1 The right to collect customs and land revenue, and the duty of the financial administration and civil government of the province of Bengal.

2 I quote from the admirable standard work by Keith, A. Berriedale, A Constitutional History of India 1600–1935. (London, 1936), p. 70.Google Scholar

3 “The Governor and Company of Merchants of London trading into the East Indies” had received their first charter from Queen Elizabeth in 1600.

4 See “Post-Mutiny Army Reconstruction” by Pal, Dharm in the New Review (Calcutta) of 12 1945.Google Scholar

5 In his India under Ripon (London, 1909), p. 312.Google Scholar

6 Lord Minto was viceroy from 1906 to 1909.

7 Thus explicitly Morley in trie House of Lords, Dec. 17, 1905.

8 Keith, , l. c., p. 229.Google Scholar

9 Minto, Lady, India, Minto and Morley (London, 1934), p. 47.Google Scholar

10 Hansard, 1552.

11 Jaffe, , New Frontiers in Asia (New York, 1945), p. 39.Google Scholar Jaffe's own figures (p. 98) show that British imports into India represented in 1913–4 64% of the total, but only 30% in 1937–8, whilst British exports to India constituted 15% of her total exports in 1913 and only 7% in 1938.

12 Chintamani, C. Y., one of the Ministers under dyarchy, as quoted in Zacharias, Renascent India. (London, 1933), p. 218.Google Scholar

13 DrMacmcol, Nicol in his recent book C. F. Andrews: Friend of India (London, 1945, p, 48)Google Scholar similarly contrasts “Tagore, who was an internationalist and a humanist, with Gandhi who is a nationalist and confines his attention to the land of his birth.”

14 “I desired to test in India the extent to which might be possible the application of the method I had tried in South Africa.” (Gandhi, M. K., My experiments with Truth (Ahmedabad, 1927), II, 335.Google Scholar)

15 States, where government as good as in British India obtained, could until quite recently be counted on the fingers of one hand: Mysore, Travancore, Cochin, Baroda and the minuscule Aundh.

16 Cf. India Today of January 1946. As regards the mediatizing of small States, this policy has been officially sponsored since 1943. See the Communiqué issued by the Political Dept. on April 16 of that year (quoted by SirCoupland, Reginald in his The Indian Problem (New York. 1944), III, 205).Google Scholar

17 Cf. Indian Information of January, 1946.

18 In his “Report on Indian Constitutional Reforms,” published in 1918 as a Parliamentary Paper (Cd. 9109).

19 Prof. Keith (l. c, p. 243) comments that “if quite unintelligibly Curzon did not realize that responsible government meant parliamentary democracy, his ignorance was surprising.”

20 The Skeen Committee (so called efter the Chief of Staff of the Indian Army who presided) on the Indianization of the Army, published a report in 1927 putting forward a plan under which one half of the Indian Army could be completely Indianized in 25 years. Lord Birkenhead vetoed it on the plea that military efficiency and morale would suffer, if British officers had to serve under Indian superiors. Against this I quote Sir Mosley Mayne's, K.C.B., C.B.E., D.S.O., address to the Royal United Service Institution, London (from the official Indian Information of June 1, 1945): “Gen. Mayne said that no battalion could have dene better at Gallabat, Keren, Amba Alagi and, later in the Desert. In that battalion or in others, he had seen a Sikh commanding P.M.'s, a Parsi commanding Sikhs, a Rajput commanding Mahrattas. Contrary to the foreboding of many of them, it worked. The modern unsophisticated Indian soldier would obey and follow any officer, British or Indian, provided he was just, impartial and professionally efficient. Again, British officers and other ranks were serving in regiments, in battalions, in batteries and in almost every type of unit under the command or leadership of K.C.I.O.'s and I.C.D.'s. It was aoflfing well.” In similar strain Sir Homi Mehta on his visit to the Italian front said: “There is not much room left for grousing, and amenities available for the British tommy and Dominion troops are equally shared by Indian troops. This results in a very desirable fraternisation among them.” ibid. Aug. 1, 1945). Of the 27 “Victoria Crosses” (highest award for gallantry in the British Empire) awarded in the Burma Campaign 20 went to Indians, although until 1914 this most enviable order had been reserved for whites. Altogether the Indian army during World War II gained 4028 awards for gallantry, including 31 Victoria Crosses—the while the Congress Party referred to it habitually as “mercenaries” and “vice-soldiers.”

21 Of the Congress governments in the Provinces, which had become self-governing under the 1935 Acts (see infra) and which administered “Law and Order,” Coupland says: “They can be said to have stood the test” (II, 135) and “in the Punjab, as in Bengal, the Government has unquestionably proved its capacity to maintain law and order in a Province, in which the task is particularly difficult.” (II, 52).

