PROPAGANDA IN THE LEGISLATURES

 Legislative Councils in India had no real official power till

1920. Yet, work done in them by the nationalists helped the

growth of the national movement.

The Indian Councils Act of 1861 enlarged the Governor￾General’s Executive Council for the purpose of making laws. The

Governor-General could now add from six to twelve members to

the Executive Council. At least half of these nominations had to

be non-officials, Indian or British. This council came to be known

as the Imperial Legislative Council. It possessed no powers at all.

It could not discuss the budget or a financial measure or any

other important bill without the previous approval of the

Government. It could not discuss the actions of the

administration. It could not, therefore, be seen as some kind of

parliament, even of the most elementary kind. As if to underline

this fact, the Council met, on an average, for only twenty-five

days in a year till 1892.

The Government of India remained, as before 1858, an alien

despot. Nor was this accidental. While moving the Indian

Councils Bill of 1861, the Secretary of State for India, Charles

Wood, said: All experience reaches us that where a dominant race

rules another, the mildest form of Government is despotism.’ A

year later he wrote to Elgin, the Viceroy, that the only

government suitable for such a state of things as exists in India a

despotism controlled from home.” This ‘despotism controlled from

home’ was to remain the fundamental feature of the Government

of India till 15 August 1947.

What was the role of Indian members in this Legislative

Council? The Government had decided to add them in order to

represent Indian views, for many British officials and statesmen

had come to believe that one reason for the Revolt of 1857 was   that Indian views were not known to the rulers. But, in practice,

the Council did not serve even this purpose. Indian members

were few in number — in thirty years, from 1862 to 1892, only

forty-five Indians were nominated to it. Moreover, the

Government invariably chose rulers of princely states or their

employees, big zamindars, big merchants or retired high

government officials as Indian members. Only a handful of

political figures and independent intellectuals such as Syed

Ahmed Khan (1878-82), Kristodas Pal (1883), V.N. Mandlik

(1884-87), K.L. Nulkar (1890-91) and Rash Behari Ghosh (1892)

were nominated. The overwhelming majority of Indian nominees

did not represent the Indian people or emerging nationalist

opinion. It was, therefore, not surprising that they completely

toed the official line. There is the interesting story of Raja Dig

Vijay Singh of Balarampur — nominated twice to the Council —

who did not know a word of English. When asked by a relative

how he voted one way or the other, he replied that he kept

looking at the Viceroy and when the Viceroy raised his hand he

did so too and when he lowered it he did the same!

The voting record of Indian nominees on the Council was

poor. When the Vernacular Press Bill came up before the Council,

only one Indian member, Maharaja Jotendra Mohan Tagore, the

leader of the zamindari-dominated British Indian Association was

present. He voted for it. In 1885, the two spokesmen of the

zamindars in the Council helped emasculate the pro-tenant

character of the Bengal Tenancy Bill at a time when nationalist

leaders like Surendranath Banerjea were agitating to make it

more pro-tenant. In 1882, Jotendra Mohan Tagore and Durga

Charan Laha, the representative of Calcutta’s big merchants,

opposed the reduction of the salt tax and recommended the

reduction of the licence tax on merchants and professionals

instead. The nationalists were demanding the opposite. In 1888,

Peary Mohan Mukherjea and Dinshaw Petit, representatives of

the big zamindars and big merchants respectively, supported the

enhancement of the salt tax along with the non-official British

members representing British business in India.

By this time nationalists were quite active in opposing the

salt tax and reacted strongly to this support. In the newspapers

and from the Congress platform they described Mukherjea and

Petit as ‘gilded shams’ and magnificient non-entities.’ They cited their voting behavior as proof of the nationalist contention that

the existing Legislative Councils were unrepresentative of Indian

opinion. Madan Mohan Malaviya said at the National Congress

session of 1890: ‘We would much rather that there were no non￾official members at all on the Councils than that there should be

members who are not in the least in touch with people and

who...betray a cruel want of sympathy with them’ Describing

Mukherjea and petit as ‘these big honourable gentlemen,

enjoying private incomes and drawing huge salaries,’ he asked

rhetorically: ‘Do you think, gentlemen, such members would be

appointed to the Council if the people were allowed any voice in

their selection?’ The audience shouted ‘No, no, never.’

