THE GOVERNMENT OF INDIA.
In the very able speech in which, on July 27, Mr. Montagu, the new
Under-Secretary of State for India, introduced the Indian Budget in the
House of Commons, one passage referred to the relations between the
Secretary of State and the Viceroy in terms which have deservedly
attracted very great attention[23]. Differences of opinion, sometimes of
an acute character, have at intervals occurred between Secretaries of
State and Viceroys as to their relative attributions. Mr. Montagu's
language, however, would seem to constitute an assertion of the powers
of the Secretary of State far in excess not only of past practice but of
any reasonable interpretation of legislative enactments on the subject.
After congratulating Lord Minto on the completion of, a "difficult
reign," Mr. Montagu said:--
The relations of a Viceroy to the Secretary of State are
intimate and responsible. The Act of Parliament says
"That the Secretary of State in Council shall superintend,
direct, and control all acts, operations, and concerns which in
any way relate to or concern the government or revenues of
India, and all grants of salaries, gratuities, and allowances,
and all other payments and charges whatever out of or on
the revenues of India." It will be seen how wide, how far
reaching, and how complete these powers are. Lord Morley
and his Council, working through the agency of Lord Minto,
have accomplished much.... I believe that men of
all parties will be grateful that Lord Morley remains to carry
out the policy he has initiated.
It is to be regretted in the first place that Mr. Montagu should not
have been more careful to make his quotation accurate. For, as quoted by
him, the Act would make it obligatory upon the Secretary of State to
supervise practically every act of the Government of India, whereas the
powers of the Secretary of State, who has succeeded to the powers of the
old Board of Control of the East India Company, are discretionary
powers. The statute from which the Secretary of State actually derives
his powers is the Government of India Act, 1858, which under section 3
declares that the Secretary of State "shall have and perform all such or
the like powers and duties in any wise relating to the government or
revenues of India and all such or the like powers over all officers
appointed or continued under this Act as might or should have been
exercised or performed" by the Company and Board of Control, and those
powers and duties are defined in the following terms in the Act of 1833
(3 and 4 William IV., c. 85, sec. 25), which Mr. Montagu would seem to
have had in his mind, though he quoted it imperfectly: "The said Board
[of Control] shall have and be invested with full power and authority to
superintend, direct, and control all acts, operations, and concerns,
&c." The difference, as has been very properly pointed out in the
_Manchester Guardian_, no unfriendly critic of the present
Administration, is "between exercising control and the power to exercise
control, between 'shall' and 'may.' If these words of the Act were to be
abbreviated, the right abbreviation would have been 'may.' This is the
word used by Sir Courtenay Ilbert in his summary of the Secretary of
State's powers (The Government of India, p. 145);--'... the Secretary
of State may, subject to the provisions embodied in this digest,
superintend, direct, and control all acts, operations, and concerns,
&c.' This difference between 'shall' and 'may' is, of course, vital.
'Shall' implies that the Secretary of State is standing over the Viceroy
in everything he does; 'may' simply reserves to him the right of control
where he disapproves. 'Shall' imparts an agency of an inferior order;
'may' safeguards the rights of the Crown and Parliament without
impairing the dignity of the Viceregal office."
Of greater importance, however, is the construction which Mr. Montagu
places on these statutes. There are three fundamental objections to the
doctrine of "agency" which he propounds in regard to the functions of
the Viceroy. In the first place, it ignores one of the most important
features of his office--one, indeed, to which supreme importance
attaches in a country such as India, where the sentiment of reverence
for the Sovereign is rooted in the most ancient traditions of all races
and creeds. The Viceroy is the direct and personal representative of the
King-Emperor, and in that capacity, at any rate, it would certainly be
improper to describe him as the "agent" of the Secretary of State. From
this point of view, any attempt to lower his office would tend
dangerously to weaken the prestige of the Crown, which, to put it on the
lowest grounds, is one of the greatest assets of the British _Raj_. In
the second place, Mr. Montagu ignores equally another distinctive
feature of the Viceroy's office, especially important in regard to his
relations with the Secretary of State--namely, that, in his executive as
well as in his legislative capacity, the Viceroy is not a mere
individual, but the Governor-General in Council. Mr. Montagu omitted to
quote the important section of the Act of 1833, confirmed in subsequent
enactments, which declared that:--
The superintendence, direction, and control of the whole
civil and military government of all the said territories and
revenues in India shall be and is hereby vested in a Governor-General
and Councillors to be styled "the Governor-General
of India in Council."
