struggle’ on his return to India (Dover himself was a Eurasian, or an
‘Anglo-Indian’ as the revised and more polite terminology of the new
Government of India Act put it, although by this time the original
‘Anglo-Indians’ referred to themselves as ‘Europeans’).^19
The Government of India Act of 1935 had finally been passed. It had
had a stormy history, raising the bogey in Britain of the government
giving away India at a time (during the Depression) when British industry
most needed its Indian markets, and in India of a permanently-entrenched
system of divide and rule that the British government had enshrined
in the functioning of the constitution, enabling Britain to pose as
perpetual referee of Indian conflicts and indefinitely defer meaningful self-
government. The process that had begun with the Statutory Commission’s
multi-volume report, passed through three Round Table Conferences,
a Parliamentary Select Committee and a White Paper, had outlived
two governments (the Conservatives who had appointed the Simon
Commission, and the Labour government of 1929–31) and almost a third
(the coalitional National Government formed to deal with the Depression)
in Britain before it was passed. In its final form, it set out a scheme of
provincial autonomy, in which British Indian provinces were to be ruled
by elected Indian ministries, but the governor would have reserve powers
to take over the running of the province if he saw fit. Separate electorates
were maintained; with the vastly raised stakes of the 1935 Act, providing
as it did the right to control British Indian provinces with the mandate
of an electorate set at about 16% on average, this could potentially lead
to ‘communal’ discrimination in matters of employment, or worse, to
violence condoned by one ‘community’ who controlled the government
against another. There were, moreover, ‘safeguards’ for British business
and financial interests, and British businessmen and the ‘European
community’ were also granted reserved seats and over-representation in
legislatures – as Indian ‘minorities’. One such businessman, Sir Edward
Benthall, who had been instrumental in campaigning at the Round Table
Conferences for Europeans in India to be recognised as an Indian minority
and thereby to qualify for safeguards as had the Backward Castes and
the Muslims, had reassured his colleagues that as long as ‘Europeans’
controlled the Finance, Commerce and Home departments, Britain could
rule India indefinitely even if all other posts and all the provinces were to
be ruled by Indians. In the end, even this limited scenario did not arise:
the princes were greatly suspicious of the federal provisions that placed
‘INEFFECTUAL ANGEL’, 1927–39 77