A Nation in Making/Chapter 12

12

My Legislative Council Work

The Legislative Councils were reformed and expanded by the Parliamentary Statute of 1892, and the reformed Councils met for the first time in 1893. The Regulations framed by the Government under the Statute of 1892 were much less drastic than those under the subsequent Statute of 1909, when the Councils were still further expanded and liberalized. The elective principle having been definitely recognized and larger powers having been conferred upon non-official members, the Government assumed authority to interfere with the elections. Dismissed servants of Government and persons bound down for good behaviour under section 110 of the Indian Criminal Procedure Code were disqualified; and, above all, Government assumed a general power of declaring a person disqualified whose election would, in the opinion of the Governor or the Governor-General, be contrary to the public interest. It was not indeed necessary to reserve these powers in 1893, for the Government was the final authority in accepting or rejecting an election made by a constituency.

It has been, I fear, a traditional policy with the Government, when making a concession to popular demands, to fence it round with safeguards, promoted by a spirit of caution and sometimes in excess of what may be deemed necessary by the exigencies of the case. In the old days before the Councils were reformed, official members were permitted considerable freedom of action to vote as they thought fit; and the annals of the Bengal Legislative Council bear testimony to the fact that the President of the Council, the Lieutenant-Governor of the province, was defeated by the voice and vote of the Council, a majority of whom were officials, when, in the course of the debate in connexion with what became the Calcutta Municipal Act of 1876, he supported the motion for three-fourths of the members of the Corporation being elected. A remnant of that freedom still lingered when the Councils were reconstituted in 1893, and I remember my lamented friend, Mr. R. C. Dutt, then Commissioner of the Burdwan ​Division, who was for some time a member of the Bengal Legislative Council, and Mr. Cotton, Chief Secretary, voting against the Government. But all that is now a matter of the past. The official members must vote with the Government, unless released by the authority of the President. The only occasion within my recent experience when this order of relaxation was given was in connexion with the debate on the resolution I moved in the Imperial Legisla- tive Council regarding the Chancellorship of the Calcutta Univer- sity. On that occasion every official member was allowed to speak and vote as he thought fit; and, I may add, the fullest advantage was taken of the privilege.

There was another point in which the Regulations under the Statute of 1892 compared favourably with those of 1909. No special electorates, representing class or commercial interests, were created. The constituencies were the district boards and the municipalities, the former representing rural, and the latter urban, interests. The middle class received the measure of prominence to which they were entitled, but this was taken away from them by the extraordinary Regulations of 1910. In 1892, although there were no separate electorates and special constituencies, no class interests. suffered. The Maharaja of Natore, the Raja of Tahirpur, Nawab Serajul Islam, the two former representing the interests of the land-holding, and the latter, those of the Mohamedan, commu- nity, found no difficulty in getting themselves returned to the Council. It is true that the Rajas and Maharajas had partly to depend upon the support of the middle class, and the Mohamedan candidates upon that of their Hindu fellow-subjects. But nobody in Bengal, so far as I know, ever made it a matter of complaint. The Hindu-Mohamedan question is of more recent date, and was accentuated, if not indeed created, by the partition of Bengal; and even to-day, notwithstanding the official acceptance of class representation, there is really no cleavage of interest between the landed aristocracy and the great middle class; and so prominent a member of the landed interest as the Maharaja of Burdwan delights to call himself a member of the educated community and to be associated with them in their public movements. Class representa- tion is the retort courteous of the bureaucracy to the middle class, who clamoured for the reform of the Councils and got it. It seriously curtailed the power which they exercised over the elections under the Statute of 1892; and the whole trend of the Regulations of ​1909 was to assign to them a back seat in the new system that was largely their creation.

The Councils having been reformed in 1892, and there being no legal bar in my way, I offered myself as a candidate for election to the Bengal Legislative Council by the Corporation of Calcutta, of which I was then a member. There were two other candidates, Babu Kalinath Mitter and Babu Joygovind Law. Babu Kalinath Mitter was the undoubted leader of the Opposition in the Corporation and the foremost representative of the rate-payers. As such, when the Calcutta Municipal Bill, which subsequently became the Municipal Act of 1888, was under consideration, he was nominated by the Government as a member of the Bengal Legislative Council, to represent the interests of the rate-payers. He performed his duties on that occasion with conspicuous zeal and ability. As a member of the Corporation (which he served from 1876 to 1899, when he resigned along with twenty-seven other municipal Commissioners) he was noted for his industry, his capacity, and his absolute candour and honesty of purpose. Babu Joygovind Law, though less distinguished as a member of the Corporation, was respected by his colleagues for his quiet, business-like ways, and his genuine interest in the affairs of the Corporation. We were all friends and we fought as friends. No misrepresentation, no word uttered in anger or in malice was permitted to mar the contest or to leave an unpleasant memory behind; and, when the elections were over, we were as good friends as ever and continued to be helpful colleagues, working in close co-operation so long as we remained members of the Corporation.

