The roots of the form of government now gradually working out in British India ramify into past centuries and are visible through continuous growth. For the purpose of this book they may be passed over, to reach the briefest outline of the present evolutionary phase.
The supreme power over India, today, is the people of Great Britain represented by the British Crown and Parliament, acting through the Secretary of State in Council of India, sitting in India Office, in London. The supreme government in India is that of the Gov-ernor-General-in-Council, commonly called the Government of India. The Governor-General, or Viceroy, is appointed by the Crown. His Council, similarly appointed, consists of seven Departmental heads--the Commander-in-Chief of the Forces, the Home Member, the Finance Member, the Member for Railways and Commerce, and the Members for Education, Health and Lands, for Industries and Labor, and for Law. Of this cabinet of seven members the three last named are Indians.
Next in the structure of the Central Government comes the "Indian Legislature," with its Upper Chamber or "Council of State," and its Lower Chamber or "Legislative Assembly."
The Council of State comprises sixty members, of whom thirty-four are elected, while twenty-six, of whom not over twenty may be government officials, are nominated by the Viceroy.
The Legislative Assembly consists of one hundred and forty-four members, of whom one hundred and three are elected. Of the remaining forty-one, all nominated by the Viceroy, twenty-six must be members of Government, while the rest are named to represent the minor interests in the country, as, the Christian Indian population, etc. Both chambers are heavily Indian, and both are constituted with a view to due representation of the several provinces into which, for purposes of administration, the country is divided.
British India is thus divided into fifteen provinces, each with its separate administration. Of the nine major divisions--Madras, Bengal, and Bombay Presidencies, the United Provinces, the Punjab, Behar and Orissa, the Central Provinces, Burma, and Assam--each is controlled by a Governor with his Executive Council. These act in conjunction with a Provincial Legislative Council, a legislature of which 70 per cent, (in Burma, 60 per cent.) at least must be elected by the people.
The electorate is intended to give fairly balanced separate representation to the various races, communities and special interests. The scale varies from province to province, with varying local conditions. In Madras, for example, it stands as follows:
Number of Members Returned
Class of Constituency
Non-Muhammadans (meaning Hindus, Jains, Buddhists, etc.) 65
Muhammadans 13
Indian Christian 5
Europeans (including British) 1
Anglo-Indian 1
Landholders [zemindars] 6
University 1
Commerce Industry 6
The qualifications for voters also varies in the several provinces. In general, however, the franchise rests on a minimum property qualification. The law, thus far, has given the vote to some seven-and-a-half million persons[1] and has conferred upon all the major provinces the right to enfranchise their women.[2]
[1.The India Office, Sir Malcolm C. C. Seton, Putnam, London, 1926, p. 59.]
[2. See Appendix II.]
The effort to decentralize--to magnify the responsibilities of provincial governments for the purpose of training and stimulating Indians to handle their own affairs, stands out preeminent in the present scheme. In part and as applied to the nine major divisions, this makes of the provincial government a two-branched machine operated from the office of the Governor. The Governor and his Executive Council, all Crown appointees, form one branch. Council membership is commonly divided between British and Indians. The Governor and his Ministers of Departments form the second branch. These are appointed by the Governor from the elected members of the legislature and are themselves responsible to that body. All ministers are Indian. Between the two branches the various functions of government formerly handled by a single arm are now divided, under the heads of "reserved" and "transferred" subjects.
Reserved subjects, save for the ultimate power of the Central Government, lie in the hands of the Provincial Governor in Council. Transferred subjects are assigned to the provincial legislatures, and are operated by the Ministers.
The list of transferred subjects represents authority resigned by the British people in favor of the peoples of India. The intention of the plan is, if the experiment succeeds, to enlarge the list of subjects transferred. On the other hand, where the Ministerial machine fails to work, Governors-in-Council may resume control of a subject already transferred. Transferred subjects at present comprise Education, Public Health, Management of Public Works other than irrigation and railways, Development of Industries, Excise, Agriculture, Local Self-government and others. Reserved subjects include Maintenance of Law and Order, Defense of India, Finance, the Land Revenue system, etc.
Of the provincial legislatures, known as Legislative Councils, a recent authority[3] says:
[3. The India Office, pp. 59-60.]
The Councils have very wide powers of legislation and the annual provincial budgets are submitted to them. In Transferred subjects they possess the power of the purse, but the Governor may restore grants for purposes of the Reserved side of the administration if he considers it essential to the discharge of his responsibility that money refused by the Council should be provided. He can disallow an Act or reserve it for the Governor-General's consideration, and has the exceptional right to enact on his own authority a measure (provided that it deals with a Reserved subject only) the passage of which he certifies to be essential to the discharge of his responsibility. This special power has hitherto been exercised only once.