However, despite the early nationalists believing that India

should eventually become self-governing, they moved very

cautiously in putting forward political demands regarding the

structure of the state, for they were afraid of the Government

declaring their activities seditious and disloyal and suppressing

them. Till 1892, their demand was limited to the expansion and

reform of the Legislative Councils. They demanded wider

participation in them by a larger number of elected Indian

members as also wider powers for the Councils and an increase

in the powers of the members to ‘discuss and deal with’ the

budget and to question and criticize the day-to-day

administration.

The nationalist agitation forced the Government to make

some changes in legislative functioning by the Indian Councils

Act of 1892. The number of additional members of the Imperial

and Provincial Legislative Councils was increased from the

previous six to ten to ten to sixteen. A few of these members

could be elected indirectly through municipal committees, district

boards, etc., but the official majority remained. The members

were given the right to discuss the annual budget but they could

neither vote on it nor move a motion to amend it. They could also

ask questions but were not allowed to put supplementary

questions or to discuss the answers. The ‘reformed’ Imperial

Legislative Council met, during its tenure till 1909, on an average for only thirteen days in a year, and the number of unofficial

Indian members present was only five out of twenty- four!

The nationalists were totally dissatisfied with the Act of

1892. They saw in it a mockery of their demands. The Councils

were still impotent; despotism still ruled. They now demanded a

majority for non-official elected members with the right to vote on

the budget and, thus, to the public purse. They raised the slogan

‘no taxation without representation.’ Gradually, they raised their

demands. Many leaders — for example Dadabhai Naoroji in 1904,

G.K. Gokhale in 1905 and Lokamanya Tilak in 1906 began to put

forward the demand for self government the model of the self￾governing colonies of Canada and Australia.

Lord Dufferin, who had prepared the outline of the Act of

1892, and other British statesmen and administrators, had seen

in the Legislative Council a device to incorporate the more vocal

Indian political leaders into the colonial political structure where

they could, in a manner of Speaking let off their political steam.

They knew that the members of the Councils enjoyed no real

powers; they could only make wordy speeches and indulge in

empty rhetorics, and the bureaucracy could afford to pay no

attention to them.

But the British policy makers had reckoned without the

political capacities of the Indian leaders who soon transformed

the powerless and impotent councils, designed as mere machines

for the endorsement of government policies, and measures and as

toys to appease the emerging political leadership, into forums for

ventilating popular grievances, mercilessly exposing the defects

and shortcomings of the bureaucratic administration, criticizing

and opposing almost every government policy and proposal, and

raising basic economic issues, especially relating to public

finance. They submitted the acts and policies of the Government

to a ruthless examination regarding both their intention and their

method and consequence. Far from being absorbed by the

Councils, the nationalist members used them to enhance their

own political stature in the county and to build a national

movement. The safety valve was transformed into a major

channel for nationalist propaganda. By sheer courage, debating skill, fearless criticism, deep knowledge and careful marshalling

of data they kept up a constant campaign against the

Government in the Councils undermining its political and moral

influence and generating a powerful anti-imperialist sentiment.

Their speeches began to be reported at length in the

newspapers and widespread public interest developed in the

legislative proceedings.

The new Councils attracted some of the most prominent

nationalist leaders. Surendranath Banerjea, Kalicharan Banerjee,

Ananda Mohan Bose, Lal Mohan Ghosh, W.C. Bonnerji and Rash

Beha Ghosh from Bengal, Ananda Charlu, C. Sankan Nair and

Vijayaraghavachariar from Madras, Madan Mohan Malaviya,

Ayodhyanath and Bishambar Nath from U.P., B.G. Tilak,

Pherozeshah Mehta, R.M. Sayani, Chimanlal Setalvad, N.G.

Chandravarkar and G.K. Gokhale from Bombay, and G.M.

Chitnavis from Central Provinces were some of served as

members of the Provincial or Central Legislative Councils from

1893 to 1909.

