White Paper on Indian States (1950)/Part 1/Change of Policy towards States owing to possible Constitutional Developments in British India
Change of Policy towards States owing to possible Constitutional Developments in British India
17. Until towards the last phase of the first World War, Indian nationalism had not developed into real challenge to foreign rule in India, nor until then had the grant of responsible Government to British India been viewed as a real possibility. Up to 1909, the position was that such reforms as were introduced were purely administrative and the view expressed by Dufferin in 1888 that "England should never abdicate her supreme control of public affairs" firmly held the field. The objective of tho Minto-Morley reforms was not the eventual grant of responsible Government, but the establishment of what Minto described as "a constitutional autocracy". The authors of the reforms scheme of 1909 put it beyond doubt that no parting of power was contemplated. "I am no advocate of representative Government for India in the Western sense of the term", Minto clearly stated. "As heirs to a long series of Indian rulers", he went on to say, "we are bound to reserve to ourselves the ultimate control over all executive action and the final decision in matters of legislation". Morley was equally clear regarding the limited objective of the reforms of 1909. "If it could be said", he stated in the House of Lords, "that this chapter of reforms led directly or necessarily to the establishment of parliamentary system in India, I for one would have nothing at all to do with it". He was as emphatic on this point in private as in public. "Not one whit more than you", he wrote ta Minto, "do I think it desirable or possible or even conceivable, to adapt English political institutions to the nations who inhabit India".
18. When the authors of the reforms scheme of 1909 thus ruled out the establishment of a parliamentary system in India, they reckoned without the momentus events which the following decade held in its lap. The Great War of 1914-18 accelerated the march of history and inevitably affected the temper of Indian nationalism. The demand for self-Government now became more and more insistent and the principle underlying the Minto-Morley Reforms became patently out of tune with the times. What was considered inconceivable in 1909 became the accepted goal of the British policy in India in 1917. Montagu's announcement of August 1917 accepted for the first time the objective of "gradual development of self-governing institutions with a view to the progressive realisation of self-Government in India as an integral part of the British Empire".
19. After the introduction of Montagu-Chelmsford reforms, the Swaraj movement fired the imagination of the people and deepened the anxiety of the alien rulers of India to neutralise, or at least to isolate, the growing upsurge of Indian nationalism. This marked the beginning of the policy of utilising the services of States for organising a counter-revolution.