White Paper on Indian States (1950)/Part 12/Moral Aspect of Treaties
Moral Aspect of Treaties
249. It is a recognised principle of International Law that the treaties for the duration of whose obligations no special period is fixed, are not to be understood as binding the contracting powers in the event of some material change in the conditions with reference to which they were concluded. An essential change of conditions—the term includes not only material but also moral facts—necessarily involves the obsolescence of treaty obligations. Dealing with this aspect of these engagements, Coupland has admirably summed up the position as follows:—
"The law can only take account of usage and sufferance, but there is also a moral proviso which is insusceptible of legal definition. No undertaking can be rightly interpreted without weighing the effect of lapse of time and change of circumstance. It is not only a question of material factors: it is also a question of morals. No compact can endure when, owing to the evolution of ideas, it has ceased to square with general conceptions of right and wrong. In this sense rebus sic stantibus is the implicit condition of every treaty. And certainly things no longer stand in India as they stood when most of the treaties were made. It was assumed, for instance, by those who made them, that British rule in India would continue. Indeed they were made on the British side solely for the purpose of maintaining it. Manifestly the whole situation is very different when the British Government has declared its intention of bringing British rule to an end as soon as possible. Pledges, again, to protect the dynastic rights of the Princes must needs read differently now from the way they read a century or more ago. When, for example, Metcalfe signed in 1818 a treaty which declared that the 'Maharajah (of Bikaner) and his heirs and successors shall be absolute rulers of their country' he was intending to safeguard the ruling dynasty primarily against British usurpation of its rights and possibly also against the claims of rivals to the throne. He was certainly not contemplating the possibility of democratic agitation. Democracy as practised now in Britain or in an Indian Province was almost as inconceivable to the British governing class in the early nineteenth century as it was to an Indian Prince. Thus, the development of Western political thought, quite as much as usage and sufferance arising from acts of interference by the British Government with a Prince's absolute authority, has made it impossible to construe such pledges literally. Is it conceivable that the British Government should lend its aid to prevent the development of constitutional government in the States when it has not only promoted that development in the neighbouring Provinces for many years past but actually brought it in recent years to its almost complete culmination by Act of Parliament?"