Indian Politics, 1936-1942. Report on the constitutional problem in India,
Part II. By R. Coupland. (Oxford University Press. 7s. 6d.)
BOOKS OF THE DAY
India in Transition
PROFESSOR COUPLAND has written a book quite indispensable to anyone who seeks to know the truth about the political problems of India or to hold a decided opinion about them. Mr. Amery has unconsciously paid a remarkable testimony to the integrity and liberalism of his own attitude towards India's constitutional develop- ment in publicly electing to be judged by the evidence of a cool, dispassionate, open-minded and exact historian such as Professor Coupland has again shown himself to be. Here is the truth, and by the truth alone can British policy and Indian reactions be justly tested and appraised. In this second of the three parts in which Professor Coupland is publishing his report for Nuffield College, he has told the story of Indian politics from the passage of the 1935 constitutional Act to the insurrection of August, 1942, and the incarceration of the Congress leaders. It was the critical period of India's constitutional advance, when experience of democratic government was taking the place of theory and speculation, when ideas borrowed from the West were being put to the proof of practice in the East. It may prove, on a longer historical view than we can yet take, to have been the period when India of her own will and motion rejected the model of British parliamentary democracy and set herself the far harder and more perilous task of building some new and untried form of government.
A great part of Professor Coupland's book is taken up with a detailed survey of the operation of provincial self-government under the Act of 1935. Had he done no more, his work would still have been indispensable to students of Indian affairs ; for in the day-to- day experience of eleven responsible Indian Governments (seven of them formed by the Congress party) lies a wealth of guidance for the future and of correction of pre-conceived ideas in both British and Indian minds. But Professor Coupland has gone beyond this. Without straying from the path of detached historical analysis, he has brought out the sinister sweep of larger facts than are revealed by a recital of such details. As so often happens in political history, the whole story is greater than the sum of its parts.
The stagnation of political development at the Centre is the first of these underlying facts. Here, it must be confessed, the scale of Professor Coupland's treatment is less than adequate to the impor- tance of the subject, for he himself suggests very clearly how far happier India's recent constitutional history might have been, had the central provisions of the 5935 Act been put into force. That the failure to make federation effective was due to the short-sighted intransigence of certain of the Princes, coupled with the mutually cancelling objections of principle of the Congress and the Muslims, he makes quite plain, but he leaves us guessing whether British policy need have been so acquiescent, had it been a little more single-minded and adventurous.
Certainly the stagnation at the Centre greatly enhanced the second of those broad facts which underlie the story of provincial autonomy and unhappier later events—the totalitarianism of the Congress and the dictatorship of Mr. Gandhi. This fact in turn engendered the third, the violent Muslim reaction which has changed Pakistan from a fad to a slogan, from a slogan to a possibility. Much the most interesting chapter in Professor Coupland's book is one on " The Character and Policy of the Congress," which will be revealing even to close students of Indian politics. For it brings out, with chapter and verse, the way in which the history, the ideology and the internal constitution of the Congress produced a system wherein responsible parliamentary governments were made the pawns of a party executive, and that executive itself, resting as it did on very indirect and dubious popular franchise, was in practice under the thumb of one man of remarkable personality and nihilistic outlook. We need look no further for the major cause of India's breakdown along the road of democratic government as we know it in the West. The one-party system, though bound up in our minds with the evils of fascism and the suppression of free thought, is not neces- sarily unworkable or unsound in conditions different from our own. But it is plainly and flatly inconsistent both with the parliamentary democracy which India was offered and still demands, and with the existence of an internecine cleavage as acute as the communal cleavage in India today. If India tomes to it in the end, it will be by a circuitous route.
Perhaps the least satisfying of Professor Coupland's chapters is that on the constitutional position at the present time. This is not the fault of the author, but of the fact that when he turns from the narrative of the dynamic to the description of the static, and when that static condition has been the subject of much ignorant abuse, the plain statement of fact (and in this Professor Coupland is impeccable) is apt to seem defensive and sterile. His picture is not in fact quite complete, for he omits from it any treatment of the place of the bureaucracy in the Indian constitution in practice: it is a serious omission, for India is only now, and very partially, emerging from the characteristic condition of a subordinate imperial domain, where executive government is but the flower on the stem of administrative officialdom. No statement of the Indian constitu- tional position is complete without some account of the peouliar influence and status of the higher bureaucracy, with its solidarity and its right of direct access to the Governor or Governor-General.
Professor Coupland will no doubt deal with these matters, pro- ceeding from the descriptive to the constructiye, in his Part III, which is to be concerned with the future. Everyohe interested in India will look forward to it eagerly—all the more eagerly; and better equipped for assessing its prophecies and turning its ideas to
account, for having read Part II. • H. V. HonsoN.
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