The only title recognized by statute to the Viceroy is that of
Governor-General in Council, and how material is this conjunction of the
Governor-General with his Council is shown by the exceptional character
of the circumstances in which power is given to the Governor-General to
act on his own responsibility alone, and by the extreme rareness of the
cases in which a Governor-General has exercised that power.
Thus, on the one hand, Mr. Montagu forgets the Crown when he talks of
the Secretary of State acting through the agency of the Viceroy; and, on
the other hand, he forgets the Governor-General in Council when he talks
of the relations between the Viceroy and the Secretary of State--whose
proper designation, moreover, is Secretary of State in Council, for,
like the Governor-General, the Secretary of State has a Council
intimately associated with him by statute in the discharge of his
constitutional functions. Though the cases in which the Secretary of
State cannot act without the concurrence of the Council of India, who
sit with him at the India Office, are limited to matters involving the
grant or appropriation of revenues, and in other matters he is not
absolutely bound to consult them and still less to accept their
recommendations, the Act of Parliament quoted by Mr. Montagu clearly
implies that, in the exercise of all the functions which it assigns to
him, he is expected to act generally in consultation and in concert with
his Council, since those functions are assigned to him specifically as
Secretary of State in Council.
Now, as to the nature of the relations between the Governor-General in
Council and the Secretary of State in Council as above defined by
statute. The ultimate responsibility for Indian government, as Mr.
Montagu intimated, rests unquestionably with the Imperial Government
represented by the Secretary of State for India, and therefore, in the
last resort, with the people of the United Kingdom represented by
Parliament. The question is, What is in theory and practice the proper
mode of discharging this, "ultimate responsibility" for Indian
government? It is not a question which can be authoritatively answered,
but, if we may infer an answer from the spirit of legislative enactments
and from the usage that has hitherto prevailed, it may still be summed
up in the same language in which John Stuart Mill described the function
of the Home Government in the days of the old East India Company--"The
principal function of the Home Government is not to direct the details
of administration, but to scrutinize and revise the past acts of the
Indian Governments; to lay down principles and to issue general
instructions for their future guidance, and to give or refuse sanction
to great political measures which are referred home for approval." This
seems undoubtedly to be the view of the relations, inherited from the
East India Company, between the Secretary of State and the Government of
India which has been accepted and acted upon on both sides until
recently. Nor is any other view compatible with the Charter Act of 1833,
or with the Government of India Act of 1858, which, in all matters
pertinent to this issue, was based upon, and confirmed the principles of
the earlier statute. The Secretary of State exercises general guidance
and control, but, as Mill laid it down no less forcibly, "the Executive
Government of India is and must be seated in India itself." Such
relations are clearly very different from those of principal and agent
which Mr. Montagu would apparently wish to substitute for them.
Besides the special emphasis he laid on his definition of the relations
between the Viceroy and the Secretary of State, other reasons have led
to the belief that the Under-Secretary, who spoke with a full sense of
his responsibility as the representative of the Secretary of State, was
giving calculated expression to the views of his chief. I am not going
to anticipate the duties of the historian, whose business it will be to
establish the share of initiative and responsibility that belong to Lord
Morley and Lord Minto respectively in regard to the Indian policy of
the last five years. Whilst something more than an impression generally
prevails both at home and in India that Mr. Montagu's definition does in
fact very largely apply to the relations between the present Viceroy and
the Secretary of State, and that every measure carried out in India has
originated in Whitehall, it is only fair to bear in mind that Lord
Morley has never himself put forward any such claim, nor has Lord Minto
ever admitted it. The Viceroy, on the contrary, has been at pains to
emphasize on several occasions his share, and indeed to claim for
himself the initiative, of all the principal measures carried out during
his tenure of office, and especially of the new scheme of Indian
reforms, of which the paternity is ascribed by most people to Lord
Morley.