What a change now from those times—what a deterioration in the public life of the province, when mendacity and malice are the weapons, offensive and defensive, employed by those who call themselves the apostles of self-government and promise Swaraj to their countrymen! Swaraj means self-restraint in the great books of the Hindu religion where the word is first used. It means, as now employed by a certain class of people, license to use the meanest of mean tricks for the furtherance of their ends. If this is what we are to have in the green, what may we not expect in the dry?

I was returned at the head of the poll, the first representative of the Calcutta Corporation to the first reformed Legislative Council. What told in my favour it is difficult to say; for Babu Kalinath Mitter was undoubtedly a more distinguished member of the ​Corporation. Possibly it was felt that my interests as a public man were wider, and that I had in part contributed to the reform and expansion of the Legislative Councils. I felt it a great honour that I should be the first representative of Calcutta, the city of my birth, in the new reformed Council, for the creation of which I had done what little I could. I applied myself to my legislative work with all the zeal that I could muster. Of that work it is not for me to speak. Good or bad, it is there in the records of the Bengal Legislative Council. All that I claim is that I did my best with the opportunities that lay before me.

After my first term of office, the Corporation again honoured me by electing me as their member. For the third and fourth terms I was returned a member of the Bengal Legislative Council, through the Presidency Division in Bengal, first by the municipalities and then by the district boards, so that I was a member of the Bengal Legislative Council for eight consecutive years, from 1893 to 1901, a period which for length of service is unique in the records of the reformed Legislative Council of Bengal.

In 1897 I was elected by the District Boards of the Presidency Division when I was away in England as a witness before the Welby Commission. It was my esteemed friend, the late Babu Ashutosh Biswas, whose tragic death we all mourned, who was mainly instru- mental in securing my return on that occasion.

In 1899, the Government intervened to find a constituency for me. Under the Regulations of 1893, the number of seats open to election being few, the constituencies (the district boards and municipalities) took part in the elections by rotation. There was no constituency by which I could be returned in 1897. The Calcutta Municipal Bill was then under discussion. I had taken a prominent part in it, in pressing for a modification of the Bill upon more liberal lines. Both the Government and the public were of opinion that my presence in the Council, while the Bill was being considered, was absolutely necessary. Sir John Woodburn, the then Lieutenant- Governor, expressed the same view. He had, under the regulations, the power of changing the order of rotation. It was now the turn of the Dacca Division to return a member. The Lieutenant- Governor, in virtue of the discretion vested in him, transferred the privilege to the Municipalities of the Presidency Division for the elections of 1897. I stood as a candidate; there was no contest, and was unanimously returned.

​The two measures of the greatest importance that came up for consideration before the Council in my time were an amendment of the Bengal Municipal Act and a complete revision of the Calcutta Municipal Act. The former was pending when the reform- ed Council was formed, the latter was introduced in 1897. They both referred to local self-government and the municipal institutions of the land, with whose practical working I was quite familiar. I had been chairman of a mofussil municipality since 1885 and a member of the Calcutta Corporation since the introduction of the elective system in 1876. In dealing with these measures I was on familiar ground and commanded a degree of experience that was very helpful to me in my legislative work. The amendment of the Bengal Municipal Bill was the work of Sir Charles Elliott, then Lieutenant- Governor of Bengal. From 1893 till his retirement I was in close touch with him. Personally our relations were friendly and even cordial. I had the amplest opportunities of knowing the man and the ruler. He came from the United Provinces and was somewhat unfamiliar with the ways and methods of the people of Bengal. But his industry was marvellous; his mastery of detail, which would have been admirable in the Collector of a district, was somewhat out of place in the ruler of a great province. His too close touch with details interfered with his clear vision of principles. Unfamiliar as he was with Bengal, he had the good sense to summon Mr. Henry Cotton to fill the office of Chief Secretary.

No member of the Bengal Civil Service enjoyed in an equal measure the confidence and esteem of the people, and the appointment was welcomed as a good augury. That the hopeful anticipations entertained were not realized was not Mr. Cotton's fault; for he had to deal with an administrator who was a typical bureaucrat. Sir Charles Elliott had a profound faith in the Civil Service and an unshaken conviction that the Government of the country by the Civil Service was the best that could have been devised by the genius of man. As a necessary corollary to this belief there was a feeling, more or less pronounced, which ran through all his measures, that the people could not be trusted to manage their own affairs. As between Indians and Englishmen, however, he made no distinction in social amenities, or in official employment. But he had an unswerving faith in the saving virtues of the Civil Service, as an all but infallible controlling agency for the admini- stration of the country. This distrust of the people and of popular institutions lay at the root of the two most prominent measures of ​his administration, namely, the Bengal Municipal Bill and the Jury Notification.

