future we must contemplate the possibility of our armies operating in
the Middle East based partially in India and partially at home.... India
has now been admitted into partnership with the Empire, and the Indian
Army has fought alongside of troops from other parts of the Empire in
every theatre of war. Its responsibilities have thus been greatly
widened, and it can no longer be regarded as a local force whose sphere
of activity is limited to India and the surrounding frontier
territories. It must rather be treated as a part of the Imperial Army
ready to serve in any part of the world." Indians interpreted the Report
as an attempt on the part of the British War Office to throw upon the
Indian Exchequer the cost of a larger army than would be required merely
for Indian defence whilst keeping it under its own control for
employment at the discretion of British Ministers far beyond the
frontiers of India. Official assurances were given both in India and at
home that an exaggerated construction had been placed on the meaning of
the Report, to which, moreover, neither the British Government nor the
Government of India was officially committed, and that in any case
Indian troops would not be required to serve outside India except with
the consent of the Government of India. These assurances did not prevent
the Assembly from passing two Resolutions in which it embodied its
strong protests. The second part of the Report, containing practical
recommendations for the reorganisation of the Indian Army, and alone
based on the results of the inquiry actually conducted in India, was far
less criticised.
The army estimates themselves would have been enough to cause dismay
even if the estimates of other departments, upon which the Indian public
looks with more favour, had not clearly been pruned down with more than
usual parsimony to meet the large increase in military expenditure. But
Lord Rawlinson, who had done his utmost to reduce them to the extreme
limit of safety as he conceived it in existing circumstances, wisely
decided to take the Assembly as far as possible into his confidence, and
to explain the requirements of the military situation not only from his
seat on the Government bench but in private conferences, at which
members were freely invited to meet him and his advisers. If he did not
altogether convince them, he gave them food for reflection at a time
when not only our own North-West Frontier but the whole of Central Asia
is still in a state of turmoil, Persia a very doubtful quantity, and the
Ameer of Afghanistan far more eager to sign a treaty of alliance with
Soviet Russia than to bring to a friendly conclusion the long-drawn
negotiations which the Government of India has sent the head of its
foreign department to conduct at Kabul. The appointment of a Committee
to visit the North-West Frontier and to study the situation on the spot
was admirably calculated to carry the practical education of Indian
legislators a long step farther. In regard to other matters, too,
Government gave and gained time for reflection by referring them, before
committing itself to any definite pronouncement of policy, to special
committees in which points at issue could be thrashed out much more
effectively and with less heat than if only discussed in full house.
Nothing, however, could alter the awkward fact that Government had been
compelled to confront the Legislative Assembly at its first session with
a Budget showing a deficit and making calls upon the Indian tax-payer
absolutely unprecedented in the annals of British-Indian State finance.
The deficit amounted to nearly 19 crores of rupees on a Budget of 130
crores,[3] and the Financial Member, Mr. Hailey, who had only recently
succeeded to the financial department, had to admit that the deficit
could only be met by increased taxation. That the estimates of the
previous year had been so largely exceeded was due beyond dispute to the
growth of military expenditure, which, for the current financial year,
has been put down at 62 crores, or very nearly half the total
expenditure for which provision has to be made. This Budget, moreover,
not only came at a time of general economic depression, but coincided
with the operation of the new financial arrangements between the
Provinces and the Government of India, which have deprived the latter of
the facilities it had formerly for mitigating its own financial
necessities by adjusting to them the doles paid out of the Central
Exchequer to the several Provincial Exchequers. Under the new system
various revenues have been definitely allocated to the Provincial
Governments for their own free disposal, and in return they have to make
fixed annual contributions to the Central Exchequer. These contributions
are in no case to be subject to increase in the future, but on the
contrary to be reduced gradually and to cease at the earliest possible
moment compatible with the irreducible requirements of the Government of
India. The Act of 1919, it is true, transfers to the Indian Legislature