Turning from provincial legislatures to that of the Central Government, the same authority summarizes:[4]
[4. Ibid., pp. 60-2.]
The Indian legislature, subject to the preservation of the powers of Parliament, has power to make laws "for all persons, for all courts, and for all places and things, within British India," for British officials and subjects in Indian States, for "native Indian subjects of His Majesty" beyond British India, and for officers, soldiers and followers of the Indian Army wherever serving. But it requires the sanction of the Governor-General for the introduction of measures affecting the public debt or revenues, religion, military discipline, foreign relations, or for measures treating on matters relegated to provincial governments...
The power of the purse has been very largely entrusted to the Legislative Assembly...The annual budget is laid before both Chambers, and the consent of the Legislative Assembly is sought for the grants required on most matters, though certain heads of expenditure are classed as "non» valable."
The Viceroy and the Crown hold the power of veto; and the former may enact a bill into law, subject to disallowance by the Crown, without the consent of either Chamber. An emergency measure, such a step would be taken only in extreme cases.
It will scarcely be necessary, in this place, to go further into the machinery of the present government of British India.
Commonly known as "Dyarchy," or "The Reforms," it is in essence no new thing, but merely an accelerated unfolding of the original British theme whose motif is the drawing of Indians into responsible participation in Government. India's outburst of loyalty in the World War, her whole-hearted contribution of men and means from every province and state save Bengal, prompted a responsive flood of feeling in Britain and a desire to requite one demonstration of confidence and sympathy with another in kind. But Parliament was, in reality, only re-phrasing the original principle embodied in the Proclamation of Queen Victoria in 1858, was only pursuing the line of the Indian Councils Act of 1909, when, in the Preamble of the Act of 1919, the Act now functioning, it declared its policy[5]
[5. Cf. pp. 193-4 and 287, ante.]
...to provide 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 progressive realisation of responsible government in British India as an integral part of the empire.
The scheme in its shape of today has not the stability of the slow-growing oak, root for branch, balanced and anchored. Rather, it is a hothouse exotic, weedy, a stranger in its soil, forced forward beyond its inherent strength by the heat of a generous and hasty emotion. An outsider sitting today through sessions of Indian legislatures, Central or Provincial, somehow comes to feel like one observing a roomful of small and rather mischievous children who by accident have got hold of a magnificent watch. They fight and scramble to thrust their fingers into it, to pull off a wheel or two, to play with the mainspring; to pick out the jewels. They have no apparent understanding of the worth of the mechanism, still less of the value of time. And when the teacher tries to explain to them how to wind their toy up, they shriek and grimace in fretful impatience and stuff their butterscotch into the works.
As to the relation of these people to their supposed job, its most conspicuous quality, today, is its artificiality. Adepts in the phraseology of democratic representation, they are, in fact, profoundly innocent of the thought behind the phrase. Despotisms induce no growth of civic spirit, and the peoples of India, up to the coming of Britain, had known no rule but that of despots. Britain, by her educational effort, has gradually raised up an element before unknown in India--a middle class. But this middle class--these lawyers and professional men--are in the main as much dominated today as were their ancestors five hundred years ago by the law of caste and of transmigration--com-pletest denial of democracy. They talk of "the people" simply because the word bulks large in the vocabulary of that western-born representative government which they now essay.
A village headman knows and feels infinitely more than do these elected "representatives" as to the duties and responsibilities of government. An Indian prince has the inherited habit of ruling, and, whatever his failings, whatever his purpose, keeps his people somewhere in mind. And an American unconscious of his own civic debt to his spiritual or blood-lineal ancestors, from Plymouth Rock to Runnymede, may be brought to a wholesome state of humility by a few days' watching of the anchorless legislators of India.
Off and on, during the winter session of 1926, in Delhi, I listened to Assembly debates. Hour after hour, day after day, the Swarajist bench spent their energies in sterile, obstructionist tactics, while for the most part the rest of the House sat apathetic save for an occasional expression of weary contempt from some plain fighting man out of the north. Little or nothing constructive emanated from party benches. The simplest piece of essential legislation proposed by Government evoked from the Swarajist orators fantastic interpretations as to sinister intent. The gravest concerns elicited from them only a bedlam of frivolous and abusive chatter. "We do not trust you," they would repeat in effect; "we know your motives are bad." "We believe nothing good of your thrice-damned alien government." And, coming down to specific arraignments, they could solemnly produce such theories as that the Supreme Court of the United States obeys, in its decisions, the will of the British Crown.[6]
[6. Legislative Assembly Debates, Vol. VII, p. 278.]
Patient, unruffled, always courteous, the Government members answered back. Not once was there a sign of irritation or annoyance or fatigue, much less of despair of the situation thrust upon them.