As I have observed, an amendment of the Bengal Municipal Act was pending before the Government when the Council was reconsti- tuted under the Statute of 1892. The measure was reactionary, prompted by the official distrust of municipal institutions. Once a municipality was invested with the right of electing its own chairman, the right, under the law in force, could not be withdrawn. It was now proposed under the amending Bill to vest in the Government the power of depriving a municipality of this right. Again, under the present Municipal Act, there can be no sub- division of a municipality without the consent of the Commissioners. They are the final authority in this matter. It was now proposed under the Bill to deprive them of this power and make Government the judge and arbiter in regard to these questions.

Outside the Council I had done my best to get these provisions condemned. I had protested in the Press, I had organized public meetings against them, I had personally interviewed some of the Indian members of the Council; but all in vain. At last the idea of an appeal to England occurred to me. I wrote a long letter to Mr. Allen Hume, urging my reasons and requesting him to see Lord Ripon, who was then a member of the Cabinet. Mr. Hume forwarded my letter to him. Lord Ripon wrote back to say that each member of the Cabinet was supreme in his department, but that he had sent my letter to Lord Kimberley, who was then Secretary of State for India. I heard no more about it; but it had the desired effect. Sir Charles Elliott came to the Council one morning and before opening the proceedings declared that he had received a communication from the Secretary of State on the subject of the Bengal Municipal Bill, and that what he had decided, as the result of a careful reconsideration, was in entire agreement with the views of the Secretary of State. He and the Secretary of State had agreed that the provisions to which exception had been taken should be dropped. All is well that ends well. I was in the Council listening to these obscrvations, and my feelings may well be imagined. The diplomatic conversion of the Local Government to our views was welcomed by the public; and we did not care to examine whether the Lieutenant-Governor had carried out a mandate from the Secretary of State, or had come to the same decision as the result of his own independent review of the situation. ​For the time, the interests of local self-government in the mofussil were saved.

The other measure affecting local self-government that came on for consideration while I was a member of the Bengal Legislative Council—and here I am anticipating events that took place much later—was what was known as the Mackenzie Bill. Its genesis has so often been told that I need not repeat it here. Sir Alexander Mackenzie, who succeeded Sir Charles Elliott as Lieutenant- Governor of Bengal was the author of the measure, and its scope and object were further amplified by Lord Curzon. It is an irony of fate that the Lieutenant-Governor over whose signature as Home Secretary the great Resolutions on local self-government had been issued, should have been instrumental in forgoing a deadly weapon against the institution of local self-government in the capital of British India. But perhaps as Home Secretary Sir Alexander Mackenzie was merely carrying out the orders of superior authority, and as Lieutenant-Governor he was the master of his own policy.

A successful Civil Servant has often no convictions; or, when he has any, he never allows them to interfere with his official advancement. Sir Richard Temple was the friend of local self- government in Calcutta, and to him we are indebted for the recognition of the elective system in the constitution of the Calcutta Corporation. But in England he sat on the Tory benches of the House of Commons, and conveniently forgot his liberal predilections. Sir Alexander Mackenzie had been the pupil and assistant of Sir Ashley Eden in the Bengal Secretariat, and Sir Ashley Eden had once said, in derision of representative institutions, that they were a sickly plant in their own native soil. Sir Alexander Mackenzie, in his famous speech at the opening of the Pumping Station at Palmer's Bridge, said of the Calcutta Corporation that it was an armoury of talk and an arsenal of delays. The Commissioners talked ad libitum; he wanted to curb their loquacity, to reduce their brake power and to add to the vigour of executive authority. The head of the municipal executive was to have independent powers, no longer subordinate to those of the Corporation; he was to be a co-ordinate authority, and the supremacy of the Corporation was to be emasculated. The Commissioners could talk as much as they liked; but, within his own sphere, the Chairman would act as he pleased with little or no responsibility to the Corporation. The authority of the Corporation was to be further restricted by creating a General Committee, another co-ordinate ​and independent authority. The majority of the representatives of the rate-payers in the Corporation was still maintained; but it was left for Lord Curzon, after the Bill had passed the Select Committee stage, to issue the crowning mandate that was to officialize the Corporation, directing the reduction of the elected members, and placing them numerically on the same footing as the nominated element. This, coupled with the fact that the president was an official, gave a standing majority to the official element. Thus was the officialization of the Corporation completed.

As a protest against this arbitrary action on the part of the Government of Lord Curzon, twenty-eight Commissioners, includ- ing all the men of light and leading, tendered their resignation. Sir John Woodburn, the Lieutenant-Governor, threatened to resign, but as a matter of fact held on to his office. The Bill was introduced in 1897; it was passed in 1899; and it became the law of the land on April 1, 1900.