The Secretary of State's great personality may partly account for the
belief that he has entirely overshadowed the Viceroy, all the more in
that he has certainly overshadowed the Council of India as never before.
But if Lord Minto has reason to complain, of the prevalence of this
belief, he cannot be unaware that he too has helped to build it up by
neglecting to associate his own Council with himself as closely as even
his most masterful predecessors had hitherto been careful to do.
Lord Minto's position has no doubt been one of very peculiar difficulty,
and no one will grudge him the warm tribute paid to him by Mr. Montagu.
Whatever the merits of the great controversy between Lord Curzon and
Lord Kitchener, the overruling of the Government of India by the Home
Government on a question of such magnitude and the circumstances in
which Lord Curzon was compelled to resign had dealt a very heavy blow to
the authority and prestige of the Viceregal office in India. Within a
few weeks of Lord Minto's arrival in India the Unionist Government who
had appointed him fell, and a Liberal Government came into power who
could not be expected to display any special consideration for their
predecessors nominee unless he showed himself to be in sympathy with
their policy. Lord Minto's friends can therefore very reasonably argue
that his chief anxiety was, quite legitimately, to avoid any kind of
friction with the new Secretary of State which might have led to the
supersession of another Viceroy so soon after the unfortunate crisis
that had ended in Lord Curzon's resignation. If this was the object that
Lord Minto had in view, his attitude has certainly been most successful,
for Lord Morley has repeatedly testified to the loyalty and cordiality
with which the Viceroy has constantly co-operated with him. That the
Secretary of State and the Viceroy have, nevertheless, not always seen
eye to eye with regard to the interference of the India Office in the
details of Indian administration appears clearly from a telegram read
out by Lord Morley himself in the House of Lords on February 23, 1909.
In the course of this telegram, which acknowledged in the most generous
terms the strong support of the Secretary of State in all dealings with
sedition, the Viceroy made the following curious admission:--"The
question of the control of Indian administration by the Secretary of
State, mixed up as it is with the old difficulties of centralization, we
may very possibly look at from different points of view." The curtain
fell upon this restrained attempt to assert what Lord Minto evidently
regarded eighteen months ago as his legitimate position, and to the
public eye it has not been raised again since then. But in India
certainly the fear is often expressed in responsible quarters that,
notwithstanding the courageous support which Lord Morley has given to
legislative measures for dealing with the worst forms of seditious
agitation, their effect has been occasionally weakened by that
interference from home in the details of Indian administration of which
Lord Minto's telegram contains the only admission known to the public.
It is difficult to believe that Lord Minto's position would not have
been stronger had he not allowed the Governor-General in Council to
suffer such frequent eclipses. The Governor-General's Council during
Lord Minto's tenure of office may have been exceptionally weak, and
there will always be a serious element of weakness in it so long as
membership of Council is not recognized to be the crowning stage of an
Indian career. So long as it is, as at present too frequently happens,
merely a stepping-stone to a Lieutenant-Governorship, it is idle to
expect that the hope of advancement will not sometimes act as a
restraint upon the independence and sense of individual responsibility
which a seat in Council demands. In any case, the effacement of Council
during the last few years behind the Viceroy has not been calculated to
dispel the widespread impression that, both in Calcutta and in
Whitehall, there has been a tendency to substitute for the
constitutional relations between the Governor-General in Council and the
Secretary of State in Council more informal and personal relations
between Lord Minto and Lord Morley, which, however excellent, are
difficult to reconcile with the principles essential to the maintenance
of a strong Government of India. Private letters and private telegrams
are very useful helps to a mutual understanding, but they cannot safely
supplant, or encroach upon, the more formal and regular methods of
communication, officially recorded for future reference, in consultation
and concert with the Councils on either side, as by statute established.
