topics: |  history | british-india

This is a history of the Government of India Act of 1935, an important event in the closing stages of British rule in India. The act was intended by the Colonial rulers as a partial measure that would help defuse the rising nationalist sentiment, and was strongly opposed by conservatives in britain. Indeed, it did help channelize the protest; until these elections, the earlier councils with limited democracy had been rejected by most Indians and the Congress Party as rubber stamps of the british rulers, stacked with un-elected British officials, pro-British princes and members of religious minorities represented beyond reasonable proportions.

However, the elections that followed the act also demonstrated the widespread support for the Indian National Congress, and also gave a taste of partial democratic control to the Indian states. This book however, does not describe the debates within the Congress regarding participating in the elections (dealt with in a paragraph or two), and the reasons for their victory are not touched upon at all.

The main focus of the work is not India per se, but the debates and negotiations among the British rulers regarding the passage of the Act. As a book written in the 21st century however, one is struck by its lack of any attempt to reflect the popular opinions in India or in England; indeed, it reads almost as an old-fashioned "top-down" history of the ruling class, in sharp contrast to postcolonial (subaltern) trends focusing on the common man). To some extent, the ruling class pre-occupations may be legitimate given its avowed topic of the passage of the Act, but surely these negotiations were governed by larger context of the political views in the wider population? With regard to India, it fails to address the primary force which caused the Act -- the "nationalist agitation" and its origins. By focusing entirely on the administrative reactions to this agitation and ignoring the structure of this agitation itself, the text becoes a narrative of official records and letters by prominent Britishers and a handful of Indian moderates.

The discourse is thus entirely limited to the British officials in London
and their decisions-making processes.  What is interesting is how many of
these British officials considered themselves more well-informed on Indian
matters than many Indians.  Thus, even after the completely unexpected
landslide victory by the Congress, the british administrators, fed by
their Indian confidants (the "petitioners"), kept insisting that this was no
evidence of any Indian desire for independence.

Debate in Britain

Most of the book is devoted to the debate on India within the ruling
classes in Britain , with the conservative Die-Hards pitted against the
moderates led by Secretary of State for India, Samuel Hoare.  Muldoon tries
to bring out which voices were to be taken as the more knowledgeable on
India matters. On the one hand were Hoare and others who argued that

  	[there was] little probability of Congress being in a majority in
	the Provinces" and that, even in the worst case scenario, "at its
	maximum Congress cannot obtain more than 34 per cent of the seats at
	the Centre. [it was] almost impossible, short of a landslide, for
	the extremists to get control of the federal center.   196

The Tories also emphasized how the Die-Hards of the India Defence league -
led by Churchill and Page Croft - had had almost no Indian experience,
whereas a number of viceroys and others supported the India Bill.

Churchill countered these accusations by claiming that Hoare and the liberals
had stocked the Raj administration with their confirmed supporters who would
"give a modern and welcome reception to these sort of proposals." 197

Delusions of government

One of the more interesting discussions is in the last Chapter, which shows
how the broad sweep by the Indian National Congress in the provincial
elections of 1937, exposed the "shakiness of the colonial state's claim to
know the "real" India".  Yet this debacle did not fetter their confidence for
long, and they continued to exercise power, and returned to their old
viewpoint:

	A few months after the election, only a few British officials seemed
	to have noted the larger lesson learned: "There are fissiparous
	tendencies in the Congress, which superficial observers are inclined
	to think must soon break the movement, but past history shows that
	any such idea is an illusion."
		J.M. Ewart memorandum, Intelligence Bureau of Home Department
		(India), 1 May 1937, L/PJ/12/235/38.

The Viceroy, Linlithgow, proclaimed that the election results did not show
deep anti-British feeling:
    It is only to the extent that the notion of taxes is linked to
    "Government" that there has been any direct anti-Government (and
    therefore, to some extent, anti-British) prejudice raised in the
    villages. [Linlithgow to Zetland, 15 February 1937]

But even this chapter does not consider the repercussions of the Act in
India.  The debates within the Congress are subsumed in a sentence or two,
and the causes of the Congress electoral success never investigated.  The
focus remains strongly on the official documents; the only indian political
party given some space is the Justice party, which was subservient to
British interests, and was supported by British officials in the Madras
presidency.