no direct or complete statutory control over revenue and expenditure,
and powers are still vested in the Government of India to override the
Assembly in cases of emergency and to enact supplies which it refuses if
the Governor-General in Council certifies them to be essential to the
peace, tranquillity, and interests of India. But the fact that there was
a deficit which could only be met by increased taxation offered
exceptional opportunities which might easily have been used for
embarrassing obstruction by a young and immature chamber naturally
concerned for its own popularity. Even a direct conflict between the
Government and the Assembly might not have been impossible, and the
consequences would have been lamentable. For if the Government of India
had been driven to use its statutory powers to impose taxation and
secure supplies in opposition to the Legislature during its very first
session, all the hopes of friendly co-operation based on the new
constitution would have been wrecked far more disastrously and
permanently than by any "Non-co-operation" movement. The Legislative
Assembly was wise enough to exercise its rights with sufficient
insistence to show that it was conscious of them, but never to strain
them. It did not refrain from criticism of almost every department in
turn or from motions to reduce the official estimates for them. Many of
the criticisms were sound, and some of the reductions were accepted by
Government. Mr. Hailey handled a delicate situation with unfailing
patience and skill. Even in regard to new taxation he endeavoured to
meet, as far as the exigencies of the Budget allowed, the objections of
the Assembly to such increases as, for instance, higher postal rates,
which press most heavily on the least well-to-do classes. Nothing,
however, helped him so much to get his Budget through without a serious
conflict as the decision of the Government to seek in an increase of the
import duties over two-thirds of the new revenue to be raised to meet
the deficit. For there Government took up common ground with Indian
opinion on fiscal matters and carried into effect the principle laid
down by the Select Joint Committee on the Reforms Bill, and endorsed by
the Secretary of State, that the Government of India must be granted the
same liberty to devise Indian tariff arrangements on a consideration of
Indian interests as all other self-governing parts of the Empire enjoy.
If the Assembly did not see altogether eye to eye with Government as to
the necessity for all this increased expenditure and increased taxation,
its objections were at least mitigated by a form of increased taxation
in which it saw the first step towards fiscal autonomy. In this as in
every other question with which the Legislature had to deal, the
Government of India showed its willingness to accept as far as possible
the guidance of Indian opinion and to act as a national Indian
Government, and not merely as the supreme executive authority under the
Government of the United Kingdom.
On those terms the Assembly was prepared to take into account the
difficulties and responsibilities inherited by Government from past
policies from which no sudden departure was possible, or desired even,
by responsible Indians who recognise the present limitations of their
experience as well as of their rights. Government and Legislature
therefore parted in mutual goodwill and with increased confidence in the
value of the new policy of co-operation. But the Legislature has only
just commenced to realise the extent of its powers, expressed and
implied. The latter stretch almost immeasurably farther than the
former. Indian-elected members form a large majority in the Legislative
Assembly, which has already so largely overshadowed the Council of State
that it will probably be difficult for the upper house to exercise over
the more popular chamber the corrective influence originally
contemplated. The Government of India, of course, retains its great
statutory powers, but these could hardly be exercised again in
uncompromising opposition to the opinion of the majority of the Assembly
now that out of eight members of the Viceroy's Executive Council, which,
with him, forms the Government of India, no less than three are Indians,
who would presumably be often more amenable than their British
colleagues to the pressure of Indian opinion. Under the Act of 1919 the
Government of India is not responsible to the Assembly. That may come in
a later stage, it has not come yet. But one may rest already assured
that only in extreme cases, and if the majority shows itself far more
irresponsible than it has yet given the slightest reason to fear, is
Government likely to risk a cleavage between British and Indian members
of the Viceroy's Executive Council, or to rely on the fact that no vote
of the Assembly can remove it from office, to provoke or face a conflict
of which the consequences would extend far beyond the walls of the
Legislature. This is a powerful lever of which Indians may quickly learn
the use.
