FUTURE OF INDIA

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXIV, Issue 22723, 8 May 1937, Page 14

FUTURE OF INDIA

GOVEBNOKS' POWERS ATTITUDE OF CONGRESS ACT NOT UNDERSTOOD By TeiezTaph—Press Association —Copyright (Received May V, 6~> p.m.) British Wireless RUGBIt, May 6 Before the House of Lords adjourned for the Whitsun recess the Marquess of Zetland, Secretary of State for India, made another important statement on the working of the Government of India Act. He alluded to the suggestion that a conversation between the Viceroy and Gandhi might dispose of the misunderstanding which appears to have arisen. Lord Zetland said that hope seemed to rest on the assumption that a short and simple formula could be found, alternative to Gandhi's own, to express the manner in which a Governor would exercise reserved powers. However, if such a formula could have been attained it would have been embodied in the Act. It appeared to him that in some quarters a great deal more had been read into the part of the Act which imposed certain obligations on a Governor than it contained.

The Indian National Congress, for example, had declared that the past record and the present attitude of the British Government showed that without special assurances a popular Ministry would be exposed to constant and irritating interference. That idea betrayed' a very different picture of the working of provincial autonomy from the one Lord Zetland had formed as aj- member both of the Round Table Conferences and the Joint Select Committee.

There was no idea of a field of government divided into two parts, in which a Governor and a Ministry would operate separately, with the risk of a clash between them. Reserved powers would not normally be in operation at all, and if they ever came into question it would be wrong to assume that a Governor would at once be in open opposition to the Ministry. Certainly it was not the intention that Governors, by a narrow and legalist!? interpretation of their responsibilities, should trench upon the wide powers which it was the purpose of Parliament to place in the hands of the Ministries for use in furtherance of their programmes.