“Are we to believe then that Indian princes are prepared to entrust their fate into the hands of an uninformed and unfamiliar white Democracy in England instead of getting into some kind of federal relationship and treaty arrangement with British India and the future Parliament of their own countrymen?….We refuse to believe that the Indian princes feel themselves in such a humiliating position of helplessness and backwardness as to seek, against a Government composed of their own countrymen, the protection which the coloured races need against their white exploiters.”
APRIL 17, 1929
The Butler report
THE FULL SUMMARY WHICH OUR SIMLA CORRESPONDENT HAS sent us of the report of the Butler Committee, will, we have no doubt, be read with absorbing interest by our readers and with not a little surprise and indignation. Various forecasts were made at various times of the nature and scope of the expected recommendations of the Committee, but few would have been prepared for the definitely reactionary, mischievous and insidious principles which underlie and dominate these recommendations. It would be remarkable indeed if the Indian princes proved to be blind to the implications of the two principal proposals in the report for which unfortunately they were led to express their preference, taken in conjunction with the very definite and unqualified assertion of the rights and privileges of the paramount power of the British Government over them. The Committee have refused to define the limits or the principles of such paramount authority of the British Raj and have declared that it should continue as elastic and uncontrolled as it has till now been. But they have recommended that this paramount power should now be exercised through the Viceroy and not the Governor-General-in-Council and that the relationship thus established should not be transferred without the agreement of the princes to a new Government in British India responsible to the Indian Legislature. The princes wanted a strict definition of their treaty relations with the Crown, and the maintenance of those relations in their integrity strictly by the Crown and not through a democratic Government in India which they most unjustly and unfortunately distrusted. They have now been told that while the power of the paramount power will not be defined or controlled by any definite juristic or international principles, the actual exercise of that will vest as they demanded in the arbitrary control of a Viceroy and free from any control or pressure which a popular Government of their own countrymen in British India expected to act in their interests could exercise upon him. In other words, the princes asked for bread for themselves – ignoring the claims of their own subjects and their fellow-countrymen in British India. They have been given a stone that is calculated to act as a deadweight upon the progress of their own countrymen in British India and their own States in consequence. It is surprising that a proposal originating from designing brains and pregnant with mischievous possibilities, such as that which Sir Leslie Scott foreshadowed long ago, should have found such easy acceptance by the Butler Committee. The Nehru Report foresaw this danger vividly and condemned the insidious plot in no uncertain terms. It warned the Indian princes against being made the cat’s paw in any such nefarious tactics.
We do not propose to-day to examine the legal and constitutional aspects of the two cardinal propositions propounded in the Butler Report. The first, as the Nehru Report puts it, in plain English, means, “that the past and present Governments of India were acceptable because they were essentially foreign in complexion and not responsible to the Indian electorate and that the future responsible Government of India would not be acceptable to the Indian princes because it will consist of their own countrymen and because it will be responsible to an electorate of their own countrymen.” The other proposal is that the Crown should act through the Viceroy as its agent and not through the Governor-General-in-Council in its obligations, contractual or otherwise, towards the Indian princes. This, if analysed, imputes to the princes an amount of unjust and unnatural sentiments which, we think, they do not really or will not on reflection entertain. If, as the Butler Committee have found, these obligations have been performed, to quote the words of the Nehru Report, “by white agents to the apparent satisfaction of the brown princes, on what principle and law, we ask, may that contract not be performed by brown agents, to the equal if not greater satisfaction of the brown princes?” Are we to be told that the Indian princes with all their pride of ancestry and aristocracy and with all their vaunted love for the motherland are prepared to put their faith in the ministers – say, of a government of Tom, Dick and Harry in England and not in ministers consisting of their own countrymen in India responsible to a legislature which from its very nature is bound to have far more regard to the interests, traditions, rights and privileges of the successors of the ancient rulers of India. For, what does this socalled claim of having direct relations with the Crown through the Viceroy amount to? The legal theory of a so-called “personal confidence”-as between the rulers of Indian States and His