In another important direction the first session of the Legislature bore
out Sir Thomas Munro's view, expressed, as we have already seen, a
hundred years ago, that in India as elsewhere liberal treatment will be
found the most effectual way of elevating the character of the people.
Nothing perhaps has tended more to alienate the sympathies of Englishmen
from the political aspirations which the founders of the Indian National
Congress were bent upon promoting than the subordination of social to
political reforms. There remained always some distinguished Indians who
ensued both--notably Mr. Gokhale, who founded the society of "the
Servants of India," dedicated chiefly to social reform, of which the
beneficent activities have expanded steadily throughout a decade of
political turmoil. His mantle fell on no unworthy shoulders, and it is a
good omen that his chief disciple, Mr. Srinivasa Sastri, has become the
leader of the Moderate party in the Council of State, as well as one of
the Indian representatives at the recent Imperial Conference in London.
A similar spirit informs the numerous associations that have addressed
themselves, though with perhaps less success so far, to the more glaring
evils of the Hindu religious social system, such as infant marriage, the
prohibition of re-marriage of widows, the rigidity of caste laws in
regard to inter-caste marriage, and to intercourse between the different
castes even at meals. Many interesting experiments have been made by
Indians for infusing into education a new moral tone and discipline on
Indian lines, and it is due to Indian effort no less than to the
encouragement of Government that female education has begun to bridge
over the intellectual gulf that tended to separate more and more the men
and the women of the Western-educated classes. In Madras, to quote only
one instance, there is to-day a high school for girls--almost
unthinkable two decades ago and only opened ten years ago--in which
high-caste Brahman girls live under the same roof and are taught in the
same class-rooms as not only Hindu girls of the non-Brahman castes, but
Mahomedan and native Christian and Eurasian girls from all parts of the
Presidency, and the only real difficulty now experienced is in the
traditional matter of food, and it is circumvented, if not overcome, by
providing seven different kitchens and seven different messes.
The last attempt on the part of the Government to promote social reforms
by way of legislation was Lord Lansdowne's "Age of Consent" Bill thirty
years ago, and though it was carried through in spite of the violent
opposition of Hindu orthodoxy, which then brought Mr. Tilak into public
life as its leader, an alien Government pledged to complete neutrality
in social and religious matters shrank after that unpleasant experience
from assuming the lead in such matters without having at least the
preponderating bulk of Indian opinion behind it. Not the least
noteworthy event of the first session of the Indian Legislature was the
introduction by Dr. Gour, a Hindu member from the Central Provinces, of
a private Bill legalising civil marriage which British Indian law so far
recognises only between a Christian and a non-Christian, though the
Indian States of Baroda and Indore have legalised them for all their
subjects. Sir Henry Maine wished to move, as far back as 1868, in this
direction when he was Law Member of the Government of India, but to meet
even then a fierce orthodox opposition the provisions of the Bill
finally enacted in 1872 were so whittled down as to make it practically
useless, and it was almost nullified when it came up for interpretation
by the Privy Council. The question does in fact involve many material as
well as social and religious considerations, as matters of personal law
are largely governed by ancient custom in the different communities, and
the point at issue was whether it is possible for a Hindu to cease to be
subject to Hindu law. More recent attempts to make civil marriage lawful
have failed hopelessly. Dr. Gour has had the courage to appeal to the
more liberal spirit for which the new reforms stand, and he defended his
Bill, which is only a permissive Bill, on the grounds that any measure
calculated to break down the ancient barriers between races and creeds
and communities must tend to strengthen the sense of national solidarity
of which the new Indian Legislature is the expression. It remains yet to
be seen what will be the fate of his Bill, but its introduction is in
itself not one of the least hopeful signs of the times.
