AN INDIAN REFORMER

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXX, Issue 21457, 3 April 1933, Page 8

AN INDIAN REFORMER

Much has happened since the days when Lord Chelmsford, who has just died, shaped, in collaboration with Mr. E. S. Montagu, the reforms which set India on the road to the ultimate goal of self-government. It is just 15 years this month since the Montagu-Chelmsford report was signed. A year earlier Mr. Montagu had made in the House of Commons what the report described as "the most momentous utterance ever made in India's chequered career." The Simon Commission, quoting it in 1930, said "this claim is justified." It is not that no previous advances had been made toward giving the Indian people some shar.e in shaping their own destinies. A beginning had been made in 1861, when responsibility was transferred from the East India Company to the Crown. Few things were done, and most of them small, until the considerable advance represented by the Morley-Minto reforms of 1909 was made. The real step forward came in the Montagu announcement of 1917, with its declaration of a policy for "the increasing association of Indians in every branch of the administration and the gradual development of self-governing institutions with a view to the progressive realisation of responsible government in India as an integral part of the British Empire." Thus were ushered in the events which have followed up to the immediate present, when the task of shaping actual legislation to embody a further substantial measure of self-gov-ernment, including a federal constitution, is before the House of Commons. Lord Chelmsford's work was done long before. With Mr. Montagu he shaped the report on which "the Government of India Act, 1919, was based. He carried the heavy burden resting on the Viceroy during the troubled years from 1918 to 1921. Then he made way for another while the reforms were actually instituted. Whatever the ultimate verdict on the course being followed in India, Lord Chelmsford's name is indissolubly associated with the country's history through the Montagu-Chelmsford report.