The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830–1970 (37 page)

that in the course of a few years the constitution which we propose to establish will come to be regarded as a precious possession round which conservative sentiment will crystallise and will offer substantial opposition to any further change. We anticipate that the aristocratic elements in society and the moderate men, for whom there is at present little place in Indian politics, will range themselves by the side of government, and will oppose any further shifting in the balance of power and any attempt to democratise Indian institutions.
⁸⁴

The repudiation of the Congress demand for swifter progress towards self-government, and the admission to power of the anglo-literate class, could not have been blunter.

Morley's response to this provocative document was curiously tepid. He welcomed it, pressed the case for advisory councils in the provinces and remarked on the need for greater representation of
European
interests if the councils were enlarged. His caution was understandable. Being
seen
to impose reform on the Indian government was risky. He was nervous of Anglo-India-at-Home and its furious correspondents. He knew that any constitutional scheme would have to navigate the parliamentary rapids in the House of Lords with its phalanx of former Viceroys. There Curzon lay in wait, and without the support of Lord Lansdowne (Viceroy 1888–92) Morley had little hope of winning over its Conservative majority. To make matters worse, his Indian ally, the Congress, was in disarray and threatened him with embarrassment.

The Congress faced a syndrome all too familiar to colonial nationalists in the twentieth century. Their leverage on colonial rulers was usually increased by signs of general unrest. The official world became uneasy and more open to modest concession. But, if unrest challenged colonial power too openly, ‘Home’ opinion was quickly hardened against ‘agitators’ or ‘troublemakers’. Colonial officials made up lost ground by stigmatising their critics as rebels-in-the-making. Without
organised
mass support, nationalist leaders then faced the choice between promoting chaos or accepting impotence. After 1906, the Congress lurched dangerously towards this political impasse. The
swadeshi
agitation in Bengal radicalised
bhadralok
opinion and the local Congress supporters. It gave a chance to Congressmen from other provinces who favoured more ruthless tactics against the Civilian Raj: now they might swing the Congress behind them. In January 1907, B. G. Tilak launched his ‘New Party’ and attacked the policy of relying on British goodwill and Morley's reformism. The remedy, he declared, ‘is not petitioning but boycott’.
⁸⁵
Boycott was the way to shatter the illusion of British power, resting as it did on ‘our assistance’. For ‘every Englishman knows that you are weak and they are strong…We have been deceived by such a policy so long.’
⁸⁶
After the Congress annual meeting in Calcutta in December 1906, it looked as if Tilak's programme – boycotting military service, revenue collection and the administration of justice – would carry all before it.
⁸⁷
In 1907, there was serious unrest in the Punjab over land rights. In Bengal, young
bhadralok
activists turned to assassination and bomb-throwing.
⁸⁸
This was hardly the right climate for Morley to force more reform on the government of India than it had proposed itself. The established Congress leaders, for their part, were desperate to avoid the tag of extremism.
⁸⁹
The next annual meeting at Surat broke up in disorder. The leadership withdrew, and drafted its own manifesto, insisting on its loyalty and rejecting unconstitutional action. The following year at Allahabad, a new Congress constitution was drawn up to repudiate the Tilakite heresy and declare that ‘colonial
swaraj
’ – self-government within the Empire on the ‘white dominion’ model – was the grand objective. The British helped by arresting Tilak for sedition and exiling him to Burma. His ‘party’ in the Congress broke up. The Punjab unrest was appeased. The Bengal bombing died down. The moderates regained control of the Congress and imposed their new ‘creed’.
⁹⁰

