In 30 Seconds
Story
The Government of India Act of 1919 had promised a commission after ten years to weigh India’s fitness for the next constitutional advance, and in November 1927 the British government, advancing the date to keep the appointment out of a possible Labour government’s hands, announced its composition. Seven members of Parliament under Sir John Simon, every one of them white. Not one Indian was judged necessary to the inquiry into India’s future, and the exclusion accomplished overnight what a decade of nationalist labour had not, the unification of political India. The Congress, the Muslim League in its Jinnah wing, the Liberals of Sapru who had cooperated with every previous reform, the Hindu Mahasabha, all resolved to boycott the commission, and the two words with which the country met it at every landing, Simon Go Back, chalked on walls and roared at railway stations, became the age’s shortest manifesto.
The boycott’s method was the black flag demonstration, and its price was paid in the movement’s blood at Lahore. When the commission reached the Punjab capital on 30 October 1928, the province’s protest was led in person by its greatest son, Lala Lajpat Rai, the Lion of Punjab, Sher e Punjab, thirty years the embodiment of its nationalism, deported in 1907 for the agrarian agitation, president of the Congress at its Calcutta special session of 1920, founder of its national college and its servants of the people society, now sixty three and in frail health. At the head of the vast, peaceful crowd before the station, Lajpat Rai stood against the barricades, and the police under Superintendent James Scott charged with lathis, Scott’s blows, eyewitnesses across the record testified, falling upon Lajpat Rai himself, upon the chest and head. That evening, bleeding and bandaged, he told the mass meeting the sentence the movement never let die, that every blow struck at him that day was a nail driven into the coffin of British rule in India. He never recovered, dying on 17 November 1928, and the medical dispute the government raised over the cause, a heart already failing, its officials pleaded, was answered by the country with the only verdict that mattered politically, that the empire’s police had beaten the Punjab’s grand old man to death in the open street, and that no inquiry would even be held.
The answer came in two currencies. The revolutionary one was exacted within the month, on 17 December 1928, when Bhagat Singh, Rajguru and Azad, having marked Scott for death, shot down in mistaken identity his assistant John Saunders outside the Lahore police office, the HSRA’s posters proclaiming the next morning that the assassination avenged the nation’s insult in Lajpat Rai’s blood, a vengeance the country, whatever its leaders said, largely received as justice, and which set in motion the Lahore case and the martyrdoms of 1931. The constitutional answer was the Nehru Report, for the challenge flung by the Secretary of State Birkenhead alongside the commission, that Indians could never agree upon a constitution among themselves, was taken up by the All Parties Conference, whose committee under Motilal Nehru produced within the year the first constitution drafted by Indians, the story of the chapter that follows.
The commission itself toured a country of turned backs twice through 1928 and 1929, its hartals and lathi charges, at Lucknow the beating of Jawaharlal Nehru and Govind Ballabh Pant in the black flag lines, writing its real report in the streets. The two volumes Simon eventually published in 1930, able in description and barren of advance, recommending provincial autonomy without responsibility at the centre, were obsolete at birth, overtaken by the Irwin declaration of dominion status as the goal, by the round table method that superseded the commission, and by the civil disobedience then filling the jails, and no clause of the eventual Act of 1935 owed the commission its paternity. The exclusion of 1927 had thus purchased, in exchange for nothing, the radicalisation of a generation, the unity of the boycott, the martyrdom that fired the revolution, and the Indian drafted constitution that framed the next demand, a return on insult the empire rarely matched, and Lahore station’s two words outlived every page the seven travellers wrote.