Lessons: Divide between ruler and ruled

The great divide between the rulers and the ruled is however, not a
colonial pre-occupation.  Indeed, this is a malaise affecting not only
governments but any hierarchy; how much a managing director or a general
knows of his organization depends completely on the quality of interlocutors
he chooses to interact with.  This rift survives in modern democratic
societies, and allow leaders such as Ronald Reagan or Mayawati to continue
confidently while remaining in complete ignorance.

The ruling British relied on interlocutors among Indians yes men like Tej
Bahadur Sapru and M. R. Jayakar, widely considered as turncoats by the
mainstream nationalist sentiment.  Sapru and Jayakar are profiled more
richly in this book than most other texts in India.

The "Petitioner" culture in the tide of nationalism

Starting in 1905, the Indian National Congress had become increasingly
nationalistic.  This is referred to as the second phase of the Congress,
marked by "radicalism" that reflected rising nationalist sentiment.  The
movement is associated with three "extremist" leaders - Lala Lajpat Rai,
Bal Gangadhar Tilak and Bipin Chandra Pal - known as "Lal-Bal-Pal".

The earlier Congress is now described as the Petitioners or Moderates.
They typically demanded constitutional reforms, economic relief,
administrative reorganisation and defence of civil rights under the British
rule by giving petitions to the British officials.

The new Congress differed significantly in its aim and method of struggle;
for the first time, they articulated a demand for Swaraj, or self rule.
They had no faith in petitions.  Bal Gangadhar Tilak said, ‘Swarajya is my
birth right and I will have it.’ The radicals suggested programmes like the
boycott of foreign goods, government services and titles and honours.  They
supported the Swadeshi movement and nationalist educational institutions.

But the moderates didn't disappear.  They were very much alive and the
Liberal party, not much discussed in the history of the Indian freedom
movement, was an offshoot of this strand.  In particular, as we find in
this analysis, they continued to be the people on whom the British
administration, increasingly alienated from the wider population, relied.

How rulers get their worldviews

the point-of-view of the author is that of a historian trying to highlight
the capable decisions made by bureaucrats in India and Britain:
	the Raj was a monument to, and a celebration of, bureaucratic
	capability. p.6

Not much has changed in the methods by which an estranged leadership
obtains its information about society.  Here we have an intimate portrait
of Lord Irwin (E.F.L. Wood) and his small coterie of advisors and their few
Indian connections.  However, Irwin's moderate goals, seeking to mediate
conflict were apparent in India 1926-1932 - these would become more marked
during his later diplomacy, when he indicated to Hitler that German designs
on Austria and parts of Czechoslovakia and Poland were not regarded as
illegitimate by the British.  While these steps have been labelled
"appeasement" by history, his tenure in India, marked by the steps that
formed the Indian representative government act of 1935, remains less
explored.

Excerpts

Indian liberals: Sapru and Jayakar

Informants for Irwin included moderates like Tej Bahadur Sapru and
M. R. Jayakar, who were regarded as collaborators of the british - a step
away from being traitors - and about them one doesn't hear much in India
today.  Sapru was one of the most sought-after lawyers of the time, and
Jayakar was an intellectual.  Both opposed movements towards complete
independence for India and sought to bring change via petitions and other
mechanisms within the British system.  Originally members of the Indian
National Congress, they opposed the civil disobedience movements of Gandhi
and formed their own party.  They also adopted the british stance in other
maters such as whether India should join WW1 etc., leading to their
increasing estrangement from the mass view within India.

As Sapru noted while going to attend the first round-table congress of 1930
(with hand-picked members - mostly other princes - and no representatives
from Congress) - he wrote Jayakar:
	[in bombay] you and I were immortalized together by being burnt in
	effigy. p.80

Sapru's legacy was somewhat redeemed when he served as the barrister
representing the INA soldiers in their famous red fort trial.  Jayakar
however has been consigned more or less to an ignominous oblivion.

