from the central government, and provided with their own legislatures;
elections were to be held on the basis of a very narrow property franchise,
and separate electorates and reserved communal seats were retained.
Central to these proposals was the principle of ‘dyarchy’: legislation
would be divided into legislation on ‘transferred’ subjects that could be
introduced by elected ministers, and voted on by elected members of
provincial legislatures, and legislation on ‘reserved’ subjects, introduced by
the governor as imperial proconsul, that could be discussed but not voted
on by elected members. The ‘transferred’ legislation was still subject to
the governor’s veto; and even as British administrators grandiosely referred
to the new legislative spaces available to Indians as the ‘nation-building
departments’, a reorganisation of government finances appropriated
all flexible sources of finance to the centre, leaving to the provinces the
inflexible and non-lucrative sources such as land revenue. In this scheme
of provincialised politics, Indians could be given a safe play-pen in which,
if they could harm anyone at all, they could only harm each other.
British tactics to pacify Indian opinion also included promises of
economic change. The principle of ‘fiscal autonomy’ was to be a central
tenet of the new order: henceforth, it was stated, decisions affecting the
economic and financial life of India would not be made in London
but in Delhi. Given that the government of India was as British as the
one in London, this hardly mattered, as many subsequent episodes were
to show. But if combined with the principle of ‘Indianisation’, these
changes appeared to bode well for the future – even if, for the present,
it meant packing committees and commissions of enquiry with a few
pliant Indians who would back the opinions of the official bloc to come up
with the report that the government desired, leaving Indians outside the
official consensus to write long notes of dissent for the nationalist press to
quote.
From the moment of the August 1917 declaration, the public rhetoric
of British rule was that the British were willing to leave India – but always
tomorrow. The rhetoric of the need for qualification in self-government
before the departure of the British was renewed and intensified, alongside
a longer-running theme: India was composed of mutually antagonistic
‘communities’ who would only fight each other if the British did not
remain to referee conflict. Nonetheless, once the declaration of impending
departure had been made by the British, the declaration became the
catalyst for wide-ranging discussions on the nature of a future, possible
THE YOUNG GANDHIAN 35