In this easier atmosphere, Morley, whose enthusiasm for reform had been ebbing, was able to insist on two crucial principles which the Civilians had hoped to bury. The new enlarged councils in the provinces would have ‘unofficial majorities’: a predominance of members who were not required (as were official members) to vote with the government as a condition of their place. Secondly, Morley insisted, against the Civilians’ prejudice, that a substantial proportion of the unofficials would be chosen by electorates, not selected by interest groups. This, together with the provision that Indians could be appointed to the Viceroy's executive council, was the heart of the ‘Morley-Minto’ reforms. A new political order seemed in the making. The Congress received the prospect with enthusiasm. Morley, said Surendranath Banerjea, was the ‘Simon de Montfort of India’.
⁹¹
The Congressmen looked forward to filling the lion's share of seats in the new provincial councils. With more liberal rules on debate and interpellation in the council chambers, they hoped for gradual progress towards a quasi-parliamentary constitution. At the very least, Morley had blocked the Civilians’ project for a ‘constitutional autocracy’ based on the partnership of princes and landowners. But it soon became clear that the triumph of ‘British Indian nationalism’ was far from complete.

The stalemate

The struggle over the reforms had been fought on two levels and between several parties. At the imperial level, it had been a trial of strength between London and Simla, between Morley and the Viceroy's Civilian government. Morley had been determined to bring the Civilians to heel. ‘It is not you or I who are responsible for [Indian] unrest’, he told the Viceroy irritably in June 1908, ‘but the over-confident, over-worked Tchinovniks who have had India in their hands for fifty years past.’
⁹²
Morley had insisted on a Royal Commission to decentralise the Indian government and chose as Minto's successor the diplomat Lord Hardinge (closely involved in negotiating the Anglo-Russian entente) to underline that the days of Curzonism were over. The Viceroy's government, remarked Morley's under-secretary, and perhaps at his suggestion, had acted as his ‘agent’ in making the reforms (a description received badly in Simla).
⁹³
Implicit in Morley's whole policy was not so much the graceful acceptance of Indian claims as the deliberate extension of London's control. It was entirely in keeping with this that, while he pressed for unofficial majorities in the provincial councils, he bluntly rejected one at the Indian centre (on the Viceroy's legislative council) where India's budget and its military spending were settled. In the strange constitutional minuet it danced to keep London at bay, it had been the Viceroy's government that had proposed this seemingly radical innovation.
⁹⁴

In the Indian arena the contest was much more confused. The old struggle between the Civilians and Congress had widened out. The partition of Bengal had shown the potential of mobilising support on a larger scale and with a more emotive programme. Much of Tilak's ‘new party’ plan was soon to be revived by Gandhi. For the moment, this tendency had been checked by a tacit alliance between the British and the Congress moderates. There was one significant exception. The Congress attack on partition had infuriated its main beneficiaries, the Muslims of East Bengal. In 1906, their sympathisers in North India formed the All-India Muslim League. Since Muslim loyalty was vital to British rule across much of Northern India (especially in the United Provinces and Punjab), the embattled Civilians looked kindly on these likely allies. At a time of rising tension between Britain and Ottoman Turkey, Morley had extra reasons for conceding the Muslim demand for separate seats on the councils. ‘The Mahomedans’, he told Parliament, ‘have a special and overwhelming claim upon us.’
⁹⁵
But, overall, the surge of political unrest unleashed in 1905 produced a curiously indecisive result in which none of the interested parties – London, the Civilians, the Congress ‘moderates’, the ‘extremists’ or the Muslims (partition was reversed in 1911) – gained a clear advantage.

But, for the time being, it was the Civilians who carried off most of the spoils. As in 1892, London had been obliged to delegate the ‘small print’ of reform to the local officials. But, since the small print included choosing electors and electorates, and deciding the membership of the provincial councils, its importance was very large. The Civilians once more took full advantage. Minto and his advisers had disliked the idea of elections, but there was another string to their bow. ‘We shall have to trust to a careful creation of electorates’, said the Viceroy coolly.
⁹⁶
And so they did. This creativity ensured that, in Bengal, out of twenty-six elective ‘constituencies’, perhaps only four could have been won by Congress and (in 1912–13) only three
were
won.
⁹⁷
The same tactic brought disillusion in the United Provinces. ‘They…are just the opposite of reforms’, Motilal Nehru reported angrily. ‘The avowed object of the so-called reforms is to destroy the influence of the educated classes.’
⁹⁸
The effects were soon seen. The provincial budget debate in 1910 was ‘a farce’, as a crowd of unofficial members stood up not to challenge the government but to praise it.
⁹⁹
Nor were the Civilians content with new allies in the councils. They armed themselves with fresh weapons against attack in the press. Provincial governments were given wide powers to close down papers on grounds of sedition
¹⁰⁰
and were encouraged to subsidise ‘selected loyal vernacular newspapers’.
¹⁰¹
The new Department of Criminal Intelligence stepped up the scale of political surveillance.
¹⁰²
There was little to choose between ‘extremists’ and ‘moderates’, said the Civilian in charge.
¹⁰³
It was little wonder that a senior official could say in 1910, after five years of upheaval, that, in his province at least, ‘the executive has never been stronger’.
¹⁰⁴

