THE New Zealand Herald AND DAILY SOUTHERN CROSS SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 24, 1934 A FEDERATED INDIA

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXI, Issue 21966, 24 November 1934, Page 12

THE New Zealand Herald AND DAILY SOUTHERN CROSS SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 24, 1934 A FEDERATED INDIA

The; new proposals for investing India with a Constitution that will givet the greatest amount of selfgovernment. it is considered possible to grant, at present, in important details from various schemes that had been produced previously. It had to be so, of course, for a system of government that will be work--1 able, and also acceptable to the Indian people, has had to be hammered out over a considerable period of years. Yet in its central principle, that of a federation, it retains the most definite recommendation made by the Statutory Commission. Even that body did not claim to be original in advancing this principle as the way out of the many difficulties of finding a method of self-government. In the crucial passage of its finding on this aspect of the problem, it quoted the pronouncement of the MontaguChelmsford Report on the same point. This document, enlarging on the declaration that ultimate autonomy must be the goal of Indian policy, proceeded : —"We cannot, at' the present time, envisage its complete fulfilment in any form other than that of a congeries of selfgoverning Indian provinces associated, for certain purposes, under a responsible Government of India; wdtlii possibly what are now the Native States of India finally embodied in the same whole, in some relation which we will not now at-r tempt to define." That principle, laid down in 1917, has animated all which has been done since to extend the degree of self-government and is found embodied in the latest proposals for action. The Statutory Commission did more than declare the need for a federal system. It discussed in some detail the circumstances making it essential. The chief of these was summed up in two sentences — "There is a very definite correspondence between dimensions of area and population, and the kind of Constitution" that can be operated successfully. There have been autocratically governed States compar- ! able in size and population to India, but a democracy of nearly 250,000,000 people is unprecedented." The largest and most populous State to be governed democratically, it is added, is the United States, with less than half the " population of India: and it is a federation of 48 States. Mere size alone is not' the end of the argument. The United States has a high level of education and a common language, conditions which are entirely absent from India. By way of rounding off its argument the commission adds:—"To imagine that a constitutional structure suitable for 45,000,000 British people, mainly urban, will serve equally well for 250,000,000 Indians spread over a sub-continent and living in half a million villages is unreasonable." It can be added—and the commission duly recognised the point—that only very lately has there been any growth of national consciousness among these many millions of Indian people. When sometimes the more highly developed among them have chafed at British slowness to recognise their nationhood, or to allow it expression in full and immediate self-government, they have forgotten one of the paradoxical features of their own modern development. It has only been through the maintenance of peace by, and the even-handed administration of, tho British Raj that this Konso of nationality has been given the chance to develop to its present stage of growth. "

The obstacles in the way of realising a homogeneity resembling that of Britain's 45,000,000 are enormous. A difficulty at the very beginning iis the sharp distinction between British India and the Native States. The latter are in many instances wholly out of sympathy with British India. Their relations with Britain are, for the most part, purely by treaty, and they would fiercely resent any suggestion that they had ever been governed by an outside authority. Yet they are not necessarily linked with one another. Another complication is that there is no clear geographical division between the States and the rest of India. Territories inter-lock in many places. Some States are islands wholly surrounded

by land under direct British administration. The States could not be brought into any unitary system of government without treaty rights, diverse in character, often of very long standing, being extinguished. Further than this, there are divisions of race, language and religion which do not correspond to geographical boundaries, which spread unevenly over the States and British India. In these circumstances it would be beyond the wit of man to plan any single form of centralised government that would fit. Federation, and a loosely-knit federation at that, is the only possible device. Even it has its difficulties, because it is not possible to divide the country in any way that will produce States or provinces free from the many diversities that have already been * mentioned. Decentralisation will, however, allow of the problems being attacked on a reasonably reduced scale. The federal system will also make it possible for the Native States to be associated with the one unifying Government at the centre. That is why insistence on federation has run as a consistent thread through all the proposals for reforms in India.