In 1912 the industry employed more than three-quarters of a million
people. India took nearly half of Lancashire's exports.  As Basudev Chatterji
puts it, it is no wonder that the largely Tory Lancashire saw India as their
and "imperial Britain's most prized possession." 13
    [Basudev Chatterji, Trade, Tariffs and Empire: Lancashire and British
    Policy in India, 1919–1939 (Delhi, 1992).]

India in British eyes

in the late nineteenth century, there had emerged several strong ideas about
what "India" was and what the British role there should be. India had become
... a cultural construct, a place of which the British claimed specific
ethnographic understandings.  These British assumptions about India were
quite powerful and pervasive... [and] proved influential in shaping the
British response to Indian nationalism.  15

    India was also the subject of much popular literature, especially in
    the adventure stories and romance novels which attracted a large
    middle-class audience, and in the travelogues, memoirs, and works of
    pseudo-anthropology which claimed a readership among the political
    elite.  Notable examples included the stories of Rudyard Kipling
    (Stanley Baldwin's cousin, no less), tales which found many imitators
    in the profusion of "Boys’ Own" literature which cloaked professions of
    British manly character in accounts of exploration and colonial
    derring-do. Maud Diver, the wife of a former British officer in India,
    churned out popular romances at a Barbara Cartland-like pace through
    the interwar years, using India as both a character and an exotic
    backdrop in her novels. Flora Annie Steel authored several historical
    novels of India, especially a best-selling account of the 1857 Mutiny.  16

[see also The Indian mutiny and the British imagination
for how these subtexts made it possible for britain to continue a violent
occupation of India.

	British suffragettes used descriptions of the condition of Indian
	women as an argument for suffrage, claiming that imperial
	administration might become more moral if British women could
	exercise their influence on it. 17

The images of India [constituted] a discourse that emphasized the
idea of "difference": not only the difference between Britain and India, but
also the various differences or oppositions which existed in India itself.
     (Thomas Metcalf, Ideologies of the Raj)

A recurrent trope of this discourse was the difference between Western
modernity and an India still plagued by "ancient" belief systems and social
constructions. In short, India appeared an "authentically primitive" place.

In 1893, contemplating limited political reforms in India, Lord Lansdowne had
argued that "any system of election is entirely foreign to the feelings and
habits of the people, and that ... the really representative men would probably
not come forward under it."

The Imperial Gazetteer of 1909 estimated that ninety per cent of Indians
lived in communities with populations less than five thousand, and reckoned
that nearly all those born in these villages remained there their entire
lives. 19

Ancient religious practices, like the worship of Kali, appeared in the work
of writers like Steel and Mayo as occasions of fanaticism, cruelty and
carnality. ... Deep down, passion and an unbridled sexuality still possessed
Indians, a notion which was central to Mayo's explanation for much that was
wrong on the sub-continent and thus for why Indians could not be allowed to
govern themselves, obsessed as they were by such things as child marriage.
Mayo argued that Indian men enjoyed such sexual license and lustful behavior
when young that, by age thirty, these men were completely run-down and
"broken-nerved," their mental and physical energy sapped by lives devoted to
sensual pleasure; such men could never, in Mayo's estimation, govern
themselves. 21

The "martial races" of northern India, Sikhs from the Punjab and Muslims from
the Northwest frontier, came from rugged climates that produced a hardy and
forthright peasant stock, while the steamier environment of Bengal sapped its
inhabitants of both moral and physical vigor, leaving them enervated and
indolent. 24
	on British views of the Indian climate, see Kennedy, Magic Mountains,
	Chapter 2; E.M. Collingham, Imperial Bodies: The Physical Experience
	of the Raj, c. 1800– 1947 (Cambridge, 2001). Kipling promoted similar
	ideas in his fiction, especially the short story, "The Head of the
	District."

The character of the Bengali "babu," an innately effeminate, cowardly type
(in contrast to the Sikhs and the princes) who possessed rhetorical
eloquence, but no conception of the meaning of his words, and whose
aggressive pronouncements masked his true spinelessness, became a familiar
trope in British portrayals of Indians.
	See especially Mrinalini Sinha, Colonial Masculinity: The "Manly
	Englishman" and the "Effeminate Bengali" in the late nineteenth
	century (Manchester, 1995), Chapter 1; also: Teresa Hubel, Whose
	India? The Independence Struggle in British and Indian Fiction and
	History (Durham, 1996), Chapter 1.