If one turns from the Government of India to the new Provincial
Governments and Councils the outlook is, on the whole, not less
encouraging. The statutory powers of the Provincial Councils are more
definite and can be brought more directly to bear upon Government, but
they are not likely to be exercised in any extravagant fashion until
time has shown how Indian Ministers discharge their responsibilities to
the Councils and how the two wings of the new Provincial Governments
work together. In fact, the policy, wisely adopted by Provincial
Governors, of treating the two wings of their Government as equally
associated with them in a common task of governance, has robbed the
distinction between "reserved" and "transferred" subjects, if not of all
reality, at any rate of the invidious appearance of discrimination which
might otherwise have attached to the word "dyarchy." As one Provincial
Governor remarked to me, "We are in reality skipping the dyarchy stage."
Indian Ministers, kept fully informed and drawn into consultation on all
subjects, are learning to understand the difficulties of government and
administration of which, as outside critics, they had little notion, and
to value the experience and knowledge which their European colleagues
and subordinates freely place at their disposal, whilst the latter
benefit both from hearing the Indian point of view and from having to
explain and justify their own. Economic depression and financial
stringency cannot, however, but react unfavourably upon the new system
in the Provinces as well as at Delhi, for all the more practical reforms
in which the ordinary Indian elector, whether politically minded or
otherwise, is most closely interested, and for which he has been looking
to the new Provincial Councils, require money, and a great deal of
money. There is a universal demand for more elementary schools, more
road-making, more sanitation, a more strenuous fight against malaria, a
greater extension of local government and village councils' activities,
and the demand cannot be met except by more expenditure. The Indian
Ministers and Indian members of the Provincial Councils have to face
unpopularity whether by postponing much-needed reforms or by imposing
new taxation in order to carry them out. A great many of the best men
have naturally been attracted to Delhi, but though the proceedings in
the Provincial Councils have more frequently betrayed impatience and
inexperience, and sometimes required the monitory intervention of the
Governor, they have played on the whole creditably the important part
allotted to them in this great constitutional experiment.
It is far less easy to appraise the value of the attempt which has been
made at the same time to bring that large part of India which lies
outside the sphere of direct British administration into closer touch
with it by the creation of a Chamber of Princes, which will at least sit
under the same roof with the Council of State and the Legislative
Assembly in the great hall of Parliament to be erected in New Delhi. The
moment when the Government of India is departing from its autocratic
traditions and transferring a large part of its powers throughout
British India into the hands of representative assemblies which are to
pave the way towards the democratic goal of responsible government,
seems scarcely well chosen for the creation of a Chamber which must give
greater cohesion, and potentially greater power to resist the spirit of
the age, to a body of ruling Princes and Chiefs who all stand in varying
degrees for archaic forms of despotic government and whose peoples have
for the most part stood hitherto entirely outside the political life of
British India.
The Native States, as they are commonly called, scattered over nearly
the whole length and breadth of the Indian Empire, cover altogether more
than a third of its total area and include nearly a quarter of its total
population. Some of them can compare in size and wealth with the smaller
States of Europe. Some are but insignificant specks on the map. Great
and small, there are several hundreds of them. Their relations with the
Paramount Power, which have been not inaptly described as those of
subordinate alliance, are governed by treaties and engagements of which
the terms are not altogether uniform. The essence is in all cases the
maintenance of their administrative autonomy under their own dynastic
rulers whose hereditary rights and privileges are permanently guaranteed
to them, subject to their loyalty to the British Crown and to reasonably
good government. The Princes and Chiefs who rule over them--some well, a
few rather badly, most of them perhaps indifferently; some Hindus, some
Mahomedans; some still very conservative and almost mediaeval, some on
genuinely progressive lines; some with a mere veneer of European
modernity--are all equally jealous of their rights and their dignity.
The Native States cannot, however, live wholly in water-tight
compartments. They must be more or less directly affected by what goes
on in British India just across their own often very artificial
boundaries. Their material interests are too closely bound up with those
of their British-Indian neighbours. In many matters, _e.g._ railways,
posts, telegraphs, irrigation, etc., they are in a great measure
dependent upon, and must fall into line with, British India. Their
peoples--even those who do not go to British India for their education
or for larger opportunities of livelihood--are being slowly influenced
by the currents of thought which flow in from British India.
