BY B. PATTABHI SITARAMAYYA

For over a month, a keen controversy has been raging round the happenings in the Central Provinces. In the August issue of 1938 the Editor of the ‘Triveni' apportions his own findings and with them the appropriate share of blame to each of the parties concerned and incidentally demands that the relations between the provincial Ministers, and the Legislature on the one hand and the Parliamentary Board and the Working Committee of the Congress on the other, need a thorough examination at the hands of an impartial body. He states in a spirit of resentment that "it is becoming increasingly clear that, under the Congress regime, the Ministers and the Legislators are mere automatons, subject to the continual and irritating control of the Congress gods." "Unity of command and uniformity of policy are eminently desirable," he adds, "but the loss in initiative is too heavy a price to pay."

Then the Editor proceeds to apportion blame as between Dr. Khare, who according to him "was obviously wrong in resigning so precipitately on the eve of the Working Committee meeting. He deserved to be censured and deprived of his high office," and the Mahakoshal Ministers who again, in his view, "need not have been taken to the bosom of the Working Committee and exalted to positions which they had proved themselves unfit to hold," for, "they plotted incessantly against their immediate Chief, and when finally he resigned in disgust, they would not resign with him–an event unheard of in the history of Parliamentary Government." The Editor finally comes to the Governor and says, "they (the Mahakoshal Ministers) were rightly dismissed by the Governor. No blame can attach to him for exercising his powers, and the Working Committee was not justified in complaining about his conduct in this affair." The last remedy proposed by the Editor is that the Working Committee should have excluded all previous C. P. Ministers and advised the party to take a new leader. He concludes by saying that the correct solution was "to have recommended the formation of separate Provinces at an early date."

I venture to examine these observations though I must do so with a certain trepidation, because I cannot affect to be an ‘impartial body’ which the Editor says should undertake "a thorough examination of the relations" between the different bodies concerned. As a member of the Working Committee I belong to that body which some people hold, as the Editor says, "can do no wrong," and my examination of the case is bound to be one-sided. But as I write I recall the fact that I am one of the members of the Advisory Board of the ‘Triveni,’ and if I claim to be loyal to either body, I must be credited with an honest desire, at any rate, to examine the issues with a certain impartiality.

Let us leave all the minor issues raised in these Editorial notes, for they would really be absorbed in the major issue or issues that lie back of them. At the first sight two major issues emerge from the happenings in the C. P. Was Dr. Khare right in tendering his resignation to the Governor direct? Was the Governor correct in accepting it and dismissing the recalcitrant Ministers? Even these two so-called major issues really constitute but one issue, namely, "Is the Working Committee of the Congress a legitimate intermediary between a provincial Cabinet and the provincial Governor in the matter of the resignation of the Premier of the Province?" If we are able to clarify this issue, the minor issues pale into insignificance, if indeed they are not absorbed in the major one. Dr. Khare himself has answered this single issue when, prior to the Pachmarhi agreement, he took the matter of the three then pending resignations of his Ministers before the Working Committee in Bombay in May last. If the resignations of three of his colleagues had to be taken by Dr. Khare before the Working Committee in May last, surely in July his own resignation should have been taken before that body. But it is open to any one to say that what applies to the part need not apply to the whole, or that if what Dr. Khare has done on one occasion is a standard, what he has done on another occasion should be equally so.

Dialectics and Geometry apart, let us take note of certain facts of recent history. In the first week of July 1937 the Working Committee endorsed the plan of office acceptance, after considering the Viceroy’s declaration on the question or assurances. The situation created in respect of the political structure of India was not only piquant but also unique in the history of Parliamentary Governments in the world. There is a Central Government which is of the obsolete type, while the Provincial Governments are to be based upon the principle of Responsible Government. While the latter thus came under the new Act, the former is to continue to function under the old. This patch of a new fabric made in the rents of an old garment is a sartorial device as much to be condemned by statesmen as by tailors or housewives, as much in politics as in the Bible. Yet we had to put on these made-up habiliments. We agreed to do so. If the Constitution of a country be revised from the centre to the circumference, there would be a fundamental unity of design, structure and functions from end to end. The Central Government would be the authority, whether it is of the Unitary or of the Federal type, to co-ordinate and correlate the Provincial Governments. Such a parental body is absent in the scheme of Provincial Autonomy inaugurated in April 1937 under the Government of India Act of 1935. How then are the seven Congress Provinces to function?–How without a central factor to counsel, to co-ordinate, to correlate and if need be to control? It was thus that this extra-constitutional body came into existence as an intermediary between the petrified British bureaucracy and the nascent Indian democracy. It was at the instance of the Working Committee that provincial leaders had asked for assurances and met with a rebuff not only from Governors but from leading moderate lawyers in India. Dr. Sapru on the one side and two ex-Advocates General of Bombay–Sri Taraporewalla and Sri Bahdurji–on the other gave opposite legal opinions, and even the clinching view of Prof. A. B. Keith did not convince our Liberal leaders at the time. Yet the Viceroy met the demands of the of Congress half way for assurances to the effect that "so long as a provincial leader and his Cabinet act within the Constitution, the Governor will not use his special powers of interference or set aside the advice of his Ministers in regard to constitutional activities.