Majesty the King Emperor may of course be dismissed as ridiculous. It has not been noticed by the Butler Committee itself. But it is possible that the princes may have a wholly superficial notion that His Majesty the King Emperor, apart from the social and ceremonial part that His Majesty discharges in his relations with the Indian princes, has any direct part or lot in the policy or actions of His Majesty’s Government in regard to the exercise of the paramount powers that vest in the Crown. If there is any such notion we do trust that those who are responsible for the recommendations in the report would frankly disabuse them of the same, because no man in his senses believes that to-day in the British constitution His Majesty the King controls or guides the policy of his Government or Ministry. That power has long ago passed into the hands of Parliament. Are we to believe, then, that Indian princes are prepared to entrust their fate into the hands of an uninformed and unfamiliar white democracy in England instead of getting into some kind of federal relationship and treaty arrangement with British India and the future Parliament of their own countrymen? The position that will, under the report be assigned to the Viceroy vis-a-vis the Rulers of Indian States and their territories by the Committee in consequence of the grant of responsible Government to British India, is not dissimilar to that assigned to the Governor-General of South Africa or other colonies in regard to the protection of native races and their territories. We refuse to believe that the Indian princes feel themselves in such a humiliating position of helplessness and backwardness as to seek, against a Government composed of their own countrymen, the protection which the coloured races need against their white exploiters. We know as a matter of fact that some princes do not feel so. It is possible that some of the Indian rulers may hope that the British suzerainty thus altered may in practice not be as rigorously exercised as it is being done by the Foreign Department of the Government of India to-day. But any such expectations are doomed to disappointment in the face of the most unqualified assertion of the paramount power contained in the report. Even to-day although the Governor-General-in-Council is the authority dealing with the Indian States, the Viceroy through the Foreign Department exercises, practically unchecked by his colleagues, all the powers that are vested in him under the statute. The source of the right of the Governor-General to deal with the affairs of Indian States to-day does not lie in any inherent or personal rights of the Crown, but in the actual rights statutorily transferred to the Crown by a Parliamentary enactment of 1858 from the East India Company that preceded the Crown in its relations with them. There can be no doubt therefore that in practice the authority of the Viceroy will be wholly dependent on the authority of His Majesty’s responsible Minister, resting on the support of a democratic Parliament. It follows therefore that the change now asked for has absolutely nothing either in principle or sentiment that could commend it to the Indian princes and we can only hope that they will realise that the gift that they have been offered now is that of the proverbial wooden horse which the Greeks presented to the Trojans.
In regard to other outstanding questions and the proposals made for the settlement of disputes and differences between the princes and the Indian Government, the report of the Butler Committee has hardly added to our knowledge or to the means of their solution in the future. They have relegated the financial questions connected with the imposition of direct and indirect taxes by British India and the States to a special Commission to be hereafter appointed. And they have made proposals for the constitution of conferences and of special tribunals for the decision of non-justiciable and justiciable claims and disputes between them inter se and between themselves and the British Government. In both these matters they have, if we may say so, been wholly anticipated by, if they have not actually followed, the proposals made by the Nehru Committee in their report and it is unnecessary to deal with them at any length to-day. It will be no fault of anyone if the report conveys to him the impression that it is but a part of a concerted plan of action that is being pursued to defeat or delay India’s claims for Swaraj into which the princes have been most unfortunately dragged. Above all, the interests and the future position and rights of the people of Indian States have nowhere found any recognition except in the most casual way either in the report or in the claims which the princes put forward before the Butler Committee. It is therefore necessary for the leaders of the people both in British and in Indian India to immediately take steps to persuade and convince the princes of the essential wisdom and justice of their making common cause with their own subjects and with their brethren in British India and claim for themselves and for British India a Swaraj that is free from the domination or intervention of British interests and that gives the fullest scope for the development of freedom and prosperity for the whole of India.
Reference:
The First 100
A Selection of Editorials, 1878-1978, THE HINDU, VOLUME I