Indian Unrest

by Sir Valentine Chirol

CHAPTER XXVI.

THE GOVERNMENT OF INDIA.

In the very able speech in which, on July 27, Mr. Montagu, the new Under-Secretary of State for India, introduced the Indian Budget in the House of Commons, one passage referred to the relations between the Secretary of State and the Viceroy in terms which have deservedly attracted very great attention[23]. Differences of opinion, sometimes of an acute character, have at intervals occurred between Secretaries of State and Viceroys as to their relative attributions. Mr. Montagu's language, however, would seem to constitute an assertion of the powers of the Secretary of State far in excess not only of past practice but of any reasonable interpretation of legislative enactments on the subject. After congratulating Lord Minto on the completion of, a "difficult reign," Mr. Montagu said:—

The relations of a Viceroy to the Secretary of State are intimate and responsible. The Act of Parliament says "That the Secretary of State in Council shall superintend, direct, and control all acts, operations, and concerns which in any way relate to or concern the government or revenues of India, and all grants of salaries, gratuities, and allowances, and all other payments and charges whatever out of or on the revenues of India." It will be seen how wide, how far reaching, and how complete these powers are. Lord Morley and his Council, working through the agency of Lord Minto, have accomplished much…. I believe that men of all parties will be grateful that Lord Morley remains to carry out the policy he has initiated.

It is to be regretted in the first place that Mr. Montagu should not have been more careful to make his quotation accurate. For, as quoted by him, the Act would make it obligatory upon the Secretary of State to supervise practically every act of the Government of India, whereas the powers of the Secretary of State, who has succeeded to the powers of the old Board of Control of the East India Company, are discretionary powers. The statute from which the Secretary of State actually derives his powers is the Government of India Act, 1858, which under section 3 declares that the Secretary of State "shall have and perform all such or the like powers and duties in any wise relating to the government or revenues of India and all such or the like powers over all officers appointed or continued under this Act as might or should have been exercised or performed" by the Company and Board of Control, and those powers and duties are defined in the following terms in the Act of 1833 (3 and 4 William IV., c. 85, sec. 25), which Mr. Montagu would seem to have had in his mind, though he quoted it imperfectly: "The said Board [of Control] shall have and be invested with full power and authority to superintend, direct, and control all acts, operations, and concerns, &c." The difference, as has been very properly pointed out in the Manchester Guardian, no unfriendly critic of the present Administration, is "between exercising control and the power to exercise control, between 'shall' and 'may.' If these words of the Act were to be abbreviated, the right abbreviation would have been 'may.' This is the word used by Sir Courtenay Ilbert in his summary of the Secretary of State's powers (The Government of India, p. 145);—'… the Secretary of State may, subject to the provisions embodied in this digest, superintend, direct, and control all acts, operations, and concerns, &c.' This difference between 'shall' and 'may' is, of course, vital. 'Shall' implies that the Secretary of State is standing over the Viceroy in everything he does; 'may' simply reserves to him the right of control where he disapproves. 'Shall' imparts an agency of an inferior order; 'may' safeguards the rights of the Crown and Parliament without impairing the dignity of the Viceregal office."

Of greater importance, however, is the construction which Mr. Montagu places on these statutes. There are three fundamental objections to the doctrine of "agency" which he propounds in regard to the functions of the Viceroy. In the first place, it ignores one of the most important features of his office—one, indeed, to which supreme importance attaches in a country such as India, where the sentiment of reverence for the Sovereign is rooted in the most ancient traditions of all races and creeds. The Viceroy is the direct and personal representative of the King-Emperor, and in that capacity, at any rate, it would certainly be improper to describe him as the "agent" of the Secretary of State. From this point of view, any attempt to lower his office would tend dangerously to weaken the prestige of the Crown, which, to put it on the lowest grounds, is one of the greatest assets of the British Raj. In the second place, Mr. Montagu ignores equally another distinctive feature of the Viceroy's office, especially important in regard to his relations with the Secretary of State—namely, that, in his executive as well as in his legislative capacity, the Viceroy is not a mere individual, but the Governor-General in Council. Mr. Montagu omitted to quote the important section of the Act of 1833, confirmed in subsequent enactments, which declared that:—

The superintendence, direction, and control of the whole civil and military government of all the said territories and revenues in India shall be and is hereby vested in a Governor-General and Councillors to be styled "the Governor-General of India in Council."

The only title recognized by statute to the Viceroy is that of Governor-General in Council, and how material is this conjunction of the Governor-General with his Council is shown by the exceptional character of the circumstances in which power is given to the Governor-General to act on his own responsibility alone, and by the extreme rareness of the cases in which a Governor-General has exercised that power.