Katherine Mayo reinforced the perception [of the Indian baboo] in the late
1920s in her description of Indian politicians as "[a]depts in the
phraseology of democratic representation [but] profoundly innocent of the
thought behind the phrase." 94

R.J. Moore and Carl Bridge are the authors of the two very detailed
examinations of the process of negotiation, calculation and political maneuvering
that led to the Act.
	Carl Bridge, Holding India to the Empire: The British Conservative
	Party and the 1935 Constitution (New Delhi, 1986); R.J. Moore, The
	Crisis of Indian Unity, 1917–1940 (Oxford, 1974).

Irwin's advisors

Irwin's sense of India came from his own elite [background], education, his
... small circle of advisers in Delhi whom he described as his "wise men,"
including Malcolm Hailey and Harry Haig, both ICS elders, David Petrie of
the Intelligence Bureau and Frederick Sykes, a fellow Conservative and
Governor of Bombay.21 Irwin also met with Indians, but mainly those from
elite and "moderate" backgrounds like T.B. Sapru and M.R. Jayakar,
non-Congress politicians who often acted as mediators between Irwin and the
Congress leadership. 43


  
tej bahadur sapru, a leading lawyer.  m.r. jayakar, hindu
mahasabha member - the "petitionists" were a mixed bag

... the Viceroy received notable support from "moderates" like Sapru who
embraced the "Dominion Status" declaration and the promise of a conference in
London, and promised that Irwin's proposal would be "welcomed by a
considerable body of public men in India." Yet Sapru's politics, and
position, were more complicated than Irwin seemed to have imagined. By late
1929, Sapru had grasped, unlike the Viceroy, the real depth of feeling Gandhi
and the Congress had created in India. He asked a colleague: "Can we honestly
deny that the Congress represents the majority political party and has got a
hold on [the] popular mind which we Liberals have not got and are not likely
to get[?]"  p.64

... the Congress resolution at Lahore for full independence and active civil
disobedience dismayed Sapru greatly, leaving his "faith in Mr. Gandhi's
leadership and clear vision ... shattered in pieces."

As ever, Irwin still viewed Indian political agitation with some skepticism:
There is no doubt that Gandhi has succeeded in exciting a considerable
movement, not because everybody agrees with his methods – which they don’t –
but because there is ... a really widespread desire for political advance,
and all this takes Gandhi's action as the articulate expression of generally
loosely felt desire. The attitude of hosts of middle people is: "Well, of
course this is the wrong way to do it, but we do want something substantial
and we don’t get it unless we are tiresome, and therefore, although we
disagree with his methods, we don’t totally disagree with the purpose of
advance that he is working to secure." It is all pretty illogical and reveals
the Indian unwillingness to pass condemnations on those who at the moment
seem to have the shouts of the crowd with them.

Sapru and Jayakar as intermediaries

... when Sapru and Jayakar approached Irwin in July 1930 for permission to
speak with the imprisoned Nehrus and Gandhi, in the hope of getting them to
attend the upcoming London conference and call off civil disobedience, the
Viceroy acquiesced. He decided that "I shall probably give them permission
and risk being cursed a bit in England, for I am sure that our game must be
to try to drive as many wedges as we can between those who are at bottom
inclined to be reasonable and those who are not, but a good many say that
Motilal would be reasonable."

Although Gandhi and the Nehrus remained opposed to calling off protest
actions and to attending a conference that promised no change for India up
front, Sapru and Jayakar had through their efforts established themselves as
intermediaries and negotiators between the Government and the Congress, a
role that allowed them access to, and gave them some influence within, the
corridors of power in India. p.80

Sapru, Jayakar and the others, including representatives of the Indian
Princes, sailed from Bombay in September [1930] for the first Round Table
Conference. Sapru was not entirely optimistic of what he might accomplish,
though, noting to Jayakar that recently in Bombay, "you and I were
immortalized together by being burnt in effigy."

