Great Britain and India
The Simon Report : Why it is Unacceptable to India
The purpose of this page is to ventilate that moderate Indian opinion which, recognizing all the difficulties, yet believes in the continued association of Great Britain and India within the loose framework of the British Commonwealth of Nations. ll'e hope to include contributions from leading figures of the various sections of responsible opinion, Bindle, Moslem, and the Indian States.
[The author of this article is a well-known barrister, one of the most distinguished of the Moslems who have held office under the Government of India. He retired from the Indian Civil Service In 1914, but has since devoted himself to special work on behalf of relations between Great Britain and India. Ho was one of the representatives of India at the Ninth Assembly of the League of Nations.] I DO not intend in this brief article to discuss the details of the Simon Report. Nor do I wish to say anything that might diminish the slender chances of the success of the Round Table Conference. I utterly condemn the Civil Disobedience move- ment and have:no sympathy with the spirit of non-co-operation where the parties to co-operation can meet on equal terms. I merely desire to point out to the British public some of the reasons why the Simon Report is unacceptable to all shades of Indian opinion. Much has been written and said in Great Britain to imply that it is some perversity of Indian nature, some inherent defect of Indian character, which makes Indian opinion so unanimous against the Report. The Simon Report has been so boomed in England that the man in the street has come to regard it as the last word in British statesmanship. The Indian people arc told patronisingly that they would learn many things about their own country which they did not know before, if only they would accept as gospel what is written by seven blameless gentlemen who knew nothing about India two and a half years ago, but who have in the meantime toured 21,000 miles in that country in eight months, and have gathered an enormous mass of conflicting second-hand inform- ation from more or less authoritative sources.
Sir John Simon is unquestionably one of the ablest lawyers of the day. But his brilliant abilities in making out a case are themselves a source of danger in such a delicate adventure. The most suave and courteous of men, he has been able to use his parliamentary skill to persuade his six colleagues to agree to proposals which some of them no doubt consider as going beyond the limits of safety while others as being below the limits of adequacy. The compromises are in some parts in- consistent with each other. if it were a question merely of bargaining between the three political parties in England, this might be considered as eminently satisfactory. But as Parliament evidently desired to evolve a scheme which would be workable in India through the agency of politically-minded India, and as politically-minded India, divided on most points, agrees in rejecting the Report, it is no disrespect to the Report to say that it is a failure.
If the picture painted in the first volume of the Report is accurate, India is unfit for representative government, the whole policy solemnly enunciated in 1917 is wrong, and the new proposals about provincial autonomy and an elec- torate of 10 per cent. of the population are untenable. To give these and mask them with the numerous safeguards, such as non-elected ministers (II. 33), or Governors' over- riding powers (II. 35), or the Governor-General's apparently enlarged powers of interference with the Provinces (II. 39), ur the Governors' emergency powers (II. 48-9), is to give 0 shadow without the substance of autonomy. I am not discussing the need for emergency powers, but to call it complete provincial autonomy seems a mockery.
But is the picture in the first volume accurate ? I would concede that there is not a statement in it for which chapter and verse could not be quoted, and yet the general effect must be misleading to those who know nothing about India. Take a small point where we can verify the authority on which the Report bases itself. It says (I. 12-13) : " The census enumerates altogether 222 vernaculars for India, but without going into all these details, it is enough to say that a man who wished to make himself generally understood in all parts of India (without including special areas or remote tribes) would have to be master of as many separate tongues as a linguist who was prepared to accomplish the same achievement throughout Europe." Turn to the last census report, and study it at first hand. If you exclude the languages spoken in Burma (which the Report wants to exclude from India) and those of the Austrie family in remote tracts, you only get forty-one. Many of these arc based on principles of scientific classification, which the speakers themselves know nothing about. The differences between Western and Eastern Hindi, Bitten, and Central Pahari are (says the United Provinces Report) like the differences between the languages spoken by a " peasant of Devon and a crofter of Aberdeen." If we take the various forms and dialects of Hindi (Hindustani), we find that they are spoken by over 100 millions of the people. And with the Progress of education the smaller dialects are gradually being absorbed. It is absurd to speak of 222 vernaculars.
In the reconstruction of the Central Government the Report takes us a stage backwards. The Federal idea is hailed in some quarters as a wonderful contribution made by the Report. But the Report itself recognizes (II. 13) the references to it in the Montagu-Chelmsford Report (pares. 120, 349, Sc.), and before that Report it was adumbrated for British Provinces in a famous Government of India Dispatch in 1911. What is new in the Simon Report is the emphasis laid on hitching on the Indian States (with their consent) to British Provinces. The States may be left to speak for themselves, but I have no reason to suppose that the major States will like it. Most of the States are far behind British India in political advancement, and to hitch them 011 to British India is to slacken the pace of the political growth of British India. The Indian States were not mentioned in the original terms of reference to the Simon Commission, and it was only in the last stages of the Commission's work that " this possibly extended interpretation of our own terms of reference " was adopted by Sir John Simon after consultation with the Prime Minister. The result is that the proposals about the development of the Executive and Legislature of the Central Government throw us back a step front Dominion status when Dominion status scents to be the unanimous cry of that part of political India which is not committed to Independence.
Exigencies of space forbid more than a passing reference to Finance. On this point the Conmtission has based its recommendations on the Report of an expert from outside. There can be no question that Mr. (now Sir) W. T. Layton has carefully and patiently studied the system, but his assumption that Indian taxation can be substantially increased without being intolerable (II. 208) rests on somewhat slender grounds. He recommends the assessment of agricultural incomes to Income Tax, and the introduction of steep gradients of taxation for the more wealthy. This in Indian conditions is of doubtful validity economically, and may well be politically dangerous, as it would throw the Zatnindars and propertied classes into the arms of the sans-culottes, who are at the bottom of the present troubles. The proposal to distribute the proceeds of Income Tax according to origin and of Excise taxes on a population basis (II. 260) will hardly be acceptable to the poorer and less densely populated Provinces.
The Report rightly lays stress on " equality of status (I. 408), but the Commission mean this in a narrow sense, viz., equality as between Indian and " European " personally, whereas every patriotic Indian wishes to see his country enjoy an equal status with any other unit within or without the British Empire. This is an all-important principle, and because the Report not only does not recognize this, but makes it impossible within any measurable distance of time, Indians are justified in asking for a wholly different line of approach to the question.
A. Yusrc Atr.
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