One day I took up this subject with one of the most notable members of the Assembly, an Indian of superior abilities, whose dislike of Britain is probably as sincere as that of any of those who attack her on this floor.
"Your fellow-legislators of the opposition make terrible accusations against the good faith of Government," I said. "They impugn its honesty; they accuse it of trying to set Hindus and Muhammadans by the ears, on the principle of 'divide and rule'; they allege that it tramples Indian interests under foot, that it treats Indians themselves with disrespect, and that it sucks or cripples the resources of the country for its own selfish interests."
"Yes," he replied, "they say all that, and more."
"Do they mean it?" I asked.
"How could they?" he replied. "Not a man in the House believes anything of the sort."
To an American having America's Philippine experience fresh in mind, this repetition of history was infinitely saddening. One remembered the words of the King-Emperor's Message to the Indian Legislature and Councils at the opening of the first Sessions held under the Reforms Act:
On you, the first representatives of the people on the new Councils, there rests a very special responsibility. For on you it lies, by the conduct of your business and the justice of your judgment to convince the world of the wisdom of this great constitutional change. But on you it also lies to remember the many millions of your fellow-countrymen who are not yet qualified for a share in political life, to work for their uplift-ment and to cherish their interests as your own.
What meaning had such language in the ears of those to whom it was addressed? What relation did they feel, between themselves and poor old Mother India? What duty toward their own cause, to exhibit capacity and thereby to command further concessions?
The history of British administration of India shows that reactionary disorders follow attempts at speeded progress. The East resents being hustled, even in reforms. It was perhaps specially unfortunate for "Dyarchy" that its birthday should fall in the season of Mr. Gandhi's ill-starred adventure into politics, when he could turn upon it the full fire of his non-cooperative guns. His influence in Bengal and the Central Provinces was enough at the time to stop the experiment completely, and although that influence has now everywhere lapsed into negligibility as a political factor, its crippling and embittering after-effects still drag upon the wheels of progress.
Without presuming to offer a criticism of the Reforms Act, it would seem that its chief obstacle lies deeper in the roots of things than any enmity can reach. The whole structure of the Reforms is planned to rest on the foundation of a general electorate which, through its directly elected legislators, controls in each province the Ministers who handle the people's affairs. And the difficulty is that while the structure hangs waiting in midair, the foundation designed to sustain it yet lingers in the blue-print stage--does not in fact exist. India has no electorate, in any workable sense of the word, nor can have on the present basis for many generations to come. And of this statement the natural complement is also true: India's elected representatives are as yet profoundly unaware of the nature of the duties incumbent upon their office.
Reasons for the non-existence of an electorate will have been gathered in the foregoing pages of this book. One of the chief among them is, that while less than 8 per cent, of the peoples can read at all, that literate fraction is concentrated almost entirely in the large towns and cities, leaving the great masses spread over the great spaces of the land, unreached and un-reachable by the printed word.
This illiterate peasantry, these illiterate landholders, have no access to and no interest in the political game, nor in any horizon beyond that which daily meets their physical eyes. The town politician, the legislator actual or aspirant, rarely comes near them unless it be at election time or, as in the period of the "non-violence" agitations, to stir them with some report of evil to rise in blind revolt. When, recently, Swarajist members of the legislative councils decided to try to block the wheels of government by walking out, not one of them, as far as I was able to learn, took the previous step of consulting his constituents. The constituency is as yet too gauzy a figment, too abstract a theory, too non-oriental a conception, to figure as an influence in their minds.
No one who has studied the course of events in the Central and Provincial governments during the last six years can escape the conclusion that the British government officials charged with administering the new law have striven with honesty, sincerity and devotion, to make it a success. They work against great difficulties, straining their faith and power and patience to bridge wide voids of experience and development. Their success sometimes seems dim and slight. But one of the finest executives of them all used, in my hearing, these words:
"I would ask only this: 'Leave us alone. Don't always be resurveying, reinvestigating, pulling up the plant to look at its root. Each year that we get through is a gain, one year more of peace for the people, of public works protected and advanced, of justice given. The longer we can go on, now, without any great storm, the better the chance of Councils and Ministers discovering that when we oppose them it is in obedience to our conception of a law higher than that of personal ambition or clan advantage.'"
In the last clause of the paragraph just quoted lies half hidden one of the greatest stumbling-blocks in the way to sympathy and just judgment between India and the West. To us it seems radically obvious that personal advantage and nepotism, as motives of the acts of public officials, can but mean, the world over, shame and disgrace. Therefore the suggestion that Indians find difficulty in sharing that view carries, to our ears, the taint of moral snobbery; and so we search our own minds for other explanations of certain phenomena that follow India's autonomization of Government.
But we should be fairer to the Indian as well as wiser ourselves if we looked in his mind, rather than in ours, for light on causes. Then we should see that no white man in office ever labors under such a handicap as does the average Indian official, or ever is so largely foredoomed to defeat, in effort toward disinterested public service.
