India: A History. Revised and Updated (90 page)

In February 1931, at the height of the London talks, the British formally inaugurated their New Delhi capital. As a last imperial extravaganza, it smothered in bungalows and bougainvillaea the wasteland between Shah Jahan’s metropolis and the bat-infested battlements of all those other old Delhis. It also embodied the imperial thinking of the day. At the ceremonial heart of the city, on a ruddy acropolis atop Raisina Hill, flanked by Herbert Baker’s classical secretariats and the domed temple of Edwin Lutyens’ Viceregal House, there had been erected four columns representing Canada, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand. The columns supposedly welcomed India into the brotherhood of the British dominions. But it was noteworthy that each of these dominions comprised a federation of various provinces and protectorates which had subscribed to a single central government. For India’s patchwork of provinces and princely states, federation also looked to be the way forward.

To progressive sections of British opinion and to moderate sections of Indian opinion, federation also appealed as a way of opening up central government (as opposed to the provincial governments) to greater Indian participation. When, unexpectedly, the idea also found favour with a majority of the princes, federal proposals suddenly soared like the Raisina columns to the top of the Round Table’s agenda. But they were not to everyone’s taste. By diehard imperialists like Churchill any infringement of British sovereignty, federal or otherwise, had to be resisted; they would
fight federation tooth and nail. So would most sections of Congress, which saw in it an attempt not to unite British India with the princely states but rather to divide – and, of course, rule – an emerging entity which transcended both British and princely India, namely the Indian nation.

Nor were such suspicions unjustified. For if the central government became a federal government representing both the provinces and the princely states, the British might expect to play a lasting supervisory role. The princes would continue to look to the British authorities for support against any encroachment on their autonomy. And with this support, plus that of the minorities (Muslims, Sikhs, etc.), the British would be able to command a majority at the federal centre. Given such a scenario, the arrangements whereby defence and foreign affairs were to remain under British control during a transitional period might be prolonged indefinitely; likewise a residual British presence which would ensure to the empire the services of the Indian army at minimal cost might also be preserved indefinitely. In short, federation, though a highway to integration and independence elsewhere, might in India become a congested thoroughfare leading to the exact opposite – disintegration and continued dependence.

Compared to this contentious prospect, the other vista opened during the Round Table discussions and incorporated into the monumental Government of India Act of 1935 was comparatively uncontroversial. Yet because federation would never actually be implemented, it would be much the most significant part of the Act; and it would have a considerable bearing on the Partition of 1947 and on the different constitutions of the two states that resulted.

As a package of reforms which advanced the long-running process of Indianisation and democratisation in the provincial assemblies, this other component of the 1935 India Act looked unexciting. But in effect it made the provinces autonomous. The franchise, although still restricted by property and gender criteria, was increased from seven million to about thirty-five million, or one-sixth of the potential adult suffrage; the number of provinces was also increased, with Sind being separated from Bombay and Orissa from Bihar; and all the provincial assemblies were reorganised and their memberships greatly enlarged so that elected Indian representatives could command majorities and form governments. Many subjects remained the preserve of the central government, and some important powers of intervention and supersession remained reserved to the mostly British governors. But from 1937, when the first elections under this scheme were held, the provincial governments of British India were no longer necessarily run by the British.
Swaraj,
or self-rule, while being withheld in Delhi, was
thus being conceded in Lucknow, Calcutta, Karachi, Bombay and the other provincial capitals. In effect the provinces, with their elected Indian assemblies, were being schooled as legitimate components in a federation and as contenders in any eventual transfer of British sovereignty. This had enormous implications. It served the British purpose of a gradualist retreat; nationalist energies would be dissipated, and nationalist opinion divided, in the free-for-all of provincial politics. But it also raised the spectre of provincial devolution, leading to the possible fragmentation of British India and its as yet unthinkable partition.

Nehru perceptively characterised the 1935 India Act as ‘a new charter of slavery’; it was, after all, a long way short of
purna swaraj.
He embraced the opportunity of the 1937 elections to show the strength of Congress but expected all those elected to resign as a protest. With much the best organisation Congress duly swept the polls, capturing 70 per cent of the popular vote and, despite the system of separate electorates, nearly half of all seats. Then, after much heart-searching, indeed a near-thrombosis, and in contravention of Nehru’s wishes, the party’s leaders reluctantly agreed to let its successful candidates participate in government.

The agreeable business of allocating ministries and rewarding supporters was readily embraced. In every province, elected Indian members now formed Indian governments, appointed Indian ministers, and legislated in Indian interests. ‘The province became the most important arena in political life,’ and, more than ever, provincial leadership and identity became entrenched components of national politics. In the run-up to Independence, and thereafter when the provinces became the component states of independent India and the constituent provinces of Pakistan, this would ‘affect profoundly the nature of all-India [and all-Pakistan] “national” leadership and power’.
⁴
Against well-organised and intransigent provincial leaderships even a Congress-run national government would not be able to make much headway.

In 1937 seven of the now eleven provinces ended up with Congress governments. The outstanding exceptions were Bengal and the Panjab, both with slim Muslim majority populations and both future subjects of partition. But there the similarity ended. In Bengal a predominantly Muslim government was formed. For the first time Calcutta’s influential, English-speaking Hindu
bhadralok
, the landed ‘gentlemen’ or ‘babus’ who had made so much of the running in the early days of Congress, experienced the harsh realities of democracy and found themselves out in the cold. They condemned the system of separate minority electorates which had made their electoral chances even more hopeless, then they increasingly turned on those whom they saw as the main beneficiaries, the Muslims. Thus, ‘while the rest of
nationalist India was rejecting the “autonomy” outlined in the Government’s White Paper as a sham, the Bengali bhadralok – Congress-men and non-Congress-men alike – were concerned only with its disregard of their own provincial political ambitions.’
⁵
Having pilloried the system of separate electorates as a ‘shameless surrender to [Muslim] communalists’, they now shamelessly demanded just such a surrender to Hindu communalism by insisting that, as a minority, they too were entitled to electoral safeguards.