Thus, on the one hand, Mr. Montagu forgets the Crown when he talks of the Secretary of State acting through the agency of the Viceroy; and, on the other hand, he forgets the Governor-General in Council when he talks of the relations between the Viceroy and the Secretary of State—whose proper designation, moreover, is Secretary of State in Council, for, like the Governor-General, the Secretary of State has a Council intimately associated with him by statute in the discharge of his constitutional functions. Though the cases in which the Secretary of State cannot act without the concurrence of the Council of India, who sit with him at the India Office, are limited to matters involving the grant or appropriation of revenues, and in other matters he is not absolutely bound to consult them and still less to accept their recommendations, the Act of Parliament quoted by Mr. Montagu clearly implies that, in the exercise of all the functions which it assigns to him, he is expected to act generally in consultation and in concert with his Council, since those functions are assigned to him specifically as Secretary of State in Council.

Now, as to the nature of the relations between the Governor-General in Council and the Secretary of State in Council as above defined by statute. The ultimate responsibility for Indian government, as Mr. Montagu intimated, rests unquestionably with the Imperial Government represented by the Secretary of State for India, and therefore, in the last resort, with the people of the United Kingdom represented by Parliament. The question is, What is in theory and practice the proper mode of discharging this, "ultimate responsibility" for Indian government? It is not a question which can be authoritatively answered, but, if we may infer an answer from the spirit of legislative enactments and from the usage that has hitherto prevailed, it may still be summed up in the same language in which John Stuart Mill described the function of the Home Government in the days of the old East India Company—"The principal function of the Home Government is not to direct the details of administration, but to scrutinize and revise the past acts of the Indian Governments; to lay down principles and to issue general instructions for their future guidance, and to give or refuse sanction to great political measures which are referred home for approval." This seems undoubtedly to be the view of the relations, inherited from the East India Company, between the Secretary of State and the Government of India which has been accepted and acted upon on both sides until recently. Nor is any other view compatible with the Charter Act of 1833, or with the Government of India Act of 1858, which, in all matters pertinent to this issue, was based upon, and confirmed the principles of the earlier statute. The Secretary of State exercises general guidance and control, but, as Mill laid it down no less forcibly, "the Executive Government of India is and must be seated in India itself." Such relations are clearly very different from those of principal and agent which Mr. Montagu would apparently wish to substitute for them.

Besides the special emphasis he laid on his definition of the relations between the Viceroy and the Secretary of State, other reasons have led to the belief that the Under-Secretary, who spoke with a full sense of his responsibility as the representative of the Secretary of State, was giving calculated expression to the views of his chief. I am not going to anticipate the duties of the historian, whose business it will be to establish the share of initiative and responsibility that belong to Lord Morley and Lord Minto respectively in regard to the Indian policy of the last five years. Whilst something more than an impression generally prevails both at home and in India that Mr. Montagu's definition does in fact very largely apply to the relations between the present Viceroy and the Secretary of State, and that every measure carried out in India has originated in Whitehall, it is only fair to bear in mind that Lord Morley has never himself put forward any such claim, nor has Lord Minto ever admitted it. The Viceroy, on the contrary, has been at pains to emphasize on several occasions his share, and indeed to claim for himself the initiative, of all the principal measures carried out during his tenure of office, and especially of the new scheme of Indian reforms, of which the paternity is ascribed by most people to Lord Morley.

The Secretary of State's great personality may partly account for the belief that he has entirely overshadowed the Viceroy, all the more in that he has certainly overshadowed the Council of India as never before. But if Lord Minto has reason to complain, of the prevalence of this belief, he cannot be unaware that he too has helped to build it up by neglecting to associate his own Council with himself as closely as even his most masterful predecessors had hitherto been careful to do.

Lord Minto's position has no doubt been one of very peculiar difficulty, and no one will grudge him the warm tribute paid to him by Mr. Montagu. Whatever the merits of the great controversy between Lord Curzon and Lord Kitchener, the overruling of the Government of India by the Home Government on a question of such magnitude and the circumstances in which Lord Curzon was compelled to resign had dealt a very heavy blow to the authority and prestige of the Viceregal office in India. Within a few weeks of Lord Minto's arrival in India the Unionist Government who had appointed him fell, and a Liberal Government came into power who could not be expected to display any special consideration for their predecessors nominee unless he showed himself to be in sympathy with their policy. Lord Minto's friends can therefore very reasonably argue that his chief anxiety was, quite legitimately, to avoid any kind of friction with the new Secretary of State which might have led to the supersession of another Viceroy so soon after the unfortunate crisis that had ended in Lord Curzon's resignation. If this was the object that Lord Minto had in view, his attitude has certainly been most successful, for Lord Morley has repeatedly testified to the loyalty and cordiality with which the Viceroy has constantly co-operated with him. That the Secretary of State and the Viceroy have, nevertheless, not always seen eye to eye with regard to the interference of the India Office in the details of Indian administration appears clearly from a telegram read out by Lord Morley himself in the House of Lords on February 23, 1909. In the course of this telegram, which acknowledged in the most generous terms the strong support of the Secretary of State in all dealings with sedition, the Viceroy made the following curious admission:—"The question of the control of Indian administration by the Secretary of State, mixed up as it is with the old difficulties of centralization, we may very possibly look at from different points of view." The curtain fell upon this restrained attempt to assert what Lord Minto evidently regarded eighteen months ago as his legitimate position, and to the public eye it has not been raised again since then. But in India certainly the fear is often expressed in responsible quarters that, notwithstanding the courageous support which Lord Morley has given to legislative measures for dealing with the worst forms of seditious agitation, their effect has been occasionally weakened by that interference from home in the details of Indian administration of which Lord Minto's telegram contains the only admission known to the public.