There is a twofold danger in any eclipse, even partial, of the
Governor-General in Council. One of the remarks I have heard most
frequently all over India, and from Indians as well as from Englishmen,
is that "there is no longer any Government of India"; and it is a remark
which, however exaggerated in form, contains a certain element of truth.
To whatever extent the Viceroy, in his relations with Whitehall,
detaches himself from his Council, to that extent the centre of
executive stability is displaced and the door is opened to that constant
interference from home in the details of Indian administration which is
all the more to be deprecated if there appear to be any suspicion of
party pressure. Lord Morley has so often and so courageously stood up
for sound principles of Indian government against the fierce attacks of
the extreme wing of his party, and he has shown, on the whole, so much
moderation and insight in his larger schemes of constructive
statesmanship, whilst Lord Minto has won for himself so much personal
regard during a very difficult period, that criticism may appear
invidious. But the tone adopted, especially during the first years of
Lord Morley's administration, in official replies to insidious
Parliamentary questions aimed at Indian administrators, the alacrity
with which they were transmitted from the India Office to Calcutta, the
acquiescence with which they were received there, and the capital made
out of them by political agitators when they were spread broadcast over
India contributed largely to undermine the principle of authority upon
which, as Lord Morley has himself admitted, Indian government must rest.
For the impression was thus created in India that there was no detail of
Indian administration upon which an appeal might not be successfully
made through Parliament to the Secretary of State over the head of the
Government of India. Now if, as Lord Morley has also admitted,
Parliamentary government is inconceivable in India, it is equally
inconceivable that Indian government can be carried on under a running
fire of malevolent or ignorant criticism from a Parliament 6,000 miles
away. That is certainly not the sort of Parliamentary control
contemplated in the legislative enactments which guarantee the "ultimate
responsibility" of the Secretary of State.
At the same time the effacement of the Viceroy's Executive Council has
weakened that collective authority of the Government of India without
which its voice must fail to carry full weight in Whitehall. Every
experienced Anglo-Indian administrator, for instance, had been quick to
realize what were bound to be the consequences of the unbridled licence
of the extremist Press and of an openly seditious propaganda. Yet the
Government of India under Lord Minto lacked the cohesion necessary to
secure the sanction of the Secretary of State to adequate legislative
action, repugnant to party traditions at home, until we had already
begun to reap the bloody harvest of an exaggerated tolerance, and with
the Viceroy himself the views of the ruling chiefs seem to have carried
greater weight in urging action on the Secretary of State than the
opinions recorded at a much earlier date by men entitled to his
confidence and entrusted under his orders with the administration of
British India.
Even if one could always be certain of having men of transcendent
ability at the India Office and at Government House in Calcutta, it is
impossible that they should safely dispense with the permanent
corrective to their personal judgment and temperament--not to speak of
outside pressure--which their respective Councils have been created by
law to supply. Let us take first of all the case of the Viceroy. His
position as the head of the Government of India may be likened to that
of the Prime Minister at home, and the position of the Viceroy's
Executive Council to that of the Ministers who, as heads of the
principal executive Departments, form the Cabinet over which the Prime
Minister presides. But no head of the Executive at home stands so much
in need of capable and experienced advisers as the Viceroy, who
generally goes out to India without any personal knowledge of the vast
sub-continent and the 300 million people whom he is sent out to govern
for five years with very far-reaching powers, and often without any
administrative experience, though he has to take charge of the most
complicated administrative machine in the world. Even when he has gone
out to India, his opportunities of getting to know the country and its
peoples are actually very scant. He spends more than six months of the
year at Simla, an essentially European and ultra-official hill-station
perched up in the clouds and entirely out of touch with Indian life, and
another four months he spends in Calcutta, which, again, is only
partially Indian, or, at any rate, presents but one aspect of the
many-sided life of India. It takes a month for the great public
departments to transport themselves and their archives from Calcutta to
Simla at the beginning of the hot weather, and another month in the
