Indians increasingly in the governing of the
country, while reserving to the British Crown, that
is the viceroy, only what were regarded as the
powers necessary to preserve British rule. Parlia-
mentary-type institutions and elections – at first
confined to a small electorate and later widened –
provided the basis for constitutional development
after independence. The full scope of constitu-
tional progress under British rule cannot be
detailed here, but the salient measures were incor-
porated in the Indian Councils Act 1909, also
known as the Morley–Minto reforms, which per-
mitted Indians to be elected to the viceroy’s coun-
cil and to provincial councils. Eight years later the
growing demands of the Indian National Congress
(founded in 1885) led Edwin Montague, secretary
of state for India, to promise to increase the asso-
ciation of Indians ‘in every branch of the adminis-
tration, (and to promote) the gradual development
of self-governing institutions, with a view to the
progressive realisation of responsible government
in India as an integral part of the Empire’. It was
not exactly independence, and self-government
was gradual indeed – it was to take another thirty
years before it became reality. Then came the
Montague–Chelmsford report in 1918 which
devolved more responsibilities upon the provincial
assemblies when the reforms began to be imple-
mented in 1921.
The 1920s and 1930s under British rule were
paved with good intentions. India would be led to
independence gradually by means designed to pre-
vent the radical Congress Party with its democratic
and socialist aspirations from gaining dominant
power. The princes, Britain’s loyal allies, would be
given a prominent place and Muslim and Sikh fears
of a Hindu majority would be appeased by the
grant of considerable autonomy and separate elec-
toral rolls. Long experience of imperial rule gave
the British self-confidence in the exercise of their
‘trusteeship’. But some of India’s leaders wanted
more rapid progress to independence than Britain
was disposed to grant, among them Gandhi. The
British vice-regal government in India and the
Cabinet at home found it increasingly puzzling
and difficult to know how best to deal with this
small, skinny man in a loincloth, half saint, half
shrewd politician, who moved the Indian masses as
no one had done before, who defied the power of
the Raj by encouraging civil disobedience to show
that Britain’s rule lacked legitimacy, and who met
the use of force by passive resistance.Gandhi, once a dapper lawyer, had spent many
years in South Africa, where racial discrimination
had first aroused his anger and where he had
evolved the new methods of harnessing ‘people
power’ to overcome the apparently unassailable
might of imperial white rule. British rule in India
was met by this powerful non-violent defiance of
the masses, inspired by Gandhi’s example.
The viceroys, responsible for upholding the
imperial law, for security and order, tried to avoid
violence, preferring to govern through coopera-
tion. Gandhi was not satisfied with the promised
pace of British reforms, nor with the nationalism of
the elitist Congress Party, which had little contact
with the masses. He achieved the contact by
arranging a protest against British laws designed to
combat terrorism and to raise taxes (for it was the
Indians themselves who had to pay for the admin-392 THE TRANSFORMATION OF ASIA, 1945–55
Gandhi and his followers. A protest march. Non-
violent civil disobedience – a powerful weapon in the
struggle for independence. © Bettmann/Corbis