Nor was this all. The Civilians had been put on the defensive by Morley's alliance with the Congress moderates. But they were determined to recast Indian politics along lines of their own choosing. One symptom was Minto's appeasement of the Indian princes whom he promised to free from the strict supervision imposed by Curzon.
¹⁰⁵
The next step was more daring. It was decided to reverse the partition of Bengal to which the whole Hindu elite remained bitterly hostile. But the
quid pro quo
would be the removal of the Indian capital from the ‘disloyal’ city of Calcutta to Delhi. Here was a partial if belated fulfilment of Curzon's vision. The centre of Indian politics would be shifted from the hectic lowlands of Bengal to the loyal heartlands of Upper India. From Delhi, the Raj would assert its link to the Indian past, its legacy from the Mughals, and the permanence of its rule.
¹⁰⁶
A new imperial city was planned, to echo the Mughal foundations at Fatehpur Sikri and Shahjahanbad. At the grandiose Delhi Durbar in 1911, attended by the new King-Emperor George V, the public fealty of the Indian princes formed the climax of the ceremony. What better riposte to the pretensions of ‘
babu
’ politics?

This new ‘Delhi Raj’ had still wider implications. In 1908, the Civilians smothered the inquiry that Morley had launched into administrative decentralisation. The Financial Secretary dismissed financial devolution as a dream.
¹⁰⁷
The commission accepted his view. Three years later, as the new political landscape took form, decentralisation began to look more attractive. In the famous ‘Delhi Despatch’ of 1911, the new Viceroy, Lord Hardinge, sketched out a novel constitutional framework. Power was to be devolved increasingly to provincial governments and, indirectly, to the provincial councils and their carefully constructed ‘electorates’.
¹⁰⁸
But none of this was meant to upset the ability of the central government to meet its imperial obligations, pay the imperial dividend and impose, if necessary, the ultimate sanction of coercive power. In its new imperial enclave in Delhi, magnificently free from provincial distractions, buoyed up by feudal loyalty, confidently manipulating the levers and limits of provincial politics, the Civilian Raj would remain: indispensable and irremovable.

In the last years of peace, there was little time to test the new model Raj. Morley's successor in London, Lord Crewe, brusquely ruled out the parliamentary future on which the Congress moderates had pinned their hopes. ‘Fancy a Liberal Secretary of State…proclaiming the impossibility of Self-Government for the Indian people on the ground of their race’, said Srinavasa Sastri sadly.
¹⁰⁹
The Congress leaders grumbled but made the best of it. The reforms had reversed the growing estrangement between British and Indians; they were beneficial for all their defects; they had revived the ‘drooping spirits’ of the constitutional party.
¹¹⁰
The Delhi Despatch held out hope for provincial autonomy.
¹¹¹
Perhaps fiscal autonomy might be granted.
¹¹²
The Congress goal remained ‘an autonomous Government…under the suzerainty of the most powerful and progressive of modern nations’.
¹¹³
It was only the onset of war that changed the mood. ‘In Europe the war of nations, now in progress, will knock off the last weights of mediaeval domination of one man over many, of one race over another’, declared the Congress president hopefully in December 1914.
¹¹⁴
A new phase of the political struggle was about to begin.