I was a member of the Select Committee; and for three months, and from day to day, we were hard at work until we submitted our Report. The Council held daily sittings for over a fortnight to consider the report and the amendments that were moved. The sittings of the Council often extended from 11 A.M. to 5 P.M., with an interval for lunch. For many years I was a member of the Council, but I never had such hard work to go through. It reminded me of the time when I was competing for the Indian Civil Service. Often I would be at work till one o'clock at night, preparing myself for the work of the Council, which was to meet at eleven o'clock on the following day. After the work and the excitement were over, there came the reaction, and I was prostrated by an attack of brain- fever, one of the severest illnesses from which I have ever suffered. The last day of the debate, when the Bill was passed by the Council, was September 27. It was the anniversary of the death of the great Raja Ram Mohun Roy. As I was ascending the steps on my way to the Council Chamber, an invitation to attend the anniversary meeting was put into my hands. It raised in me the saddest emotions; and for the last time, in opposing the Bill, I said:

Before I leave this subject, it is only right and proper that I should say a word or two about the distinguished member of the Civil Service, Mr. E. N. (afterwards Sir Edward) Baker who was in charge of the Bill. I had known him ever since 1890, when he was Magistrate of the 24-Parganas. I was Chairman of the North Barrackpore Municipality, and we had some differences. I saw him, and our little dispute was settled in half an hour. The acquaintance thus begun ripened into a warm, personal friendship that was not marred by even acute differences of opinion. Our respect and esteem for each other was reciprocal. He was indeed a bureaucrat, but an Englishman with warm, generous and liberal sympathies. He wrote against the Jury Notification; and, as a member of the Viceroy's Executive Council, he was the life and soul of the reform movement which culminated in the Minto-Morley Scheme. He had been for many years a member of the Calcutta Corporation and was thoroughly familiar with the working of the municipal law. His sympathies were really with us, and he did not at all like the Bill; but he had to carry out orders and to get on in the Service. The Bill had originally been introduced by Sir Herbert Risley, then Municipal Secretary; but on his translation to the Government of India as Home Secretary, Mr. Baker was placed in charge of it. Throughout he was fair-minded, and consistently with his instructions was willing to make concessions to the opposition. But, of course, he could not go beyond a certain point.

Before I made my last speech in the Council, he came round to me and said, 'Surendranath, don't burn your boats', meaning that I should say nothing that would commit me to an absolute refusal to take further part or share in the work of the Corporation after it had been reconstituted under the new Act. I said, 'That is impossible'; and have remained outside the Corporation ever since September 1, 1899, when the twenty-eight Commissioners tendered their resignation. Once or twice I was pressed to reconsider my decision, by men like Narendranath Sen and Nalin Bchari Sircar; but I remained obdurate; and to me it fell by a strange irony of fate to revise the Mackenzie Act and to democratize the constitution of the Corporation.

The year 1893 witnessed what may be regarded as a notable event in our political history. On June 2, 1893, Mr. Herbert moved ​a Resolution in the House of Commons in favour of Simultaneous Examinations for the Indian Civil Services. Mr. Dadabhai Naoroji, who was then in Parliament, supported the Resolution, and it was carried. The acceptance of the Resolution by the House fell like a bombshell upon the official world here. The India Office lost no time in repudiating it. Sir Henry Fowler was at that time Secretary of State for India, the selfsame politician who declared amid the cheers of the House that every member of Parliament was a member for India, a declaration which we here in India understood to mean that what is everybody's business is nobody's business. He held that it was a snatch vote, that it did not represent the sense or judgment of the House of Commons, and that the Government was not bound by it. But there was the vote; and the Secretary of State sought to get over it by a reference to the authorities in India. The opinion of the Government of India and of the Local Governments was invited. Everybody knew what that opinion would be. With the exception of the Government of Madras, every Local Government was opposed to the vote. Nor was this the only occasion when Madras won pre-eminence by the liberality of its views. In the days of Lord Lytton, when the Vernacular Press Law was enacted, the Government of Madras under the Duke of Buckingham objected to the measure, and it was not extended to that Presidency.

When the reference was under discussion, Sir Anthony MacDonnell was officiating as Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal, Sir Charles Elliott having taken leave for six months. He sent for me, and I had a long conversation with him at 'Belvedere'. Let me reproduce, as far as I can, the substance of the conversation. Perhaps a dialogue would best represent what passed between the Lieutenant-Governor and myself.

This conversation took place in 1893. When I had an interview with Lord MacDonnell in London in 1909, he had, as it appeared to me, partly modified his views and was inclined to support simultaneous examinations. That was after the Curzon-Wyllie murder, and he was of opinion that it was unwise to encourage the steady flow of Indian students into England, and that both the examinations for calls to the Bar and for the Indian Civil Service should be held simultaneously in India as well as in England.