... On the voyage to Britain, the representatives of the larger Indian
Princes, who feared further reforms... agreed with Sapru to seek a plan for a
federal India which would allow the Princes to retain their autonomy, and
which the gradualist Sapru saw as a necessary first step towards full
self-rule. Once in London, this group toiled throughout October 1930 to
hammer out an agreement in principle between the princely representatives and
the other Indian delegates. The proposal was announced on 10 November, the
first day of the conference.  The key elements in the plan included autonomy
for the Indian provinces, a central federal legislature that included both
provincial and princely representatives, and the reservation of certain
powers to the Viceroy.

Malcolm Hailey was also in London, acting as a conference adviser for the
India Office, and he notified Irwin that this new federal proposal might just
provide enough reform to draw Indian opinion away from the Congress:

	If the movement of the Princes can be guided on to really useful
	lines, there is something of real substance behind, because if we
	could obtain a Federal Assembly in which they were well represented,
	and in which the Viceroy would have a wide nomination in order to
	discharge his responsibilities to Parliament, then we should all of
	us be prepared to go much further in the way of responsible
	Government than we should if matters took their ordinary line in
	development of the proposals of Simon or the Government of India. As
	I suggested to a friend the other day, the proposal may possibly be
	merely a good red herring, but, if we are lucky, it may actually turn
	out to be a good fishable salmon.

To Findlater Stewart, such a concession would attract the support of naturally
grasping politicians: "The Bengali is an emotional creature with a bad inferiority
complex ... Anything which goes to persuade him that great opportunities are open
to him is all to the good."
	[Findlater Stewart to Anderson, 9 March 1932, Mss. Eur. f.207/5/2–5.]

Contents

Introduction                                                              1
1 India Interpreted and Imagined: Culture, Intelligence and
  Policy-making in the Late-Colonial State                                7
2 "The heart mesmerizes the head": Lord Irwin and the Nationalists,
  1926–1931                                                              39
3 The Problem of "Reliable Information": British-Indian Contacts
  in 1931 and 1932                                                       87
4 Watching Gandhi: Predicting Indian Political Behavior, 1933–1935      123
5 Preventing an "unholy row": Indian Reform, Commercial Policy
  and Lancashire, 1933–1935                                             153
6 "The Men Who Know": Authority, Policy and the Future of the
  Empire in the Conservative Party                                      187
7 Provinces, Princes and Predictions: The Fate of the 1935 India Act    233
Conclusion                                                              255
Bibliography                                                            261
Index                                                                   271

Origins of this text (Ph.D. thesis 1999)

This book originated in the PhD thesis work of Muldoon at the U. Washington
in 1999:

Muldoon, Andrew Robert, "Making a `moderate' India: British conservatives,
imperial culture and Indian political reform, 1924—1935", PhD, Washington
University, 1999**. Brief summary.

    This dissertation examines the making of the 1935 Government of India
    Act, using this development as a prism through which to explore several
    aspects of British, imperial and South Asian history. An investigation of
    the negotiations between British and Indian politicians leading up to the
    1935 Act reveals that British efforts to construct a plan which would
    give India greater autonomy, but still keep India firmly under British
    control, emanated not from cynical calculation, but arose out of British
    cultural assumptions and beliefs about the nature of Indian society, and
    the workings of Indian politics in particular. The persistence of these
    assumptions allowed British negotiators to believe that Indian
    nationalism, in the form of the Indian National Congress Party, was not a
    serious threat and that the majority of Indians did not desire full
    political autonomy. This work also highlights the role played by
    so-called "moderate" Indian politicians in framing the 1935 Act, and
    argues that these politicians, especially Sir Tej Bahadur Sapru, grasped
    these British assumptions about India and worked to reinforce them for
    their own gains. These "moderates" shared with Congress the goal of full
    Indian autonomy, but preferred to use legal and constitutional means to
    achieve this. Sapru and his colleagues worked publicly to encourage the
    notion that India would accept gradual political reform, but their real
    intent was to foster a steady increase in British concessions and create
    a momentum which would soon leave the British with no other options but
    to grant full autonomy or to rule by massive force. The dissertation also
    uses these events to examine the policy-making dynamics of the British
    Conservative Party and the political influence of various lobbies within
    that party, including Lancashire businessmen, financiers in the City of
    London and retired imperial civil servants. This research also provides
    some insight into the extent and depth of popular support for Empire in
    twentieth-century Britain, by exploring and analyzing the prevalence and
    character of support for Britain's imperial ventures among the members of
    the Conservative Party." The abstract.