Political unrest cannot always or permanently be halted at their
frontier, though His Exalted Highness the Nizam of Hyderabad, whose ways
are still largely those of the Moghuls, has not hesitated, albeit
himself a Mahomedan Prince, to proscribe all _Khilafat_ agitation within
his territory. The Extremist Press has already very frequently denounced
ruling Princes and Chiefs as obstacles to the democratic evolution of a
_Swaraj_ India which will have to be removed, and if the Nagpur Congress
pronounced against extending its propaganda to the Native States, it did
so only "for the present" and on grounds of pure and avowed expediency.
Apart from the menace of Indian Extremism, there must obviously be a
fundamental conflict of ideals between ruling Chiefs bent on preserving
their independent political entity and the aspirations towards national
unity entertained by the moderate Indian Nationalists whose influence is
sure to predominate over all the old traditions of Indian governance if
the new reforms are successful. Some Princes are wise enough to swim
with the current and have introduced rudimentary councils and
representative assemblies which at any rate provide a modern façade for
their own patriarchal systems of government. But all are more or less
conscious that their own position is being profoundly modified by
constitutional changes in British India, which must, and indeed are
intended to, alter the very character of the Government representing the
Paramount Power to whose authority they owe their own survival since the
beginning of British rule. Their survival has indeed always been an
anomaly, though hitherto, on the whole, equally creditable to the
British _Raj_ that preserved them from extinction in the old days of
stress and storm and to the rulers who have justified British
statesmanship by their fine loyalty. But in a democratised and
self-governing India it might easily become a much more palpable
anomaly.
How was this new situation to be dealt with? Some of the ruling Princes
and Chiefs whose views appear to have prevailed with the Secretary of
State and the Government of India, came to the conclusion that they
should combine together and try to secure as a body a recognised
position from which their collective influence might be brought more
effectively to bear upon the Government of India, whatever its new
orientation may ultimately be under the influence of popular assemblies
in British India. Some, doubtless, believed that once in such a position
they would be able to oppose a more effective because more united front
to interference from whatever quarter in the internal affairs of their
States. Circumstances favoured their scheme for the loyalty displayed by
all the Native States, and the distinguished services rendered in person
by not a few Chiefs inclined Government to meet their wishes without
probing them too closely, and in the first place to relax the control
hitherto exercised by its political officers on the spot--often, it must
be confessed, on rather petty and irritating lines. The leading Princes
were encouraged to come to Delhi during the winter season, and those who
favoured a policy of closer combination amongst themselves were those
who responded most freely to these official promptings. Conversations
soon assumed the shape of informal conferences, and, later on, of formal
conferences convened and presided over by the Viceroy. The hidden value
of these conferences must have been far greater than would appear from
the somewhat trivial record of the subjects under discussion, for it is
out of these conferences that the new Chamber of Princes has been
evolved as a permanent consultative body for the consideration of
questions affecting the Native States generally, or of common concern to
them and to British India and to the Empire generally.
The conception is in itself by no means novel and appeals to many upon
whom the picturesqueness and conservative stability of the Native States
exercise a strong attraction. It can be traced back at least as far as
Lord Lytton's Viceroyalty over forty years ago, and the steadily growing
recognition of the important part which the Native States play in the
Indian Empire culminated during the war in the appointment of an Indian
Prince to represent them specially at the Imperial War Conferences held
in London during the war, and again, after the war was over, at the
Paris Peace Conference.
