Government of India Act

Context

The context for the 1919 Government of India Act stretches back to the early years of the seventeenth century, when Queen Elizabeth I chartered the British East India Company and granted it perpetual trading rights in India. Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the East India Company drove out its French competitors, eclipsed its Dutch competitors, and defeated Bengalese forces that were allied with the French. When the dust settled, the East India Company had consolidated its hold on India and was the de facto ruler of some two-thirds of the nation. It carried on lucrative trade in such commodities as silk, cotton, indigo dye, tea, saltpeter, and opium, in large part by striking alliances with local rulers.

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, however, charges of corruption, bribery, and abuse were leveled against the East India Company, causing Parliament to pass legislation designed to rein in the company's activities. Despite these attempts at reform, discontent with British rule in India simmered for years. It boiled over in 1857 when the sepoys, or Indian soldiers serving under the British, revolted in what is variously called the Sepoy Mutiny (or Sepoy Rebellion), the Great Rebellion, or, among Indians, the First War of Indian Independence. Indians believed that British rule was heavy-handed. If, for example, a landowner died without a male heir, his property reverted to the British Crown. Traditional customs, such as suttee, the act of a widow's immolating herself on her dead husband's grave, were forbidden. Local rulers had been eliminated, and Indians sensed that the British wanted to westernize them and convert them to Christianity. The revolt erupted on May 10, 1857, among sepoys stationed near Bengal, and soon sepoy garrisons at several other cities, notably Delhi and Kanpur, mutinied, in some instances with the backing of civilians. Over the following year, British forces regrouped, gained control of the cities where sepoys had revolted, and reasserted the authority of the East India Company, finally quashing the revolt on June 20, 1858. The conflict was bloody, and British forces felt justified in retaliating. Entire villages were wiped out, and mutineers were put to death.

In the aftermath of the Sepoy Rebellion, Britain abolished the East India Company and made efforts to create more of a cooperative relationship with Indians. The army was restructured to include more Indians, and no efforts were made to impose Christianity on Indians or to interfere further with traditional religious beliefs and social practices. The British created a complex governmental and administrative structure that came to be called the British Raj—a Hindustani word meaning “reign.” A secretary of state for India and a Council of India oversaw the administration of the colony. India was governed by a viceroy, but other governmental officials oversaw affairs in India's various regions with the help of Indian officials who served in an advisory capacity. Additionally, a number of so-called princely states were recognized. These were smaller regions in India that remained under the rule of Indian princes, though the princes were answerable to the viceroy. Meanwhile, the Indian economy developed rapidly as the British built an economic infrastructure, including schools, irrigation projects, and roads. In 1876, England's Queen Victoria was given the title of empress of India.

Britain at this point had no intention of relinquishing control of India. The colony provided valuable raw materials and an export market for British-made goods. It also supplied manpower that enabled the newly industrialized Great Britain to project its power throughout Asia and to protect British access to Asia through the Middle East. Nevertheless, concessions were made. The Indian Councils Act of 1892 allowed Indians a voice in provincial legislation. Matters began to turn sour, though, in 1895, when the British imposed an excise tax on Indian cotton, enriching Britain at India's expense. Then in 1899, George Curzon became India's viceroy. Curzon would unwittingly foment growing dissatisfaction through two measures.

The first of these measures was the Indian Universities Act of 1904, which gave Britain control over all Indian colleges and universities. This step dismayed India's emerging middle class, which valued the nation's educational institutions and wished to leave them in Indian hands. The other measure was enacted in 1905, when Curzon partitioned Bengal into two provinces in an effort to curb the political activism—and acts of terrorism—there. The British regarded one of the new provinces, East Bengal, as more backward and less developed than the other new province, Assam. Because East Bengal was largely Muslim, it could function as a counterweight to Assam's political activism. The results of Curzon's arbitrary and heavy-handed decision were demonstrations and a boycott of goods manufactured in Britain, particularly in England's cotton mills. More significant, the viceroy's actions started to turn the Indian National Congress, a political party established in 1885, into a nationalist movement. One of the chief figures in that movement was a young Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, who would become a worldwide symbol of nonviolent resistance to colonial rule.

In an effort to solve the crisis, the Crown replaced Curzon. After discussions in 1909 Parliament passed another Indian Councils Act, which is also referred to as the Morley-Minto reforms after its authors, John Morley, the secretary of state for India, and Gilbert Elliot-Murray-Kynynmond, Fourth Earl of Minto, India's governor-general. This act provided for Indian membership in provincial executive councils and enlarged the Imperial Legislative Council to give Indians greater political representation. In 1911 the partition of Bengal was reversed, and recommendations were made to increase Indians' participation in government and the military. World War I put issues of Anglo-Indian cooperation on hold, but the war also increased calls for greater independence. India made major contributions to the war effort, including monetary contributions of millions of pounds and the lives of some forty thousand soldiers who fought and died for Britain. Meanwhile, in 1917, the Indian people observed the overthrow of the monarchy in Russia with interest, and after the war's conclusion they saw the U.S. president Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points, outlined in January 1918, as holding out hope for self-government and an end to colonialism (particularly in the fifth point).

Throughout the war and afterward, political unrest in India grew. Militant activists in Bengal and Punjab backed insurrections and brought the provincial governments to a standstill. As conspiracies came to light, Britain passed the Defence of India Act in 1915 in an effort to curb revolutionary activities. In 1918 a sedition committee, chaired by Sydney Rowlatt, was formed to investigate possible links between Indian militants on the one hand and both German and Russian revolutionaries on the other; one such link came to be called the Hindu-German Conspiracy. Out of these investigations came the Rowlatt Act, passed in March 1919. The purpose of this repressive act was to strengthen and extend the Defence of India Act by exposing conspiracies and quelling civil unrest, which was being fomented by a combination of inflation, high taxes, a devastating flu epidemic, and disruption of trade because of the war. Unrest led to violence in the northern Indian city of Amritsar, which had been placed under martial law as a result of bombings, arson, and protest. On April 13, 1919, British troops opened fire on a religious gathering, according to official British estimates killing some 379 people and wounding 1,100 others in what has been called the Amritsar Massacre or, after the name of the park where it occurred, the Jallianwala Bagh Massacre. Indian authorities put the casualty figures much higher.

In light of these events, the new secretary of state for India, Edwin Montagu, acknowledged that Britain was in India's debt. Earlier, in August 1917, he had signaled a change in British policy in a declaration before the House of Commons:

The policy of His Majesty's Government, with which the Government of India are in complete accord, is that of the increasing association of Indians in every branch of the administration and the gradual development of self-governing institutions with a view to the progressive realization of responsible government in India, as an integral part of the British Empire. (qtd. in Alam, p. 48)

He collaborated with India's viceroy, Lord Chelmsford, and in 1918 the two issued the Montagu-Chelmsford Report, which was submitted to Parliament in May 1918 and again in June of that year. Their recommendations formed the basis of the Government of India Act passed into law in December 1919.