Our Indian Partner

LIEUT.-COL. GEORGE A. DREW, President, introduced the speaker.

THE MARQUESS OF LOTHIAN:-Mr. Chairman and Gentlemen: I feel that it is a great honour, and all the more an honour to a Scotsman, to be allowed to say a 'a' few words to you today on the subject of the new Indian Constitution, because the adventure on which Great Britain is engaged in India today is, perhaps, the greatest political adventure which has ever been attempted at a single time by a single state. And it is an adventure, the outcome of which you in Canada, in the last result are nearly as much concerned as we are in the British Isle% or as the Indians are in India.--India is part of the British Commonwealth and today it includes one-sixth of the human race within its boundaries. It is starting or making a further advance toward self government on a scale unexampled in human history anal the results of that experiment must be far teaching, not only to India and to Great Britain, but to the Empire and the world.

Now, let me, in a few words, give you some idea of the extent and nature of the problem. India contains three hundred and fifty-two million people-as many as are in the whole of Europe, excluding European Russia. It falls into two natural divisions-British India which is that two-thirds to three-quarters of India which is directly governed by Great Britain, and Indian India which is governed by hereditary Indian princes of whom there are about a hundred and twenty-five important ones and five hundred minor ones.

These princes govern their territory of which Hyderabad, with seventeen million inhabitants is the largest, down to states with only a few ten of thousands of inhabitants on the other end of the scale. These princes govern the states in a manner which is traditional in India and on the pages of recorded history they are referred to as absolute monarchs. Except for the supervising power of Great Britain, they have been left with all the panoply, prestige and power of hereditary monarchy in the Orient.

In addition to that main division there are two others. The Indian people speak some twenty main languages, and of each of these languages there are at least a million speakers. And these languages broadly correspond to racial divisions, overlaid by other communal considerations, but, broadly corresponding to divisions of race in India itself. So English, today, is the common language of the country. That is to say, all conferences, and parliamentary proceedings on an all-India basis are conducted ire, English as the "lingua franca" of the educated section of Indian society, just as international conferences today are increasingly being conducted in the English language as being the language which the largest number of nations learn to speak.

The final division is what you have often seen referred to in the newspapers as the communal division. This" in effect, is a religious division. The main communal division is between the Hindus and the Moslems. There are other minor religions; there are between five and six million Indian Christians; there are three million Sikhs, and there are other minor sects, but the religious distinction in India today is more important than the political. India is very much in the same condition as Europe after the Renaissance when it was divided between Roman Catholic and Protestant. European and Indian political divisions are dominated by the communal issue. I understand that the communal issue, even, in Canada, is not wholly dead, and that your political controversies are sometimes tinged by a feeling that has a religious origin. Enlarge that to a very high degree and you will understand how Indian politics tends to separate between Hinduism and Islamism. The number of the Mohammedans is about eighty millions and the number of the Hindus about two hundred and fifty millions. That gives you some idea of the basic problem from which Constitution builders have to proceed.

India has been, in a greater or less degree, under British rule for a hundred and fifty years. It began in the days of the East India Company. The control was taken over by the British Government by a gradual process which culminated in 1830 and by the middle of the last century the whole of the continent lying to the south of the Himalayas and southeast of Afghanistan was brought under control of a single government-a government brought under the control of Great Britain and acting under the British Civil Service--probably the greatest bureaucracy of which the world has record. Men recruited in England went out to India and served for twenty or thirty years, acting as the heads of each individual district in India.

That system gave to India the priceless boon of peace and unity. It led to considerable advance in education, mainly university education. It equipped India with the main elements of modern economic life-railways and roads. It added vast areas under irrigation. It introduced a modern and impartial judicial system.