It is difficult to believe that Lord Minto's position would not have been stronger had he not allowed the Governor-General in Council to suffer such frequent eclipses. The Governor-General's Council during Lord Minto's tenure of office may have been exceptionally weak, and there will always be a serious element of weakness in it so long as membership of Council is not recognized to be the crowning stage of an Indian career. So long as it is, as at present too frequently happens, merely a stepping-stone to a Lieutenant-Governorship, it is idle to expect that the hope of advancement will not sometimes act as a restraint upon the independence and sense of individual responsibility which a seat in Council demands. In any case, the effacement of Council during the last few years behind the Viceroy has not been calculated to dispel the widespread impression that, both in Calcutta and in Whitehall, there has been a tendency to substitute for the constitutional relations between the Governor-General in Council and the Secretary of State in Council more informal and personal relations between Lord Minto and Lord Morley, which, however excellent, are difficult to reconcile with the principles essential to the maintenance of a strong Government of India. Private letters and private telegrams are very useful helps to a mutual understanding, but they cannot safely supplant, or encroach upon, the more formal and regular methods of communication, officially recorded for future reference, in consultation and concert with the Councils on either side, as by statute established.

There is a twofold danger in any eclipse, even partial, of the Governor-General in Council. One of the remarks I have heard most frequently all over India, and from Indians as well as from Englishmen, is that "there is no longer any Government of India"; and it is a remark which, however exaggerated in form, contains a certain element of truth. To whatever extent the Viceroy, in his relations with Whitehall, detaches himself from his Council, to that extent the centre of executive stability is displaced and the door is opened to that constant interference from home in the details of Indian administration which is all the more to be deprecated if there appear to be any suspicion of party pressure. Lord Morley has so often and so courageously stood up for sound principles of Indian government against the fierce attacks of the extreme wing of his party, and he has shown, on the whole, so much moderation and insight in his larger schemes of constructive statesmanship, whilst Lord Minto has won for himself so much personal regard during a very difficult period, that criticism may appear invidious. But the tone adopted, especially during the first years of Lord Morley's administration, in official replies to insidious Parliamentary questions aimed at Indian administrators, the alacrity with which they were transmitted from the India Office to Calcutta, the acquiescence with which they were received there, and the capital made out of them by political agitators when they were spread broadcast over India contributed largely to undermine the principle of authority upon which, as Lord Morley has himself admitted, Indian government must rest. For the impression was thus created in India that there was no detail of Indian administration upon which an appeal might not be successfully made through Parliament to the Secretary of State over the head of the Government of India. Now if, as Lord Morley has also admitted, Parliamentary government is inconceivable in India, it is equally inconceivable that Indian government can be carried on under a running fire of malevolent or ignorant criticism from a Parliament 6,000 miles away. That is certainly not the sort of Parliamentary control contemplated in the legislative enactments which guarantee the "ultimate responsibility" of the Secretary of State.

At the same time the effacement of the Viceroy's Executive Council has weakened that collective authority of the Government of India without which its voice must fail to carry full weight in Whitehall. Every experienced Anglo-Indian administrator, for instance, had been quick to realize what were bound to be the consequences of the unbridled licence of the extremist Press and of an openly seditious propaganda. Yet the Government of India under Lord Minto lacked the cohesion necessary to secure the sanction of the Secretary of State to adequate legislative action, repugnant to party traditions at home, until we had already begun to reap the bloody harvest of an exaggerated tolerance, and with the Viceroy himself the views of the ruling chiefs seem to have carried greater weight in urging action on the Secretary of State than the opinions recorded at a much earlier date by men entitled to his confidence and entrusted under his orders with the administration of British India.

