White Paper on Indian States (1950)/Part 1/Consolidation of British power as a Unifying Factor
Consolidation of British power as a Unifying Factor
14. The new policy aimed at consolidating not the territories but the powers of the British Government. This involved a process of infiltration into the States, mainly in the economic field, without annexing their territories. Some projects could be undertaken only on a national scale. The lines of communications, the railways and posts could develop only on a national basis. The one feature which distinguished the British negotiations with the Princes during this period from those which preceded the Great Rebellion, is, the larger attention given to matters of common interest such as communications, currencies, tariff and other fiscal policies, rights and sources of irrigation, extradition, extra-territorial jurisdiction etc. In many of these matters, co-ordination of development policy as between British India and the States was secured either by the execution of formal documents or informal exchange of assurances. It was during this period that on the basis of usage, sufferance and conventions, the edifice of political practice was built up. Paramountcy provided British power an elastic instrument for regulating the relations with the Princes and between British India and the States. It was through paramountcy that the British brought about some kind of working arrangement between the two parts of India and enforced a measure of administrative and economic unity over the country.
15. Paramountcy of the British Crown, as British ingenuity developed it, was the coping stone of the imperial edifice in India. It constituted at once a link and a barrier. On the one hand, it provided a nexus between British India and States and thereby integrated the economic and administrative life of the country. On the obverse side, it drove a wedge between the two parts of India. The policy of "Hands off the Indian States" in British India with its reciprocal implication of "Hands off British Indian concerns" for States, which reared up high walls of isolationism around the States, could be made effective only by the operation of paramountcy.