With the Hindu comes, first, the ancient religious law of the family-clan; because of this system the public office-holder who fails to feather the nest of his kin will be branded by all his world not only a fool but a renegade, and will find neither peace at home nor honor abroad. No public opinion sustains him.
Second, beyond the family line comes the circle of caste. The Hindu office-holder who should forget his caste's interests for interests lying outside that circle would bring down upon his head the opprobrium, perhaps the discipline, of his orthodox fellow caste men. And this, be it remembered, means not only temporal discomfort, but also dire penalties inflicted upon his soul, determining the miseries of future incarnations.
Third, the political struggle between Hindu and Muslim, as will be seen in later chapters, brings tremendous pressure to bear upon the official from either camp, practically compelling him to dispense such patronage as he enjoys among his co-religionists only.
With these points in mind, one views with more charity and understanding the breakdown of allegiance to western ideals that generally occurs in even the staunchest of Indian public officials when the British superior officer who has backed him through thick and thin in free work for general good, is replaced by an Indian, himself subject to the ancient code.
It is stiff work to maintain, alone and accursed, an alien standard among one's own people.
Yet with all its increased expense and diminished efficiency, the new constitution is, somehow, turning the wheels. Taking the shorter view, it has improved the position of Indians in the services. It has opened to them the height of office along many lines. It has made Government more directly responsive to the sentiment of vocal India, to such an extent indeed that the onlooker is tempted to wonder whether Government's sense of proportion is not impaired, whether it has not been nervously stifling its conscience to save its ears, whether it is not paying more attention to the spoiled baby's shrieks for the matches than it is to the vital concerns of its whole big, dumb, helpless and infinitely needy family.
A "hard-headed American" long resident in India, himself a person of excellent standing, told me this incident:
One of the principal Swaraj politicians had just delivered himself of a ferocious public diatribe against the Viceroy.
"Now tell me, Pundit," said the American, privately, "how can you shout like that in view of the fact that only a few weeks ago this very Vicero) went far out of his way to be courteous and accommodating to you and to get you what you wanted?"
"How can I shout like that?" laughed the Indian. "Why shouldn't I shout? Of course I shout, when every time I shout he gives me something."
Thus in taking information from the Indian, at home or abroad, a vital preliminary step is to appreciate and keep always in mind the definition and value that he assigns to "truth."
The Indian may be a devoted "seeker after truth" in the sense of metaphysical speculation; he may be of a splendid candor in dealing with most parts of most subjects of which you speak together. And yet he may from time to time embed in the midst of his frank speech statements easily susceptible of proof and totally at variance with the facts.
Having repeatedly come across this trait, I took it up for examination with a distinguished Bengali, one of the most broad-minded of Indian public men. Said he:
"Our Mahabharata preaches truth above all. If we have deviated it is because of the adverse circumstances under which we long lived. If we lie it is because we are afraid to face the consequences."
Then I laid it before a great mystic, spiritual teacher of multitudes, who had favored me with a classic and noble metaphysical discourse. His reply was:
"What is truth? Right and wrong are relative terms. You have a certain standard; if things help you, you call them good. It is not a lie to say that which is necessary to produce good. I do not distinguish virtues. Everything is good. Nothing is in itself bad. Not acts, but motives, count."
Finally, I carried the matter to a European long resident in India, and of great sympathy with the Indian mind.
"Why," I asked, "do men of high position make false statements, and then name in support documents which, when I dig them out, either fail to touch the subject at all or else prove the statement to be false?"
"Because," he replied, "to the Hindu nothing is false that he wants to believe. Or, all materiality being nothingness, all statements concerning it are lies. Therefore he may blamelessly choose the lie that serves his purpose. Also, when he presents to you the picture that it suits him to offer, it never occurs to him that you might go to the pains of checking up his words at the source."
In the same line, a well-informed New York journalist, in the winter of 1926-27, asked certain Indians who had been publicly talking in the city: "Why do you make such egregiously false allegations about conditions in India?"
"Because," said one of them, speaking for the rest, "you Americans know nothing of India. And your missionaries, when they come back for more money, tell too much truth, and hurt our pride. So we have tc tell lies, to balance up."
As his metaphysics work out, it is no shame to a Hindu to be "caught in a lie." You do not embarrass or annoy him by so catching him. His morality is no more involved in the matter than in a move in a game of chess.
Now, in the name of fair play, it cannot be too strongly emphasized that this characteristic, this point of view, this different evaluation, constitutes not necessarily an inferiority, but certainly a difference, like the color of the skin. Yet as a difference involved in the heart of human intercourse, it must constantly be reckoned with and understood; else that intercourse will often and needlessly crash. [305]