And the ministries were formed. Thus between the Provincial Cabinets and the Governors intervened the Congress whose limb the Working Committee is, and whose creations the Provincial Cabinets are. Thus it was that the Cabinets of Bihar and of the U. P. approached the Working Committee first with their offer of resignations before they tendered them to the respective Governors. Thus again was it that the Working Committee intimated to the Viceroy that the Orissa Cabinet would tender their resignation in case Mr. Dain’s appointment to the Governorship was not cancelled. Thus too was it that the C. P. resignations were first placed before the Working Committee in the month of May last by Dr. Khare himself. And thus indeed it is that the Working Committee expected and decided that Dr. Khare should have intimated his intended resignation to the Working Committee before tendering it over their heads to the Governor of the C. P.

Then we come to the next issue. Was the Govetnor not correct in accepting Dr. Khare’s resignation? If Dr. Khare was right and correct in tendering it, the inference is implicit in the circumstance that the Governor is correct and right in accepting it. If Dr. Khare was not, the Governor would not be. Plausible as this view looks, it may still be argued that Dr. Khare might be right or wrong, but that should not affect the position of the Governor who is not a limb of the Congress, but of the bureaucracy. Obviously then, those who take this view are such constitutional prudes that they must perforce be impartial in their sense of meticulousness as between even the highly exalted Indian National Congress and the much condemned Provincial Governor. The Governor, let it be remembered, is not an isolated unit, a nebulous body floating in the high heavens of the Indian Imperial firmament. He is the subordinate of the Governor-General whose Government, it has been declared officially and authoritatively, is "a subordinate branch of the British Government." When it was said by the Working Committee that the Governor of the C. P. converted night into day and with condemnable and indecent haste accepted the resignation of Dr. Khare, and dismissed the three Mahakoshal Ministers, it was not rhetoric or a figure of speech, but an actual fact, because the resignation was placed in the Governor’s hands at 11 p.m. and the reconstitution of the ministry, together with the dismissal of the three Mahakoshal Ministers, took place at 5 a.m. What happened in between, during those six fateful and historic hours? There was a ‘line clear’ telegraphic service from Nagpur to Simla, from Simla to London, and vice versa. Press telegrams could not be taken that night at Nagpur, and in an unguarded moment the news was blurted out that there was a Government ‘line clear’ message going on the whole night. The parties, therefore, to the Khare episode were the Secretary of State and the Governor-General, in addition to the Governor of the C. P. Indeed the last of these was the smallest of them all. He came anew to his office and, like a new broom, wanted to sweep extra clean, but like all new brooms he left behind a lot of thorns. The Working Committee’s reprimand should really apply, and indeed did apply, to all the three dignitaries.

Why did this trio act thus? What did they expect to gain? Let it be remembered that the British Imperialists in India were never reconciled to the elected seven in the Legislature of Madras in 1893, to the Minto-Morley Reforms of 1909, or to the Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms of 1919–much less to the Provincial Autonomy of 1935. While Civilians and Ministers are lavish in their mutual encomiums, advertising their sense of fellowship and offer of co-operation, the fact remains that the latter feel every moment the straight-jacket and splints constituted around them by the ‘Steel-Frame,’ and the former how this infant of Swaraj is fast outgrowing not only the stage of swaddling clothes and shorts and shirts but is breaking open the hoops around them. So it was that a Civilian of Madras declared that, if the Ministers wanted their assurances from the Governors, the Secretaries and the Departmental Heads wanted their assurances in turn from the Ministers. Both sides know that they are working under sufferance, and each is anxious to get rid of the other as early as possible.

