THE FUTURE OF INDIA
THE 28o,000,00o inhabitants of British India have entered this week, despite certain adverse omens, on a new chapter of India's secular history. One more step forward has been taken towards that full liberty prescribed as the goal for India in 1921, when a far more limited advance was registered by the Act conferring the measure of self-government recommended in the Montagu-Chelmsford report. To the impatience of the modem reformer, particularly the Indian reformer, progress may be less conspicuous than procrastination. To the sober student of the India which first rose above the horizon of objective history a thousand years or more before Christ the advances made in the last thirty years in Indian government may seem almost revolutionary. It is still less than eighty years since the John Company was abolished, on the morrow of the Mutiny, and India came directly under the Imperial Crown. In the intervening period, beginning with the appointment of Indian members to the Governor- General's Council in 1862, the aim of providing for "the increasing association of Indians in every branch of Indian administration and for the gradual development of self-governing institutions, with a view to the pro- gressive realisation of responsible government in British India as an integral part of the Empire "* has been reso- lutely and consistently pur: u:d. The outstanding milestones were the Morley-Minto Councils of 1910, the Montagu-Chelmsford reforms embodied in the Act which came into operation in 1921 and the new Government of India Act which enters into force in all provinces of British India this week. The effect in short is that what was a subject nation in 1909 is, with few reserves, a self-governing nation in 1937.
There have been discreditable as well as creditable features in the British administration of India since the days of Clive. No Indian nationalist will ever forget Amritsar. And the days have been, though they are now days gone for ever, when the impoverished Indian consumer was unashamedly exploited for the benefit of the English manufacturer. But the record in the main has been one on which this country is entitled to look back with just pride, and far the more now that the governing purpose of its policy, still not fulfilled com- pletely, has become the substitution of autonomy for Empire. There may be a touch of exaggeration in the words spoken fifty years ago by an Indian leader, as there is more than a touch of irony in the fact that they were uttered at the first meeting of the Indian National Congress, but Mr. Dadabhai Naoroji was voicing no isolated or individual view when he declared that "were it not for these blessings of British rule I could not have come here today, as I have done, without the least hesitation• and without the least fear that my children might be robbed and killed in my absence nor could you have come from every corner of the land, having performed within a few days journeys which in former days would have occupied months. . . . It is to British rule that we owe the education we possess ; the people of England were sincere in the declaration made more than half a century ago that India was a sacred charge entrusted to their care by Providence, and that they were bound to administer it for the good of India, to the glory of their own name and the satisfaction of God."
That was in 1885. Today the people of England have
*Preamble to the Gove_-nment of India Act, 1919.
demonstrated the recognition of their duty not merely to administer India for India's good but to resign the trust into Indian hands that India may administer herself.
The new experiment, for experiment it must still be considered till the new regime has proved itself, opens under unfortunate auspices, for while in Bengal, the Punjab, the Frontier Province, Assam and Sind Ministries resting on assured majorities have taken or are in process of taking shape, the Congress leaders have refused to form administrations in the six provinces in which they command majorities, Bombay, Madras, the United Provinces, the Central Provinces, Orissa and Bihar. Thus are the prophets, including the leader- writers not only of the British but of much of the vernacular Press in India, confounded. The Congress appeared to have declared for assuming office, but the Congress Committee succeeded in imposing conditions embodied in a formula which it was supposed was intended as a bridge across which Congress Ministers would march without loss of dignity to receive their portfolios at the hands of provincial Governors. The ambiguous, not to say meaningless, phrase under which Governors were to pledge themselves in advance not to use the special powers entrusted to them under the Act against Ministers "acting within the constitution" has been met by the Governors with the obvious reply that they must be bound by the provisions of the Act, and since the Act provides for the exercise of special powers only if the Governor "is satisfied that a situation has arisen in which the government of the Province cannot be carried on in accordance with the provisions of this Act" it is singularly difficult to see where the grievance of Congress lies. The Governors have assured Congress leaders of their fullest and most sympathetic collabor- ation. They could not do more than that.
The refusal of Congress, even if it is maintained, does not mean at all that the new regime has broken down before it is set up. The new chapter opens inauspiciously, and in an atmosphere of hostility instead of co-operation, in more than half British India, but it opens none the less. In two great provinces and three smaller ones responsible Ministries answerable to elected legislatures will take office as the Act intended. In the other six, Ministries, there is little doubt, will take office, but they will -have no majority to rely on, and when the legislatures are convened, which need not be till six months hence, they will in all likelihood be defeated. It will then be for the Governor to choose between a dissolution, involving new elections, and the assumption by himself of administrative powers which would mean reversion to conditions prevailing not before the present Act, but before the Montagu-Chelmsford Act of 1919, came into force. The responsibility for that would rest on Congress and Congress alone, but it is well on all grounds that a period of some months for reflection should intervene. Meanwhile, the formation of what must in the circumstances be regarded as stop-gap Ministries, perfectly capable none the less of dealing with the work of day-to-day administration, is proceeding successfully in the provinces where Congress leaders have declined the task. The attitude of those leaders may point to a future deadlock, for their avowed aim is to end the constitution, but it will involve no immed- iate breakdown. An interval will now remain in, which the working of the Act in the provinCes where' the elections have had their appointed results will be observed, and the moderate elements in Congress will have time to consider whether it is in the interests of India, or even of Congress itself; that they should reject the responsibilities with which the electors have entrusted them. India is not yet in any full sense politic- ally conscious. As an article in another column shows, political emancipation has far outrun political (or any -other) education. But enough electors cast their votes with a recognition of what they meant to make it unlikely that the wrecking tactics of Congress will be generally popular. On the British side there can be no thought of capitulation to such tactics. If Congress insists on postponing autonomy, postponement there may have to be. But its power to delay does not connote power to destroy.
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