But the creation of a Chamber of Princes at this particular juncture
raises very difficult issues. In the first place, though it has been
engineered with great skill and energy by a small group of very
distinguished Princes, mostly Rajput, it is viewed with deep suspicion
by other chiefs who, not being Rajputs, scent in it a scheme for
promoting Rajput ascendancy, and it has received no support at all from
other and more powerful Princes such as the Nizam of Hyderabad, the
Gaikwar of Baroda, the Maharajah of Mysore. Some have always held aloof
from the Delhi Conferences and have intimated plainly that they have no
desire to see any alteration introduced into their treaty relationships
with the Paramount Power. Without their participation no Chamber of
Princes can pull its full weight, and even if most of them considered
themselves bound out of loyalty to the Sovereign to attend an inaugural
ceremony performed by the Duke of Connaught in the name of the
King-Emperor himself, it would be premature to infer that their
opposition has been permanently overcome. The Supreme Government has of
course reiterated the pledges already embodied in the treaties that
there shall be no interference with the ancient rights and privileges of
the Native States and their rulers, but its eminent right to interfere
in cases of extreme urgency has not and cannot be surrendered. It has
been exercised very rarely, and only when administration and government
have fallen flagrantly short of certain standards, established by usage
and generally understood and accepted, which it is perhaps easier to
describe negatively than positively. Misrule cannot be tolerated when it
amounts to a public scandal or takes the form of criminal acts. The
whole question has always bristled with difficulties, and still does.
The tendency, since Lord Curzon's time, has been to relax the control of
the Supreme Government even in matters of slighter moment on which it
had been accustomed to tender advice not always distinguishable from
commands. That some of the Native States, and not the least powerful,
are badly governed is of common notoriety. But if the Supreme Government
has been sometimes inclined to turn a blind eye in such cases, and even
to forget that it has moral obligations towards the subjects as well as
towards the rulers of the Native States, it has been free hitherto to
obey considerations of political expediency which may conceivably not
weigh so much in the future. For the same forces that have obtained the
surrender of the autocratic principle in British India, may demand with
equal insistency its surrender throughout the Native States. Should the
more irresponsible chiefs rely on the solidarity of a Chamber of Princes
to secure for them greater immunity than ever from the just consequences
of misgovernment, they would merely hasten a conflict which undoubtedly
most of their caste have begun to dread between their own archaic
methods and the democratic spirit which the Government of India Act of
1919 has quickened in British India.
There are many other thorny points. Obviously there could be no room for
all the seven or eight hundred ruling chiefs, great and small, in any
assembly reasonably constituted to represent the Native States. Nor have
they ever enjoyed any uniform status or received any uniform treatment.
Some of them, the most important, have maintained direct relations with
the Government of India; the majority only indirect relations through
the Provincial Governments within whose sphere their territories are
situated. The creation of the Chamber of Princes has necessitated a new
classification of major and minor States, the former entitled to direct,
the latter only to indirect representation, which has naturally caused a
vast amount of jealousy and heartburning. Another consequence still
under discussion is the substitution in most cases of direct relations
with the Government of India for those in which the smaller Native
States now stand to provincial governments. Such transfer must involve
innumerable difficulties and complications, especially in a Presidency
like Bombay, within whose boundaries there are over 300 Native States
inextricably bound up with it by common interests and even by common
administrative needs. Many of them are at first sight inclined to
welcome such a transfer as enhancing their prestige; some of them,
remembering the old saying that "Delhi is a long way off," hope that it
will lessen the prospect of outside interference in their own
administration, however bad it may be or become. But these are hardly
arguments to justify a transfer which can only import a new element of
confusion into an already sufficiently confused situation.
The Chamber of Princes was opened with all the glitter of oriental pomp
and magnificence, but it only held a few meetings and the proceedings
were veiled in secrecy. Only enough transpired to show that personal
jealousies and clan rivalries were rife even at that early stage. Its
very constitution denies it the assistance for which the Indian Councils
and the Indian Ministers have been wise enough to look from the
co-operation with them of British elements, whose authority in
government and administration is still maintained by statute and so far
undisputed. To the Chamber of Princes the Viceroy alone is in a position
to give guidance, and to shape that illustrious assembly to useful
purposes is one of the many difficult tasks in front of Lord Reading.
FOOTNOTES:
[3] At the "stabilised" rate of exchange a crore, or ten million
rupees = one million gold pounds sterling. One hundred lacs make a
crore.