But, as you, Gentlemen, in Canada, can understand, even the best of governments is not always regarded as being enough, and in 1833-exactly a century ago-Lord Macauley wrote a famous minute, accepted by the Viceroy and the Indian offices, stating that, in his view, the educational development of India should be on the basis of western culture and the English language. From that; time onward, the schools and universities of India have educated Indians in the knowledge and practices and' customs, political, social and economic, which are the, common basis of western civilization. They were, brought up on Mills and Burke and Gladstone arid all the other leaders of political democracy in the West. It was inevitably, in Macauley's view, the logical and necessary outcome of that education, that the Indians in due time should begin to demand the right to govern themselves, and sure enough, toward the end of the century,, the Nationalist movement in India was formed, under' the name of the Indian National Congress.

It steadily strengthened and gradually the British Government began to recognize the demands of educated, India for a larger share in the government of the country' and the first important political reform was introduced by Lord Morley in 1908, known as the Morley-Minto Reform. Lord Minto was then the Viceroy of India. Under this Reform Legislative Councils were introduced into all the provinces and the size of those already in existence increased, partly by election, partly by nomination. These Legislatures were given the duty of passing legislation, although subordinate to the Government' of India which could make its will prevail by asserting; to the Legislatures that it would not accept their proposals.

Two later events enormously strengthened the Nationalist Movement in India. One was the victory of Japan over Russia which stirred Asia to the bottom, as proving that an Asiatic people could resist and defeat what was then regarded as one of the great western military powers. The second event was the World War which had the effect in the first place, of filling India with enthusiasm for the cause of the Allies which they supported valiantly, both in cash and on the field, but which later enormously lessened the prestige of Europe in the mind of India as the War dragged on and Europe seemed more and more to be a congeries of warring nations, unworthy of the civilization they previously possessed. The demand for a rapid expansion of self government became more and more intense in India.

In 1919, a new Constitution, developing still further the Morley-Minto experiment was put on the Statute books. The Provincial Legislatures-and there are nine provinces in India were enlarged. The franchise was given to some seven million voters and a Legislative Assembly was created for All India, elected by a million voters. In the Provinces the powers of government were divided. Part was entrusted to ministers responsible to those Legislatures. Part was retained in the hands of the civil servants who were still the advisors and ministers of the government. In the centre, the Legislature still remained, an advisory body; that is to say, ministries could not be made or unmade at will.

The Indian National Congress which included a large proportion of Moslems as well as Hindus, divided between those who said, "We will work the Constitution and try to obtain more governing powers by constitutional means from within", and. the element which said, "No, we will not cooperate. We will try to break down the Constitution by revolutionary methods and try to force the hands of Great Britain by what Mr. Gandhi has called 'non-violent non-cooperation', or more simply, 'civil disobedience' ". And India has been divided ever since between those two groups of people-the Constitutionists and the Non-violent Revolutionists.

As a result of this controversy, however, the Moslem community became more and more convinced that the Indian National Conference was primarily representative of Hinduism and they proceeded more and more to Pursue a policy, designed in the first instance to protect their rights as Moslems in the new India. This is why the communal question has loomed so large in the discussions of the last three or four years. The Moslems said that they would not co-operate in working the Constitution unless given a certain percentage of seats in the Legislature, and certain other measures were demanded as necessary for their own protection.

The Constitution of 1919 provided that at the end of ten years a Commission should go out from England to examine the question and report and advise parliament as to what further steps should be taken to develop self government in India. The last four or five years has been preoccupied by the deliberations initiated by the Indian Statutory Commission, headed by Sir John Simon, better known as the Simon Commission.

The Simon Commission recommended that the provinces should be made autonomous and that no change should be made in the centre, except to increase the size and widen the franchise for the Assembly. This proposal was objected to and boycotted, not only by the more extreme element of Congress, but by the political classes in India" as a whole, and under Lord Irwin's initiative, a Round Table Conference, composed, so far as India was concerned, of the leaders of all political groups, and so far as Great Britain was concerned, of the representatives of the three political parties, was called with a view to discussing whether a Constitution could not be formulated by agreement.