Additional notes on Sapru and Jayakar

Jayakar obituary in the Hindu

source: obituary

Dr. Mukund Ramrao Jayakar, Liberal leader and former Vice-Chancellor of the
Poona University, died in Bombay on March 10. He was 86. The late Mr. Jayakar
was educated in Bombay and London and was enrolled as advocate of the Bombay
High Court in 1905. He was a member of the Bombay Legislative Council from
1923, and leader of the Swaraj Party.
[...]

Tej Bahadur Sapru

source: http://www.answers.com/topic/tej-bahadur-sapru

TEJ BAHADUR SAPRU was born in Aligarh into an aristocratic Kashmiri Brahmin
family living in Delhi. He attended high school in Aligarh and matriculated
at Agra College, where he took his law degree. After an apprenticeship at
Moradabad he joined the Allahabad High Court in 1898. He was knighted in 1923
for outstanding legal contributions. He set impeccable standards in his
personal and professional life and possessed a scholarly knowledge of Persian
and Urdu as well as English.

Sapru was appointed a member of the governor general's executive council and
served on the Round Table Conferences in London and on the Joint
Parliamentary Committee.

Throughout the constitutional debates Sapru played a key moderating role,
appealing at each stage to Hindu and Moslem and to Englishman and Hindu to
conciliate their differences. He sought in the process to safeguard the
rights of each communal group.

http://yabaluri.org/TRIVENI/CDWEB/SirTejBahadurSapruAPersonalGlimpsejul1932.htm

Gandhi-Irwin talks

source: indianetzone

... on 23rd of July [1930], Lord Irwin facilitated visits to Mahatma Gandhi and
Jawaharlal Nehru by two Indian Liberals, Sir Tej Bahadur Sapru and Mukund
Ramrao Jayakar, for the purpose of finding ways to end civil disobedience
movement and to elicit Congress Party participation at a Round Table
Conference in London. On 25th of January 1931, Lord Irwin authorised Gandhi's
release from prison and withdrew prohibition of illegality against the
Congress Working Committee. He hoped that through a personal request to
Gandhi that progress could be made.

Between the period of 16th of February to 4th of March 1931, Lord Irwin and
Gandhi met in a series of talks seeking settlement of the issues originating
from the civil disobedience movement. In the agreement reached on 5th of
March, Gandhi agreed to discontinue civil disobedience as it embraced
defiance of the law, non-payment of land revenue, publication of news-sheets,
termination of its boycott of British goods and the restraint of aggressive
picketing.

--The liberal party (wikipedia)-
The Liberal Party of India was a political organization espousing
liberal, pro-British points of view in the politics of India under the
British Raj.

The Liberals at various points backed British rule in India, and virtually
never supported India's exit from the British Empire. These stances rotated
around the idea that Indians must petition and conduct a dialogue with the
British to obtain more self-government and political freedoms. They also
espoused the British system of education and cultural influences on Indian
life.

History and organization

Although initially members of the Indian National Congress which had been
formed to create a mature political dialogue with the British government,
liberal Indians left the Congress with the rise of Indian nationalism, and
leaders like Bipin Chandra Pal, Lala Lajpat Rai and Bal Gangadhar Tilak.

The Liberal party was formed about 1910, and British intellectuals and
British officials were often participating members of its committees. Its
most prominent leaders were Tej Bahadur Sapru, V. S. Srinivasa Sastri and
M. R. Jayakar.

Politics

The Liberal Party opposed Mahatma Gandhi and the Non-Cooperation Movement
(1919-1922), the Salt Satyagraha (1930-31), and the Quit India Movement
(1942-1945).