Even if one could always be certain of having men of transcendent ability at the India Office and at Government House in Calcutta, it is impossible that they should safely dispense with the permanent corrective to their personal judgment and temperament—not to speak of outside pressure—which their respective Councils have been created by law to supply. Let us take first of all the case of the Viceroy. His position as the head of the Government of India may be likened to that of the Prime Minister at home, and the position of the Viceroy's Executive Council to that of the Ministers who, as heads of the principal executive Departments, form the Cabinet over which the Prime Minister presides. But no head of the Executive at home stands so much in need of capable and experienced advisers as the Viceroy, who generally goes out to India without any personal knowledge of the vast sub-continent and the 300 million people whom he is sent out to govern for five years with very far-reaching powers, and often without any administrative experience, though he has to take charge of the most complicated administrative machine in the world. Even when he has gone out to India, his opportunities of getting to know the country and its peoples are actually very scant. He spends more than six months of the year at Simla, an essentially European and ultra-official hill-station perched up in the clouds and entirely out of touch with Indian life, and another four months he spends in Calcutta, which, again, is only partially Indian, or, at any rate, presents but one aspect of the many-sided life of India. It takes a month for the great public departments to transport themselves and their archives from Calcutta to Simla at the beginning of the hot weather, and another month in the autumn for the pilgrimage back from the hills to Calcutta. It is only during these two months that the Viceroy can travel about freely and make himself acquainted with other parts of the vast Dependency committed to his care, and, though railways have shortened distances, rapid journeys in special trains with great ceremonial programmes at every halting point scarcely afford the same opportunities as the more leisurely progress of olden days, when the Governor-General's camp, as it moved from place to place, was open to visitors from the whole surrounding country. Moreover, the machinery of administration grows every year more ponderous and complicated, and the Viceroy, unless he is endowed with an almost superhuman power and quickness of work, is apt to find himself entangled in the meshes of never-ending routine. It is in order to supply the knowledge and experience which a Viceroy in most cases lacks when he first goes out, and in some cases is never able to acquire during his whole tenure of office, that his Executive Council is so constituted, in theory and as far as possible in practice, that it combines with administrative experience in the several Departments over which members respectively preside such a knowledge collectively of the whole of India that the Viceroy can rely upon expert advice and assistance in the transaction of public business and, not least, in applying with due regard for Indian conditions the principles of policy laid down for his guidance by the Home Government. These were the grounds upon which Lord Morley justified the appointment to the Viceroy's Executive Council of an Indian member who, besides being thoroughly qualified to take charge of the special portfolio entrusted to him, would bring into Council a special and intimate knowledge of native opinion and sentiment. These are the grounds upon which, by the way, Lord Morley cannot possibly justify the appointment of Mr. Clark as Member for Commerce and Industry, for a young subordinate official, however brilliant, of an English public Department cannot bring into the Viceroy's Executive Council either special or general knowledge of Indian affairs. Such an appointment must to that extent weaken rather than strengthen the Government of India.

The same arguments which apply in India to the conjunction of the
Governor-General with his Council apply, mutatis mutandis, with
scarcely less force to the importance of the part assigned to the
Council of India as advisers of the Secretary of State at the India
Office.

If we look at the Morley-Minto régime from another point of view, it is passing strange that the tendency to concentrate the direction of affairs in India in the hands of the Viceroy and to subject the Viceroy in turn to the closer and more immediate control of the Secretary of State, whilst simultaneously diminishing pro tanto the influence of their respective Councils, should have manifested itself just at this time, when it is Lord Morley who presides over the India Office. For no statesman has ever proclaimed a more ardent belief in the virtues of decentralization than Lord Morley, and Lord Morley himself is largely responsible for legislative reforms which will not only strengthen the hands of the provincial Governments in their dealings with the Government of India, but will enable and, indeed, force the Government of India to assume on many vital questions an attitude of increased independence towards the Imperial Government. The more we are determined to govern India in accordance with Indian ideas and with Indian interests, the more we must rely upon a strong, intelligent, and self-reliant Government of India. The peculiar conditions of India exclude the possibility of Indian self-government on colonial lines, but what we may, and probably must, look forward to at no distant date is that, with the larger share in legislation and administration secured to Indians by such measures as the Indian Councils Act, the Government of India will speak with growing authority as the exponent of the best Indian opinion within the limits compatible with the maintenance of British rule, and that its voice will therefore ultimately carry scarcely less weight at home in the determination of Indian policy than the voice of our self-governing Dominions already carries in all questions concerning their internal development.

The future of India lies in the greatest possible decentralization in India subject to the general, but unmeddlesome, control of the Governor-General in Council, and in the greatest possible freedom of the Government of India from all interference from home, except in regard to those broad principles of policy which it must always rest with the Imperial Government, represented by the Secretary of State in Council, to determine. It is only in that way that, to use one of Mr. Montagu's phrases, we can hope successfully to "yoke" to our own "democratic" system "a Government so complex and irresponsible to the peoples which it governs as the Government of India."