In 30 Seconds
Story
The longest statute the British Parliament had ever passed, four hundred and fifty one clauses and fifteen schedules ground through two years of committee against Winston Churchill’s last ditch siege, reached the royal assent in August 1935 to a reception unique in constitutional history. Nobody in India wanted it. The Congress condemned it root and branch, Nehru’s epithets, a charter of slavery, a machine with strong brakes and no engine, entering the anthologies, Jinnah pronounced it thoroughly rotten, fundamentally bad and totally unacceptable, the princes for whom half of it was built declined in the end to join, and the diehards in London had fought it as surrender. Yet the Government of India Act 1935 became, by the irony that governs constitutions, the working chassis of the subcontinent’s politics, the frame of the 1937 elections and the provincial ministries, the skeleton, amended, of the transitional governments of 1947, and the largest single quarry from which the Constitution of India was cut.
The Act’s two halves had opposite fates. The federal half, its designers’ pride, proposed a Federation of India joining the British provinces with such princely states as chose accession, the join sweetened for the princes with a third of the federal lower house and two fifths of the upper for their nominees, and hedged for London with the arrangement’s true keys, defence and external affairs reserved to the Viceroy, the safeguards and special responsibilities running through the text, and the federation to commence only when states holding half the princely seats acceded. They never did, the princes calculating, on Churchillian encouragement and their own ministers’ arithmetic, that sovereignty pooled was sovereignty lost, and the federal provisions waited unproclaimed until the war shelved and partition buried them, the centre governing to 1946 under the patched Act of 1919. The provincial half lived. Dyarchy was abolished in the provinces, whose eleven governments passed whole, police and revenue included, to ministries responsible to their legislatures, the franchise quintupled to some thirty millions, women and labour enfranchised in blocs, Sindh and Orissa born as provinces, Burma separated, and the governors retained, in their special powers and section 93, the reserve authority whose use and disuse would write the next decade’s story.
The Act’s political architecture carried the Communal Award within it, separate electorates for Muslims, Sikhs, Europeans, Indian Christians and the rest, the Poona Pact’s scheduled caste seats, weightages and the whole administrative theology of safeguards, and its silences were as loud, no dominion status in the text, no preamble of self government, responsibility conceded in the provinces precisely, its critics observed, to decant nationalism into eleven provincial channels while the imperial centre stood. The Congress read the design exactly and faced, through 1936, its own dilemma, to boycott the Act’s elections or capture them, and resolved it in the lawyer’s fashion of the age, contesting the elections of 1937 to demonstrate the Act’s rejection, then, after the famous wrangle over governors’ assurances, accepting office in the seven, later eight, provinces it had swept, the ministries of 1937 to 1939 governing under the statute the party had sworn to wreck, the schools, tenancy acts and prohibition experiments of those years the Act’s unintended harvest, and the ministries’ resignation over the war in 1939, and the League’s Deliverance Day that answered it, the hinge into the decade of partition.
The Act’s afterlife made its epitaph. The Constituent Assembly of 1946 sat under its amended frame, the Constitution of 1950 took from it, by the drafters’ own accounting, its largest borrowings, the federal lists, the governors, the emergency provisions, the administrative continuity that made the republic a going concern on day one, and Pakistan governed under it, adapted, until 1956. The charter of slavery thus became the manual of freedom, and the paradox is only apparent, for what the nationalists had rejected was never the machinery but the hands that held its keys, and when the keys changed hands in 1947, the machine, as its Indian inheritors discovered with mixed feelings, ran.