One may wonder whether the Civil Services in India are not after all reconciled to Provincial Autonomy–even the little that is conceded by the Act of 1935. No, they are not; and they are out to break it as much as they were to break the Gandhi-Irwin pact. It would be of interest to recall the happenings and experiences of 1931. What happened immediately after the signing of the pact by Gandhi on the 5th March 1931? Gandhi and his Sardar Vallabhbhai advised the peasants of Bardoli and Anand Talukas to pay down their dues of Land Revenue which they had withheld during the Salt Satyagraha. Twenty lakhs of rupees was due for the current year, while there were authorized arrears of about two lakhs outstanding in the previous years–on account of bad agrarian conditions. Within a month and a half, that is before the end of May, over nineteen lakhs of current revenues were paid down, as also a lakh of the authorized arrears. Altogether, over twenty-one lakhs was paid and there was an amount of about a lakh still due. The Revenue Member of Bombay–Mr. Hudson–could not bear the sight of this. Is Gandhi the man to order withholding and to direct payment of Land Revenue? Where then is the British Government? The very magnitude of the collection, the promptness with which the lakhs poured forth, the implicit obedience to Congress orders–all these staggered the Bombay Government, and they ordered the collection of the balance, at least Rs. fifty thousand, virtually at the point of the bayonet. All the scenes and sights of the Satyagraha days and the non-payment of taxes were re-enacted with the utmost ferocity. Pots of boiling rice were knocked down, people jumped upon the jewellery of women and caught hold of it. Sand was mixed with rice and kerosene with foodstuffs. A regular state of war, with all its barbarities, was visible all round in the concerned area. And fifty thousand was collected. That was the sequel of the Gandhi-Irwin pact. That was why Gandhi refused in July to go to London for the 2nd Round Table Conference. But the Labour Government asked Lord Willingdon peremptorily to bundle him up into a steamer and send him over to Dover. So an enquiry was agreed to by the Government, and Gandhi left for London. The enquiry failed, Government would not produce the circulars they had sent to the village officers, and Bhulabhai and Vallabhbhai withdrew from the enquiry.

This is a chapter of recent history but is apt to be forgotten. It has been recalled in order to show that a pact between Gandhi and the Viceroy was undone by the Hudsons and the Hotsons, and the Wilsons and the Emersons then. The pact–Gandhi calls it a ‘gentlemen’s agreement’–entered into between the Congress and the Viceroy is now being once again set at nought by little great men like the Governor of the C. P. He knew that Provincial Autonomy was being worked under the direct authority of the Congress, indeed that it became possible to work it only as the result of prolonged negotiations between the Viceroy and the Congress, and as a gentleman the Governor owed it to himself not to take an ignoble advantage of the weakness of a Chief Minister to efface the Congress from the C. P. by exercising his special powers and dismissing three of the Ministers. It is not the act of dismissal, or the persons dismissed, that matters, but it is the act of upsetting an agreement which has been uniformly attempted by the Governors of the U. P. and of Bihar, then by the Secretary of State in regard to the Governor of Orissa, and now by the Governor of the C. P. Put all these things together and say whether two and two do not make four! When the Governor had planned this noose, poor Dr. Khare put his neck into it. That is why he is blamed, blamed for hurrying up to the Governor and avoiding the Working Committee in order to give the Governor a tactical or strategic advantage in the great moral and intellectual fight now going on between Britain and India. Supposing we lost first the U. P., then Bihar, next Orissa and now the C. P., what would have remained to us? This is the reason for censuring the Governor of the C. P., which means really a censure of the whole British Government.

Now let us proceed to a rapid review of the minor issues. Why was not the whole old ministry scrapped? Supposing the Working Committee did it, would not the very critics have asked the plain question with upraised hands in a spirit of horror, "Oh, where is the Congress Legislature party? Who is the Working Committee to taboo a whole lot of ministers?" Indeed it is not unknown to the public that an earnest attempt was made, not by the Working Committee but by certain members of the C. P. Legislature party who shared this view, that a new leader should be found, and Sri Krishna Jaju of Wardha was ferreted out of his Khaddar hole, seized and taken dast-o-pa-bast¹ to Mahatma Gandhi who would place no embargo upon his accepting the leadership if he felt like it. When did Mahatmaji speak or act otherwise? But Sri Krishna Jajujee declined the offer with thanks. The Congress Legislature party was left free to select its own leader, and by forty-seven against twelve they selected Mr. Shukla. That is the long and short of the story. The criticism under review has taken for granted that the Mahakoshal Ministers were plotting against Dr. Khare, but today they offer their resignations if Dr. Khare proves his charges before an independent tribunal appointed by the Congress High Command.