Liberals also participated in the legislative councils and assemblies at the
town, provincial and central levels. Up till the Government of India Act
1935, most Indians and the Congress Party rejected the councils and hardly
voted. They were seen as rubber stamps of the viceroy, and stacked with
un-elected British officials, pro-British princes and members of religious
minorities represented beyond reasonable proportions. Up till 1935's
legislation, only a few seats were up for popular election.




 
This statue of John Lawrence on the Calcutta Maidan bore the slogan:
"The British conquered India by the sword and they will hold it by the sword."

Role of Liberals in Freedom Struggle : Need for re-evaluation?-

from |A neglected hero by A.G. Noorani in Frontline, Aug 2012

The main thrust of Noorani's argument is that iberals like Sapru and
Jayakar played a more important role in the Indian freedom struggle than
is generally acknowledged by Congress-affiliated historians.
Particularly, he highlights their role In getting the British to move from
a policy of conquest by the sword, to one of paternal rule, since the
"Indians were incapable of ruling themselves".

Perhaps this argument forgets the possibly of a much larger influence of the
liberal forces unleashed in the world of the time, particularly by American
and other forces.   During the debate on Dyer in the House of Commons,
(1920), Secretary of state for India, Edwin Samuel Montagu, uses the word
"terrorism" to refer to the rule of the sword:

	Once you have regard neither to the intentions nor to the conduct of
	a particular gathering, and shoot and to go on shooting, with all
	the horrors that were here involved, in order to teach somebody else
	a lesson, you are embarking upon terrorism, to which there is no
	end. I say.

	This is the question which the Committee [to ask] to-day before
	coming to an answer.

	Are you going to keep your hold upon India by terrorism, racial
	humiliation and subordination, or are you going to rest it upon the
	goodwill, and the growing goodwill, of the people of your Indian
	Empire?

later, he states:

	The great objection to terrorism, the great objection to the rule of
	force, is that.. having once tried it you must go on. Every time an
	incident happens you are confronted with the increasing animosity of
	the people who suffer, and there is no end to it until the people in
	whose name we are governing India, the people of this country, and
	the national pride and sentiment of the Indian people rise together
	in protest and terminate your rule in India as being impossible on
	modern ideas of what an Empire means.

These "modern ideas of what an Empire means" are perhaps what obtained these
changes in India.  Surely they were helped by the petitions and other
liberal arguments, but they were also precipitated by the protests, both
peaceful and violent, arising from across India.
		- from Debates, House of Commons, July 8, 1920

Though extremely opinionated in his style, Noorani paints a favourable
picture of the liberals, including Sir Chimanlal Setalvad (member, Hunter
Commission that investigated on Jallianwala Bagh).  He feels that these
leaders were ignored after independence since they had "refused to pray at
the shrine of the Congress".

Some of the points he makes remain valid in India today, such as
the initiation of the anti-democratic "Congress High Command", which started
after the Act of 1935 was implemented:

	The Congress Ministries that were formed in 1937 did not play by the
	rules of the parliamentary system. That was when the concept of the
	“Congress High Command” came into being. It was to it, and only
	formally to the Assemblies, that the Ministers were accountable. Are
	you surprised that even in 2012 it is the High Command that decides
	(a) who shall be Chief Minister of a State (b) the strength of the
	Cabinet (c) the composition of the Cabinet (d) the resignation of
	Ministers and (e) the dissolution of Assemblies?

	All other parties follow this pernicious and unconstitutional
	practice, especially the Bharatiya Janata Party...  Read the
	correspondence between Gandhi and Nehru in 1937 on whether
	Purshottam Das Tandon should resign from the Congress on his
	election as Speaker of the U.P. Assembly. Both vehemently rejected
	the idea.

	For different reasons both had contempt for the norms of
	parliamentary government. To Gandhi it was of British origin, not a
	swadeshi product suitable for Hind Swaraj. Nehru, the socialist,
	transferred his dislike of the liberals to the parliamentary system
	by which they swore. He swore at both. Their fans rewrote modern
	India’s history, and state-supported institutions, academies,
	universities and the rest revel in the halo of the Gandhi-Nehru
	consensus.

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