autumn for the pilgrimage back from the hills to Calcutta. It is only
during these two months that the Viceroy can travel about freely and
make himself acquainted with other parts of the vast Dependency
committed to his care, and, though railways have shortened distances,
rapid journeys in special trains with great ceremonial programmes at
every halting point scarcely afford the same opportunities as the more
leisurely progress of olden days, when the Governor-General's camp, as
it moved from place to place, was open to visitors from the whole
surrounding country. Moreover, the machinery of administration grows
every year more ponderous and complicated, and the Viceroy, unless he is
endowed with an almost superhuman power and quickness of work, is apt to
find himself entangled in the meshes of never-ending routine. It is in
order to supply the knowledge and experience which a Viceroy in most
cases lacks when he first goes out, and in some cases is never able to
acquire during his whole tenure of office, that his Executive Council is
so constituted, in theory and as far as possible in practice, that it
combines with administrative experience in the several Departments over
which members respectively preside such a knowledge collectively of the
whole of India that the Viceroy can rely upon expert advice and
assistance in the transaction of public business and, not least, in
applying with due regard for Indian conditions the principles of policy
laid down for his guidance by the Home Government. These were the
grounds upon which Lord Morley justified the appointment to the
Viceroy's Executive Council of an Indian member who, besides being
thoroughly qualified to take charge of the special portfolio entrusted
to him, would bring into Council a special and intimate knowledge of
native opinion and sentiment. These are the grounds upon which, by the
way, Lord Morley cannot possibly justify the appointment of Mr. Clark as
Member for Commerce and Industry, for a young subordinate official,
however brilliant, of an English public Department cannot bring into the
Viceroy's Executive Council either special or general knowledge of
Indian affairs. Such an appointment must to that extent weaken rather
than strengthen the Government of India.
The same arguments which apply in India to the conjunction of the
Governor-General with his Council apply, _mutatis mutandis_, with
scarcely less force to the importance of the part assigned to the
Council of India as advisers of the Secretary of State at the India
Office.
If we look at the Morley-Minto _régime_ from another point of view, it
is passing strange that the tendency to concentrate the direction of
affairs in India in the hands of the Viceroy and to subject the Viceroy
in turn to the closer and more immediate control of the Secretary of
State, whilst simultaneously diminishing _pro tanto_ the influence of
their respective Councils, should have manifested itself just at this
time, when it is Lord Morley who presides over the India Office. For no
statesman has ever proclaimed a more ardent belief in the virtues of
decentralization than Lord Morley, and Lord Morley himself is largely
responsible for legislative reforms which will not only strengthen the
hands of the provincial Governments in their dealings with the
Government of India, but will enable and, indeed, force the Government
of India to assume on many vital questions an attitude of increased
independence towards the Imperial Government. The more we are determined
to govern India in accordance with Indian ideas and with Indian
interests, the more we must rely upon a strong, intelligent, and
self-reliant Government of India. The peculiar conditions of India
exclude the possibility of Indian self-government on colonial lines, but
what we may, and probably must, look forward to at no distant date is
that, with the larger share in legislation and administration secured to
Indians by such measures as the Indian Councils Act, the Government of
India will speak with growing authority as the exponent of the best
Indian opinion within the limits compatible with the maintenance of
British rule, and that its voice will therefore ultimately carry
scarcely less weight at home in the determination of Indian policy than
the voice of our self-governing Dominions already carries in all
questions concerning their internal development.
The future of India lies in the greatest possible decentralization in
India subject to the general, but unmeddlesome, control of the
Governor-General in Council, and in the greatest possible freedom of the
Government of India from all interference from home, except in regard to
those broad principles of policy which it must always rest with the
Imperial Government, represented by the Secretary of State in Council,
to determine. It is only in that way that, to use one of Mr. Montagu's
phrases, we can hope successfully to "yoke" to our own "democratic"
system "a Government so complex and irresponsible to the peoples which
it governs as the Government of India."