Government of India Act

Impact

The Indian National Congress expressed disappointment with the Government of India Act of 1919. Accordingly, under the leadership of Gandhi, agitation for independence continued. Gandhi was the leader of the “noncooperation movement,” which urged Indians to refuse to pay taxes, to resign from government posts, to decline British honors and titles, and to boycott educational institutions and the court system. Throughout the 1920s numerous political parties calling for Indian independence emerged. Their activities culminated at a conference in Bombay in May 1928 that called for Indian resistance to British rule. Then in 1929, at a historic conference in Lahore, the Indian National Congress passed a resolution calling for complete independence from Britain.

The 1930s witnessed widespread civil disobedience. A key event was Gandhi's famous Salt March, which took place in March–April 1930 to protest British taxation on salt. Police and protesters clashed in Calcutta and Peshawar, and by the end of 1931 some one hundred thousand Indians had been arrested for various forms of civil disobedience. In 1935 Britain passed yet another Government of India Act, this one granting complete provincial authority to Indians. It was not enough, however. The nationalist “Quit India” movement continued to urge civil disobedience, and in 1946 the Royal Indian Navy mutinied. Finally, on August 15, 1947, the British colony was partitioned into India, primarily Hindu, and Pakistan, primarily Muslim, and both nations achieved complete independence.

The Government of India Act of 1919 was part of a mosaic of laws stretching back to the eighteenth century. The act was passed in the middle of an independence movement that had its roots in the early to mid-nineteenth century, accelerated in the late nineteenth century, and crescendoed throughout the first half of the twentieth century. In one sense, the act had little impact. If it was designed to appease Indian nationalists, it failed signally, for true power remained vested in British hands, and that fact was obvious to Indian nationalist leaders. Nevertheless, the act served as a wedge, a crack in British authority. It gave Indians a taste of government participation as well as forums in which they could express their aspirations. Less than three decades later, those aspirations would be realized. India today, with more than 1.1 billion people, remains the world's largest democratic nation.