22 During his stay in England Gandhi was taken by friends for a visit to Lancashire, to see for himself the havoc his foreign cloth boycott had wrought there. The dignified, almost friendly, attitude towards him of these ruined mill-workers, the sense of fairness and sympathy for Indian emancipation which they displayed in receiving in their midst the chief author of their unemployment and miseries, constitute a standing monument to the true temper of the English people, a temper not easily matched elsewhere.

23 Notorious for the “Hoare-Laval Pact,” which he concluded in his subsequent capacity as Foreign Secretary and which was to have presented Abyssinia on a platter to Mussolini.

24 Coupland, , l. c., II, 8.Google Scholar

25 Keith, (l. c., p. 338Google Scholar) sums up on this point that “there is no reason to suppose that the difficulties of dyarchy will not be repeated. The composition of the legislature is adapted to render very difficult an effective ministry in view of the great authority vested in the governor-general. The exclusion of the ministry's control from the mosl important expenditure, defense, may well prove that responsibility cannot be established effectively.”

26 Cf. Coupland, II, 20.

27 In Foreign Affairs, New York, 01, 1938.Google Scholar

28 l. c., II, 156.Google Scholar

29 Ironically enough, the only really outrageous case was that of a Moslem-Congress Minister of Law in the Central Provinces, who ordered the release of a Moslem school-inspector, convicted of the rape of a small Hindu girl.

30 Coupland, , II, 196.Google Scholar

31 Cf. his The Millat and the Mission (Cambridge, 1942)Google Scholar and Ahmad's, Khan A.The Founder of Pakistan (Cambridge, 1942).Google Scholar

32 Coupland, , II, 214.Google Scholar

33 Ibid., II, 239.

34 For the full wording see India's Right to Freedom, a pamphlet put out by the British Information Services, New York, in 1944.Google Scholar

35 Quoted by Jaffe, l.c., p. 104. For the intense hatred of Britain expressed on all sides at the time, see SirWrench, Evelyn: Immortal Years 1937–1944 (London, 1945).Google Scholar

36 Coupland, , II, 279.Google Scholar

37 See Life (New York), 01 28, 1946.Google Scholar

38 Subhas Chandra Bose, member of the I.C.S., at the advent of Gandhi, was chief officer of the Calcutta Municipality. Interned from 1923 to 1926, he was with Jawaharlal Nehru co-founder in 1928 of the “Independence” Movement (Purna Swaraj). Congress President in 1938, he was heading in Congress a “Forward Bloc,” which strove to renounce Gandhi's “non-violence” and take to direct action, by means of a “Congress Army” he intended to create. In 1939 Gandhi forced him to resign his Congress membership; in 1940 he was arrested, but soon managed to escape and make his way to Berlin. In 1943 he was flown to Tokyo to constitute a quisling government of “Free India.” After V.J. Day he was reported to have been killed in a plane crash, but Gandhi still believes that “he is alive and awaiting a propitious time to reappear” (according to an A.P. message from Delhi of Jan. 5, 1946).

39 For a description of the Japanese technique of forming in Hong Kong, the Philippines, etc. “India Independence Leagues,” see Ward, R. S.: Asia for the Asiatics. Chicago, 1945, pp. 179 ff.Google Scholar

40 Coupland, , II, 289.Google Scholar

41 Ibid., II, 290.

42 Ibid., II, 293.

43 Ibid., II, 292.

44 Ibid., II, 297.

45 Yardumian, Rose in Far Eastern Survey of 06 6, 1945Google Scholar gives a good résumé of the agrarian agitation in India, under the title “Record of the Kisan Sabha,” in which latter body Communist influence seems now to preponderate.

46 L. c., pp. 63 and 24.Google Scholar One wonders what alternative method was in this author's mind, that any government—American, yea even Russian—could or would have employed in such circumstances.

47 For a résumé of this “Simla Conference” see Farley, Miriam S. in the Far Eastern Survey of 08 15, 1945.Google Scholar That the Coalition Government's declarations and intentions were genuine, was not only due to Labour pressure in its ranks, but also to the outstanding economic fact that during the War India had changed from a debtor to a creditor nation. By March 31, 1945, India had accumulated a credit balance of no less than £1,030,000,000, a sum which dwarfs all British investments in India. The British vested economic interests, which used to form the backbone of Conservative opposition to Indian self-determination, have therefore become one of the casualties of the war least to be lamented.

48 Cf. India Today, December, 1945.