THE PERIOD OF COLONIAL RULESecretary of State Edwin Montagu declared that the introduction of
‘responsible government’ would be the direction of future imminent
reforms. Montagu had actually suggested the word ‘self-government’ but
this was resented by some of his colleagues in the war cabinet and Lord
Curzon, the former viceroy who was now a Conservative minister, had
insisted on ‘responsible government’—perhaps without due consideration
of the technical meaning of this term, which implies the parliamentary
principle of an executive responsible to the elected majority in the House
of Commons. Montagu, who understood these connotations much better
than Curzon, readily agreed and this is why the final declaration
contained this loaded phrase. Subsequently, Montagu went to India
himself and worked out the reform proposals with Viceroy Lord
Chelmsford.
Their report contained the reluctant admission that separate electorates
for Muslims, though actually incompatible with responsible government,
had to be retained because the Muslims now considered them to be a
political right which they were unwilling to sacrifice. To make matters
worse, the pact agreed by the National Congress and the Muslim League in
1916 was taken as the basic point of departure for the distribution of seats
in the context of this new reform—despite its making no sense in this
context at all. Finally, the British authorities noticed that the pact was
unfair to Bengal and they unilaterally raised the number of Muslim seats
there, completely disregarding the fact that Muslim under-representation in
Bengal was originally thought of as a compensation for Muslim
overrepresentation in the Muslim minority provinces.
The Montagu-Chelmsford reforms were also vitiated by the strange
construction of dyarchy, whereby the provincial executive was split into two
halves—an Indian one responsible to the legislature, and a British one which
remained irremovable and irresponsible. The Indian members of the executive
were in charge of ‘transferred subjects’ such as education, health and local
government, whereas the British members held the ‘reserved’ portfolios for
home, revenue and finance. The whole design was such that it could only
create bitter frustration. The Indian ministers were starved of financial support
and, of course, did not dare to ask for new taxes which would be assigned to
their subjects. They were in any case faced with a legislature from which they
could never hope to get solid support because of the way it was constituted—
representing communities and interests in line with the principles of the
previous reform, which this new measure had not superseded.
Federalism and the Government of India Act of 1935The next move came in 1928, when the Simon Commission was sent to
India. Secretary of State Lord Birkenhead made this move not because he
felt, as Montagu had, that further reform was inevitable, but because he