In 30 Seconds
Story
For twenty eight months between July 1937 and November 1939, the party of jails and marches governed most of British India, and the experience changed everyone it touched. The Congress ministries of 1937 to 1939, formed in seven and eventually eight of the eleven provinces after the elections’ sweep, were the freedom movement’s rehearsal in office, the first Indian governments responsible to Indian electorates, and their record, real reform under real constraints, with real costs in the movement’s soul and in communal trust, has been audited by historians ever since as the preview of the republic, virtues and flaws already in place.
Office itself came only after a constitutional duel. The Act’s governors held special powers that could override the ministers, and the Congress high command refused office until satisfied those powers would sleep, the wrangle of the spring of 1937 ending in the Viceroy Linlithgow’s soothing statement and the party’s carefully worded climbdown, ministries formed in July with the fig leaf intact. The deeper control was the party’s own, the high command through the Parliamentary Sub Committee, Patel, Prasad and Azad, supervising the provincial cabinets, premiers chosen and disputes settled from the centre, a discipline that kept the ministries to the national line and taught, its critics observed then and since, the habits of command the ruling party carried into freedom.
The ministries’ constructive record was substantial within its cage. The cage was fiscal, the provinces’ revenues thin, the centre and the army untouched, and the governors’ services running the machine the ministers rode. Within it, the governments released the political prisoners, the detenus of Bengal’s neighbouring regimes pressed hardest at the centre’s door, restored civil liberties, lifted press securities and ban orders, and legislated at a pace the old councils had never known, tenancy acts in the United Provinces and Bihar cutting into the talukdars’ arrears and evictions, debt relief and moneylender regulation across the map, Bombay’s industrial disputes act with its ambiguous gift of conciliation and restraint, prohibition’s costly experiments, and the era’s signature enthusiasms, basic education on Gandhi’s Wardha scheme, village uplift, khadi. The offices also schooled the men, Rajagopalachari in Madras, Kher in Bombay, Pant in the United Provinces, Dr Khan Sahib on the Frontier, the premiers of 1937 becoming the chief ministers and ministers of 1947, the administrative apprenticeship without which the transfer of power would have handed the machine to strangers.
The costs were entered in two accounts. Within the movement, office worked as office does, the ministries deploying the colonial state’s own instruments, section 144, police firings on strikers and peasants, prosecutions of radical speech, against agitations now inconvenient to government, the socialists and communists crying betrayal as the Kisan Sabha’s red flags were policed by Congress premiers, and Bose making the ministries’ embourgeoisement a text of his revolt. In the communal account the costs compounded. The League’s propaganda machine, needing material for its post election rebirth, produced the atrocity literature, the Pirpur and Shareef reports and Fazl ul Haq’s pamphlet, cataloguing under the ministries the slights and injuries of Muslims, Bande Mataram in the assemblies, Hindi and the cow, Wardha schooling as Hinduising, riots unpunished. Historians sifting the file have found its specific charges largely thin or false, and found equally that its plausibility fed on real things, the ministries’ majoritarian tin ear, the Congress’s Muslim mass contact campaign that threatened the League’s base while the UP coalition door stayed shut, the tricolour and the anthem’s ubiquity read as conquest. The truth of the reports mattered less than their harvest, for by 1939 the League had made Congress raj its proof of concept for Pakistan.
The end came from Europe. When the Viceroy declared India at war in September 1939 without a word to India’s elected governments, the high command ordered the ministries out, resignations complete by November, a departure the next chapters follow into wartime. Jinnah proclaimed a Day of Deliverance from Congress tyranny, the provinces passed to governors’ rule, and the rehearsal closed with its lessons taught, that the movement could govern, that governing costs movements their innocence, and that the majority’s confidence in its own fairness is not, in a divided country, the same thing as the minority’s.
