The Dual Task in India
TN a single phrase in his speech in the Indian debate in the House of Commons last Friday Sir Samuel Hoare summed up accurately the dual aim of Great Britain in India. " We have," he said, " two problems in India, that of law and order and that of constitutional advance ; and we cannot dissociate the one from the other." The implications of the last words must be emphasized. Law and order must be maintained in India as nnich in the interests of the Government of to-morrow as in those of the Government of to-day. The administration whose days are numbered must be able to hand over to the necessarily less experienced administration that will take its place a governmental machine running smoothly and efficiently and a country where order is maintained and law observed. There cannot be successful constitutional advance without law and order. But equally there cannot be law and order without constitutional advance. Pledges definite and specific have been given to India. The Viceroy repeated them at Peshawar last month. And if there were the smallest ground for suspicion that there was deliberate procrastination about the fulfilment of those obligations, discontent that would express itself in widespread violation of the law would be certain. The impnlse to lay emphasis on law and order in a week when so dastardly an outrage as the murder of Mr. Douglas at Midnapore has to be recorded is instinctive, but that does not alter the conviction that the Secretary of State is fundamentally right in setting the two ideals of law and order and constitutional advance side by side, and declaring that one cannot be dissociated from the other.
One of the worst consequences of the Midnapore crime and others like it is that they go far to justify the renewal of those emergency ordinances now in force over the whole of India. Their abnormality is their con- demnation. It is no defence of them to say that they impose no hardship on any law-abiding citizen. If that were so they might as well be made permanent, and not the most ardent apostle of -repression has ever suggested that. Removing as they do all the ordinary safeguards for the liberty of the subject which the ordinary law and the normal procedure of the Courts furnish, they Mark a definite check to the progress of the country towards a higher stage of political evolution. Their justification is their necessity, and it is a justification Which must not be taken too easily for granted. It Must be the Viceroy's ceaseless concern to see how and where and when the abnormal restrictions can be relaxed. It should be quite possible, as has been suggested, to lift them in some provinces, like Madras, where order is not gravely threatened. It should be possible to -with- draw some of the ordinances everywhere, while others are still maintained for a time. On such points as these confidence must be -reposed in Lord Willingdon and his advisers, subject always to the broad consideration that in repression, however necessary it may sometimes be, there is nothing constructive, and that what faces this country in India to-day is essentially a constructive task.
For nothing can be more constructive than consti- tutional advance in India, on the lines of a series of pronouncements by British statesmen of all parties from 1917 onwards, towards a goal justly described by Lord Irwin in Toronto last week as the creation within the British Empire of a united India with control over her own affairs and the ordering of her own political life.
That advance has reached a critical point to-day. The deliberate and considered resolve of the Chamber of Princes that the rulers of the Indian States will, subject to quite reasonable safeguards, play their appointed part in a new Federal India, is immensely encouraging. Without' them there could be no united India. The signature of Lord Lothian's Franchise Committee's report, providing, as it is understood to do, for a Wide extension Of the franchise for the Provincial legislatures, if not for the central Parliament, means the laying of an essential foundation for the constitutional fabric of the India of to-morrow, and the 'return of Lord Lothian himself to this country will add to the councils of the Secretary of State a valuable element of wisdom and courage, now fortified by a practical experience of Indian conditions. The communal controversy, unhappily, still overshadows the whole prospect. Indians have failed to settle it for themselves, and there is no reason for believing that six months or twelve months hence they would be any nearer agreement. In those conditions the Consultative Committee at Delhi has remitted to the British Cabinet a task of which it might well pray to he relieved, but which it cannot for a moment shirk. A decision on the communal problem must be given and given quickly, for on it the elections for the provincial legislatures, as well as the national, depend. There can hardly be any alternative to perpetuating the separate electorates—for a time—in itself a perpetuation of division, in the hope that this, like other problems, menacing in the realm of academic discussion, may solve itself gradually when the serious business of government begins.
In this and all similar matters the Prime Minister's inability for physical reasons to throw himself as he would desire into a task with which he is so intimately familiar is matter for profound regret on public as well as personal grounds. But with his full assistance or without it the Cabinet must press on with its work of framing the new constitution for India with all practicable speed. Delays, many of them admittedly inevitable, have already been too long: The Round Table Conference committees have finished their work, and the facts and .recommendatiOns the Cabinet needs are before it. The main question now to be resolved is Whether federal and provincial autonomy are to be provided for simultaneously in one Bill (the -federal provisions not coming into operation immediately) or the provincial question alone dealt with in the first instance. European opinion in India generally favours the latter Course. The case against it is that it means giving India not what she wants, but what we think she ought to want Nothing is more fatal to -a good understanding with the Indian politicians who will guide the destinies of the new India. They have no complete faith— whether they are justified in their scepticism is beside the point—in British intentions regarding autonomy at the centre. The only effective way to disarm that mistrust is to deal with both federal and provincial structures in one Bill, though the provincial machinery must actually be set up first. The sooner that step is taken the sooner India will be provided with more important affairs than agitation to occupy it.
No advance towards fuller self-government anywhere can be taken without some element of risk, for the use that will be made of the new freedom can never be certainly predicted. But we are committed to taking that risk in India, and the time has conic to take it,
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