In the early stages the India National Congress went into civil disobedience as a protest against that method and you will remember the excitement over Mr. Gandhi's proclamation of independence--his famous march to Dandi on the coast to make salt in defiance of the salt laws, and his subsequent arrest and long fast during which the government was compelled to deal with civil disobedience.

The Round Table Conference which took place shortly after the Gandhi episode, reached, in substance, an agreement on three main points. In the first place" the Indian princes, to the astonishment of most students of the problem, came forward and proclaimed their readiness to form part of an All Indian Federation. They felt that if India was going to move forward, from their point of view, the lesser of two evils was to form part of the All India government and not remain in isolation, scattered from one end of India to the other, and this was coupled with the demand or condition if they did come in, that some measure of responsibility should be given to the Central Government as well as to the Provinces.

This proposal was accepted by the Indian Government and accepted by the leaders of the British political parties on the condition that adequate safeguards would be introduced into the Constitution to ensure, if the experiment proved a failure, or if the government began to decline, that Great Britain would still be in a position to prevent chaos from supervening in India. and to maintain the financial integrity of the country. Very briefly, it was that Great Britain, through the Viceroy, should control the army and foreign affairs and over financial and other matters should have a field of special responsibility which would entitle it, constitutionally, to intervene in the event of the government adopting a policy which, in its view, was undermining the credit of India on one hand, or was a grave menace to the peace and tranquility of the country. That was the broad thesis of the Round Table Conference.

A further conference was held at which Mr. Gandhi, after the famous Irwin-Gandhi interview, was present. It did not lead to any conclusive result. Civil disobedience was renewed at a later stage and Mr. Gandhi went back to jail and most of the conference leaders went to jail, where very large numbers of them are this moment for civil disobedience.

Finally, during this last year, a number of Commissions have been in India with a view to filling in certain gaps in the Constitution. The most important is the one over which I had the honour to preside, the Franchise Commission,, which had as its objective that the voters of the provinces should be raised from a total of seven million to a total of thirty-five million, and that the electorate of the Federal Assembly should be raised from one million to seven million, or three per cent of the population, and should consist of those voters who have been voting in the provinces for the last twelve years and who, therefore, had some experience.

That, Gentlemen, very briefly, gives you the vertebrae of the problem and the way in which it is being approached in India. It is, very obviously, a very inadequate statement but the subject, as you understand" is so gigantic and so full of complexities that it would take hours, if not days, to explain in detail.

I think that you will ask yourselves one central question which I shall propound on your behalf and endeavour to answer: "Are we really proceeding an the right lines?"

There are two schools of opinion in England on that subject. While, on the whole, India thinks we are going too slowly, and wants a more rapid advance, there is a school of opinion in England which thinks we are going too fast. Its leader at the moment is Mr. Winston Churchill and his thesis is, roughly, this:--Ninety per cent of the population of India is still illiterate. It is divided in the way in which I have already described, as deeply as in Europe itself, by language, race and religion. It derives its unity today solely from the hand of Great Britain and its historic past. Is it conceivable that, left to itself, India can in so enormous and complicated and so divided a country, be capable of maintaining peace and unity, and financial stability, and also ensure the progress of so enormous a country? It is a query which every sensible person must realize to be a serious one and one not likely to be ignored.

The logical conclusion, of answering in the negative is that you leave things in substance as they are; that the advance which is possible if you deny the major premise can only be an advance of the smallest kind.

