[All Rights Reserved.] INDIA. INDIAN ADMINISTRATION.

Otago Witness, Issue 2809, 15 January 1908, Page 89

[All Rights Reserved.] INDIA. INDIAN ADMINISTRATION.

•BY THE RIGHT HON. SIR CHARLES W. DELKE, BART, .M.P.

The request to me to write once more on India proceeds no doubt from the attention freshly called to the problems of Indian administration, both civil and military. The army problems can be treated ■wifcn more confidence and in more definite fashion than can those of government. India is far more a single country from the military than it can ever be from the political point of view. All of u« who Save sketched as travellers, and all who have considered as students, the Indian Empire, begin by the explanation still needed both by the bureaucracy and by the general public that India is a continent. The Great Peninsula is, indeed, inhabited, not by a nation, but by people differing more sharply, in almost every possible fashion, than, do any two European peoples. It has continually been shown, beyond .'the possibility of contradiction, but is never enough in the mind of the Government at Calcutta, or at Simla, or at the India Office, that " India " is still unknown to the overwhelming majority of the Indian population. The Government ifi a tangible though mysterious entity to all of them. That Government is usually the British power, represented by the KingEmpsror, the Viceroy, the Commander-in-Chief, the District Commissioner, or the native policeman. In some of the most considerable native States " the Government " is«9 the prince who, for secondary purposes, is the actual ruler. Great as always has been my personal sympathy for the new " India," created, since Macaulay's prophecy, by our own rule, its absence of real hold over the vast majority of the population remains as conspicuous to myself as it does to officials from whom in Jnany matters I sharply differ.

THE CAUSE OF UNREST.

The tendency to the simplification of Government, by the adoption of common institutions, the introduction of common Teforms, and the creation of a code, inclusive of many principles both of Hindoo and of Mohammedan law, has commended itself through long ages, first to the chief advisers to the company before 1857, and, since the assumption of direct rule by .the British Crown in 1858, with increasing .strength to the bureaucracy. "The un--Test," caused by the production of highly trained barristers and others fully compe--tent for official life, among the town-dwell-ing natives, to whom no sufficient career is offered, aggravated by the Cslcutta agitation against the partition of Bengal, and inflamed by a small but conspicuous portion of the Home and Indian press, may in the long run do good rather than harm, if it promotes decentralisation of the riierht kind. It is understood that H.R.H. the "Prince of Wales was struck during his official tour in India by the need for improvement in the' somewhat foolish conditions which still prevail in our relations with the native courts under our protection or control. All the correspondents, many of them men of high intellieence, who wrote hooks on India in connection with the last Royal visit, whatever may be the completion of the papers which they represented or the Horn« party to which they are attached, wrote in the same sense of impatience at many of the official methods of the civilian bureaucracy of India. All recommended that decentralisation and that varied treatment of different portions of an empire in itself infinitely various which, in 1867, when I paid the first of t-hree visits to Indiar, and wrote " Greater Britain," were my dream. The decentralisation proposed by John Bright was -of a different kind, and is that which, it may be feared, is favoured hy those responsible for the reforms to be introduced into the Government of India. It is not that /which was in my view just now in using the phrase "decentralisation of the right kind." DM -i MORLEY'S PROPOSED REFORMS. * The words of Mr John Morley in his great speech, of last .session painted to *' Indian Decentralisation," introduction of a more liberal evstem into " the Legislative Councils" of th* highly-artificial "Pro■vinces" of India, and recognition of the "voice of the native princes and of native statesmen in the 'ge.neral affairs of the Indian Empire. The inquiry by the Royal Commission into general decentralisation in India ought to be as wide as possible. If the " reforms " to be introduced into the provincial system are, as it would seem, -already decided in the despatches from !Mr Morley in Council to the Viceroy in Council, and from the latter in reply, it -is difficult to &c» how the Royal Commission can be kept from confinement to mere detail, such as ought not. to need so conspicuous an inquiry. The position of the princes, again, is a thing apart, and might be dealt with either by the Viceroy and Secretary of State and their two councils gradually, or on the basis of suggestions by the Royal Commission sent out from Some, were it allowed to deal with the matter. Its advice upon this would be "valuable. The decentralisation which was in my view in 1867 and in 1890* included "the subject of the position to be occupied by tho native states, varyinsr, as it should, from one ai high responsibility to one more narrow. It also included the consideration of the popular element in government, which might run from a representative system in some great cities down to an. improved provincial, • district, and village system in more primitive portions of the vast agricultural area of British India. The improved councils of Mr Morley' s scheme under discussion with Calcutta are equivalent to Mr Bright'^ decentralisation, now adopted by the bureaucracy, and not based upon vigorous loot in India. No one outside the bureaucracy knows much about the pro-

"Problems of Greater BjitauV TTol. 104-114

vinces. The Punjab, indeed, has a great and ancient history ; but its boundaries have varied infinitely and been aften changed. Lord Curzon, with general approval, took parts of it to form his new North-west Frontier Province. Upper Burma and Lower Burma have a certain, but a modern, history. Assam and Bengal have been cut about in very recent times ; and the North-west Provinces, long conspicuous in the list, have disappeared and been replaced by new divisions. Bombay and Madras are well-known names, but have not always, nor long, meant respectively the same things. All our Provincoa, in a word, are the creation — and many of them the mushroom creation — of our own offices, as " India " itself is also our o\rn creation. India, indeed, has its one bond, under the Crown and VioeToy, in the Code — our chief work, and, with our irrigation system, the best monument of our rule. The Code is the most indivisible of Indian institutions ; for the retention of separate governments in Madras and Bombay renders the rule of the Viceroy in Council itself less noticeable in those great divisions of India than in the ordinary Provinces, each ruled by a Lieutenant-governor taken from the ranks of the civil service.

WHAT INDIA ASKS FOR

The Indian reformers represented by the National Congress movement are not all interested on the side of a complete decentralisation, and are, perhaps, inclined to make common cause with reforming elements in the bureaucracy on behalf of liberalised provincial institutions, acceptable to native barristers and the native press, for many of the same reasons which commend them to those of modern ideas among our civil servants. None of the Indian reformers ask for parliamentary institutions. The principle of elective institutions is already in existence throughout British India, though the application of the principle is only tentative as yet. The Indian decentralisation, therefore, which is in view in the terms of the reference to the Royal Commission is rather decentralisation on the lines suggested by John Bright than the more historical decentralisation to which I personally incline. In articles dealing with the native States, which appeared in the United Service Magazine for April, June, and September of the present year, Colonel Grey gave some support to the views of Lord Lytton in favour of improving the standing of the native princes. Mx Morley, probably with wisdom, has endorsed the "utter failure" of Lord Juytton's definite proposals. We may, however, agree with Colonel Grey that, on the whole, the administration of native States is more congenial to the majority of the Indian people than is our own ; .and that, while there are large parts of India which can never be included in the territory of native States, there are other parts, at«least of the Punjab and central tableland, where policy may point to an enlargement of the boundaries of princely dominions.