The Editor, ‘Triveni,’ jeeringly says that there are people who believe that "the Working Committee can do no wrong." If there are any such people in the country, so much the worse for them as well as for the Working Committee. The Committee’s decision is subject to appeal before the A.I.C.C., and it is an obvious error to say that the Working Committee is not subject to control.

The relations between the various bodies have to be examined, says the critic, by an impartial body. They have indeed been reviewed carefully. The Parliamentary Board is exercising a watchfull care over the happenings in the Provinces. Take Sheriff’s case. Did it require review or not? Who is to review it? Would you go to the Government of India? No, nor to the Secretary of State who would not even look at it. Where then should the aggrieved go for redress? Where should the people of Chirala go for a review of the G. O. on the Chirala shooting? To the Parliamentary Board and the Sub-Committee. To whom should the Sindh legislators apply for a decision as to whether a coalition Ministry should or should not be allowed? To the Parliamentary Committee. Whom should Bengal and Assam approach under like conditions? The Working Committee, with the Parliamentary Board as its Sub-Committee, is seized of the jurisdiction in respect of all these cases. The relations are fairly well demarcated. It is the initial error in judging the Khare episode that has caused this obvious aspect to be raised as an issue.

To say that under Congress regime the Ministers are becoming automatons is to speak what is obviously incorrect. To say further that they are deprived of all initiative is to ignore facts. The Madras Government was not an automaton when it prosecuted Sri Batliwallah under Sec. 124-A, or when it has un-earthed from the debris of forgotten statutes the Criminal Law Amendment Act. The Madras Government was not deprived of its initiative when it inaugurated Prohibition in one district and extended it to two others, or when it proposed a moratorium ordinance first, then a Bill, then took it back and replaced it by a Debt Relief Bill which has become both an example and a warning to several other Provinces. The Madras Government is not a stuffed mummy or a wooden piece raising its hand to order under the pressing of a button, when it is restoring 238 village officers of the Civil Disobedience era to their offices, nor is the Bombay Government such when it has restored the pension of a Deputy Collector, who was dismissed during the movement, and the mansabs of several mansabdars similarly circumstanced. The U.P. Government has inaugurated a rural reconstruction scheme, employing some 1200 Congressmen in it. That is a proof of independent initiative. The Tenancy Bills of Orissa and Bihar, the revision of Jail rules in several Provinces, the large scale releases of ordinary prisoners, the retrenchment of salaries, –all these are not acts of inertia but of initiative. Surely the Editor, ‘Triveni,’ knows these better, but anger has for the moment obscured memory.

The final issue raised by the learned Editor is a correct one. Mahakoshal and Maharashtra differ as much in temperament as Maharashtra and Gujarat, or as Tamil and Telugu. The real remedy is to separate Mahakoshal and tack it on to the U. P. or some Hindi speaking area and make it a separate Province. Its genius is quite different from that of Maharashtra. The latter is an important language-area of India, which still remembers with legitimate pride how its people were the last ruling race. Some people blame them the more for losing the country to the foreigner. Be that as it may, the Maharashtras of Nagpur (5 districts) Berar (4 or S districts) and of Bombay (11 districts) ought all to be grouped together, and the fiery and inspiring spirit of Maharashtra must be given a chance of independent initiative in working out the political problems of India. Indeed this aspect was not absent from the minds of the leaders of thought, though the immediate formation of a separate Province is not as yet favoured in certain quarters. It is to be sincerely hoped that this suggestion in the notes of the ‘Triveni’ will attract the wide attention it deserves, for, by implementing it peace, harmony and goodwill will be established not only in the C. P. but in all the mixed Provinces where similar antagonisms are possible but are wisely kept under restraint.

Today, in effect, the Congress is running a parallel Government, not merely working an Act of the British Parliament. And to raise questions of constitutional proprieties, based on the analogy of the democracies of the world, is to misconceive the situation. When we say we combat the Act, this is what we mean–namely, that we are determined not to work the Act according to the Britishers’ will, but to make the Act work according to the national will, as expressed through and by the Congress. The loyalties of our Ministers are therefore primarily due to the Congress and only secondarily to the law and custom of the Constitution, and last to the requirements of the Act.