The majority opinion of those who study the question in Great Britain, and the opinion both of the late Labour Government and the present National Government, is that we have got to move forward and here are the major reasons:--There are in the universities of India today a hundred thousand students all the time. Every one of those-and there have been a hundred thousand for many years-are being turned out, filled with the knowledge and aspirations of the West-young Nationalists to a man, except in so far as they are Communists. India is covered by an active vernacular press. Every newspaper in India except two which are owned by Europeans and British in India, are owned and edited by some Indian political party which is Nationalist in aspiration, though some parties are predominantly Hindu or Moslem. Recent economic developments have begun to bring home in some degree" even to that ninety per cent of the population of India which is left in those thousands of small villages, that the standard of living is in some degree under the control of humanly controlled forces and not of the gods, and they are anxious for a policy to be adopted which will raise the price for their products and cheapen the cost of what they buy. Almost every village in India has within it a certain number of advocates of the National India Congress, who tell them that on the whole the root of all their troubles is that they are being governed by foreigners who do not understand their problems. Finally, for the last twenty years there have been Legislatures of our own creation in India every voter of which is an Indian, and the vast majority of whose members are not only Indians, but are Nationalists of some kind or other.

Can you ignore those facts? Let us consider what the maintenance of an autocratic government, however benevolent or however well-intentioned, implies in the modern world. You can no more fight a war today with weapons of the last century. You can't possibly fight, a war today, whatever your valour or finances, unless you have at your disposal aeroplanes" tanks, high explosives, machine guns and the whole paraphernalia of recognized militarism.. It is also proved that you ca not maintain an autocratic government without modernizing your instruments, and since the war we have had some lessons in, a number of ways as to what steps are, necessary to modernize the mechanism of autocratic' government, and I find that the lesson is threefold.

It is not enough to have the police, to have the army, and to have the Civil Service. You have got to watch every educational institution and especially the universities--an instrument for government propaganda today, -and forbid either teaching or speech which is subversive of the regime. You have got to own and control every newspaper in the country and all the news agencies in order that you may be assured that only news friendly to the regime appears in the press. And, finally, you have to have a party which will tolerate no opposition to itself, which finds its roots in every village and which controls the whole legislative and political machinery of the country from top to bottom.

That is the modern instrument for blind loyalty to a dynasty and I venture to think that nobody in this room and nobody in England who, if they wished to do so, would say that it is possible for a country like Great Britain, with some twelve hundred to two thousand civil servants and a small army in India" to create an instrument of autocracy of that kind, however benevolent or well-intentioned it may be. Without creating such an instrument it is impossible to maintain the system of government in India which existed in the last century.

Therefore, the predominant opinion in England is, that doubtful as the future inevitably must be, the only thing to do is to proceed along the lines laid down by the Indian National Congress, to try to bring into being a Federation for All India in which Indian India, with its stable traditions, is balanced by Britain with its more democratic methods; in which real responsibility for their own affairs is entrusted to the vote of Indian opinion, with due regard to the rights of the minorities in India, and that Great Britain should retain in its hands safeguards which, while they will only be called into effect, if India should produce legislatures incapable of administering stable government, will yet be effective. If that hope is disappointed, then--and this is serious there is reason for believing that India is moving as many other countries since the war, toward financial break-down or political chaos. That view is held by the Nationalist Government and it is held by myself.

It is a fact that there is more political interest than some of our croakers and pessimists believe. If we make a real forward movement we can win the confidence and trust, once more, of the best element in India, and during the next thirty years-none of us would like to prophecy what the world will be like thirty years hence-during the next thirty years it will be possible to bring into being a structure of government in India which will give real responsibility to Indians and yet enable Great Britain to assure both India and the world that India is not going to follow the steps of China into chaos or ruin.

It is the greatest experiment, as I said at the beginning, to which any nation has ever set its hand-to bring into being a system of federal parliamentary government for three hundred and fifty million people, divided as the Indians are divided. There is, in my view" no other way but to move forward, resolutely and cautiously, in the hope that when you do appeal to man's better nature, when you do put on him or her, real responsibilities, they rise to them and at the end of the thirty years, people will say that the political genius of this ancient race of which you are a part here, has not faltered at the threshold of the greatest task put on them and in its wisdom it has guided India over the most difficult transition that has ever confronted a great people. (Applause).