a newspaper in India, the younger Nehru was enthusiastic: here, poten-
tially, was a country that could solve the problems that afflicted the
world.^3
BACK IN INDIA
On their return to India, the Nehrus were able to enter a political arena
recovering from the ennuiof the mid-1920s, revitalised for them by
the British government. The next wave of constitutional ‘reforms’ was due
to be enacted by the British Parliament for India, and an Indian Statutory
Commission under Sir John Simon had been appointed on November 8,
1927, to review India’s progress towards a higher stage of political
development and therefore its fitness for self-government, as required by
the 1919 Government of India Act. All its members were white; this was
considered insulting even by those who had reluctantly accepted the
British claim of the right to adjudicate on fitness for self-government.
Here was a Commission with not even the odd loyalist Indian to provide
the fig leaf of Indian representation.
An organised response became necessary. The Simon Commission
was to be boycotted and an All-Parties Conference organised, with the
cooperation of the Congress, the Muslim League and other groups such
as the Liberals, the inheritors of the old Moderate tradition. Secretary of
State Lord Birkenhead’s taunt that Indians were incapable of agreeing on
anything was to be met with a proper constitutional framework devised
by Indian groups working together. The committee that was to draw up
this constitutional framework was chaired by Motilal Nehru.
Jawaharlal was not a member; in terms of constitutional goals, he
was at odds with the committee and the eventual Nehru Report, named
after his father, that emerged from the deliberations. At the Madras session
of Congress in December 1927, he had piloted a resolution that declared
complete independence from the British rather than dominion status
under the British crown (with a British-appointed governor-general the
constitutional head of state) as the ultimate goal for Congress. The reso-
lution had been passed, only to be diluted and disarmed by amendments
proposed by the Gandhians, and publicly attacked by Gandhi himself; the
Congress Constitution continued to define its goal as swaraj. The Nehru
Report rejected the Gandhian model of a collection of autonomous villages
as outlined in his manifesto, Hind Swaraj, in favour of a more conventional
‘INEFFECTUAL ANGEL’, 1927–39 61