There was, though, another way: the political arithmetic could be revised by changing the units to which it applied. Curzon’s partition of Bengal, against which the
bhadralok
had fought so successfully in 1905, began to look less ‘utterly contemptuous of public opinion’.

In the Panjab, landed interests were also vocal but, instead of sundering the different communities, they actually cemented sectarian relations. Under the aegis of a Unionist Party, Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs all participated in government together. British dependence on the Panjab’s agricultural communities for three-fifths of its army recruitment, plus the availability and potential of newly irrigated land there, had created a markedly prosperous province in which the agriculturalist enjoyed a privileged position. Whether Hindu, Sikh or Muslim, his main interest was in protecting this position, particularly against the encroachment of urban money-leaders. The principal division was thus not between Muslim and Sikh or Hindu, but between landed interests and commercial interests. Legislation which afforded the landowner security against the alienation of his land and which ensured that the agricultural vote was maximised had ‘institutionalised the political division between the rural and urban populations’, and now provided the Unionist Party with its ideology.
⁶

In 1937 the Unionist Party won well over half the seats in the Panjab, and neither Congress nor the Muslim League gained a significant foothold. In striking contrast to Bengal, the Panjab thus looked a most improbable candidate for sectarian partition, let alone for its later tripartite reincarnation as a hotbed of Hindu communalism (Haryana), a stronghold of Sikh separatism (Indian Panjab) and the cornerstone of an Islamic state (Pakistani Panjab).

Other ambiguities haunted the new constitutional set-up. The system of separate electorates for the minority communities was bitterly contested in principle by Congress and in its details by almost everyone. Gandhi had taken particular exception to Harijans being considered a non-Hindu community and embarked on a fast to get their agreement to the removal of this provision. He succeeded; separate Harijan electorates were abolished but more seats were reserved exclusively for Harijan members. The ‘Commimal Awards’ which enumerated the seats reserved for the other separate electorates were
decided by the British, no agreed scheme being forthcoming from Indian sources. Naturally this endeared the awards to no one. In Bengal the provincial Congress, representing the disillusioned Hindu
bhadralok
, very nearly split away from the national Congress as firebrands like Subhas Chandra Bose demanded direct action against the awards. This would have alienated the substantial Muslim support which Congress still enjoyed nationally, and was therefore unacceptable to the central leadership.

Far more serious was the fate of the federation. It was to have come into operation as soon as a majority of the princes had signed Instruments of Accession. But partly because of lobbying by diehard empire dinosaurs like Churchill, and partly thanks to the intense rivalries amongst the princes themselves, the process was delayed. In the interim the princes began to have second thoughts. Some were worried about the financial implications of federation, others about the continuation of paramountcy. But what made them dig in their heels most was Congress triumphalism following the 1937 elections.

Congress’s national leadership had hitherto discouraged the party’s involvement in the princely states. But its provincial leaders, many of them now in government, were not so particular. In arguments redolent of those used by Dalhousie to support British annexations in the 1850s, they stigmatised princely rule as a corrupt anachronism. How could they remain deaf to the unenfranchised plight of close colleagues and neighbours who happened to live under such autocratic dispensations? Financial and organisational support was offered to populist movements in the states; activists and agitators were allowed to drift across state borders. Suddenly, unexpected demands for more accountable government and more popular representation brought disturbances in Kashmir, Hyderabad, Mysore and elsewhere. Where a Hindu prince ruled a predominantly Muslim state, as in Kashmir – or vice versa as in Hyderabad – the situation was exacerbated by sectarian tension. Not surprisingly nawabs and nizams, rajas and maharajas alike took fright. If provincial Congress governments could so threaten their prerogatives, what chance would they stand against a Congress-dominated federal government?

Congress-men saw it rather differently. Under a federation the two central chambers were to be indirectly elected, candidates being chosen by the provincial assemblies (in the case of British India) and by the princes (in the case of the states). Congress had done well enough in the 1937 elections to look forward to a substantial bloc of seats under this arrangement. It would, however, only be able to achieve a governing majority if it also commanded some of the seats allocated to the princes. This in turn would only be possible if some of the princes could be pressured into sending candidates who enjoyed a popular mandate. ‘Here, then, I would argue,’ writes Ian Copland in a detailed study
of princely attitudes, ‘was the crux of [Congress’s] new strategy in the states: to pressure the princes into returning only popularly elected representatives … to the federal legislature.’
⁷

If the princes were thus panicked out of their support for federation, so too were Muslims. The attitude of Muhammad Ali Jinnah and the Muslim League to the new constitution had at first been equivocal: as nationalists they condemned it as falling short of independence, while as a minority they were tempted by its apparent safeguards. But in 1938, as Congress pressure on the princely states mounted and as Congress governments in the provinces rejected Muslim overtures for power-sharing, Jinnah too foresaw the danger of a ‘Congress Raj’ at the federal centre. Accusations of Hindu discrimination against Muslims in the already Congress-run provinces were probably much exaggerated, but they received wide publicity. To the call of ‘Islam in Danger’ the League began a drive for the mass support which had hitherto eluded it. Bengal’s governing Muslim party joined the League, most of UP’s Muslims did likewise, and in the Panjab the first cracks began to appear in the Unionist Party consensus. The League’s claim to represent the majority of Muslims at last began to acquire some substance.