The two men who were most responsible for putting the

Council to good use and introducing a new spirit in them were

Pherozeshah Mehta and Gopal Krishna Gokhale. Both men were

political Moderates. Both became famous for being fearlessly

independent and the bete noir of British officialdom in India.

Born in 1845 in Bombay, Pherozeshah Mehta came under

Dadabhai Naoroji’s influence while studying law in London

during the 1860s. He was one of the founders of the Bombay

Presidency Association as also the Indian National Congress.

From about the middle of the 1890s till his death in 1915 he was

a dominant figure in the Indian National Congress and was often

accused of exercising autocratic authority over it. He was a

powerful debater and his speeches were marked by boldness,

lucidity, incisiveness, a ready wit and quick repartee, and a

certain literary quality.

Mehta’s first major intervention in the Imperial Legislative

Council came in January 1895 on a Bill for the amendment of the Police Act of 1861 which enhanced the power of the local

authorities to quarter a punitive police force in an area and to

recover its cost from selected sections of the inhabitants of the

area. Mehta pointed out that the measure was an attempt to

convict and punish individuals without a judicial trial under the

garb of preserving law and order. He argued: ‘I cannot conceive of

legislation more empirical, more retrograde, more open to abuse,

or more demoralizing. It is impossible not to see that it is a piece

of that empirical legislation so dear to the heart of executive

officers, which will not and cannot recognize the scientific fact

that the punishment and suppression of crime without injuring

or oppressing innocence must be controlled by judicial

procedure.’ Casting doubts on the capacity and impartiality of the

executive officers entrusted with the task of enforcing the Act,

Mehta said: ‘It would be idle to believe that they can be free from

the biases, prejudices, and defects of their class and position.’

Nobody would today consider this language and these remarks

very strong or censorious. But they were like a bomb thrown into

the ranks of a civil service which considered itself above such

criticism. How dare a mere ‘native’ lay his sacrilegious hands on

its fair name and reputation and that too in the portals of the

Legislative Council? James Westland, the Finance Member, rose

in the house and protested against ‘the new spirit’ which Mehta

‘had introduced into the Council.’ He had moreover uttered

‘calumnies’ against and ‘arraigned’ as a class as biased,

prejudiced, utterly incapable of doing the commonest justice . . .

a most distinguished service,’ which had ‘contributed to the

framing and consolidation of the Empire.’ His remarks had

gravely detracted ‘from the reputation which this Council has

justly acquired for the dignity, the calmness and the

consideration which characterize its deliberations.’ In other

words, Mehta was accused of changing the role and character of

the colonial legislatures.

The Indian reaction was the very opposite. Pherozeshah

Mehta won the instant approval of political Indians, even of his

political opponents like Tilak, who readily accepted Westland’s

description that ‘a new spirit’ had entered the legislatures. People

were accustomed to such criticism coming from the platform or

the Press but that the ‘dignified’ Council halls could reverberate

with such sharp and fearless criticism was a novel experience.

The Tribune of Lahore commented: ‘The voice that has been so  long shut out from the Council Chamber — the voice of the

people has been admitted through the open door of election . . .

Mr. Mehta speaks as the representative of the people... Sir James

Westland’s protest is the outcry of the bureaucrat rapped over

the knuckles in his own stronghold.’

The bureaucracy was to smart under the whiplash of

Mehta’s rapier- like wit almost every time he spoke in the

Council. We may give a few more examples of the forensic skill

with which he regaled the Indians and helped destroy the moral

influence and prestige of the British Indian Government and its

holier-than-thou bureaucracy. The educated Indians and higher

education were major bugbears of the imperialist administrators

then as they are of the imperialist schools of historians today.

Looking for ways and means of Cutting down higher education

because it was producing ‘discontended and seditious babus,’ the

Government hit upon the expedient of counterposing to

expenditure on primary education of the masses that on the

college education of the elites.

Pointing to the real motives behind this move to check the

spread of higher education, Mehta remarked: It is very well to

talk of “raising the subject to the pedestal of the rule?’ but when

the subject begins to press close at your heels, human nature is

after all weak, and the personal experience is so intensely

disagreeable that the temptation to kick back is almost

irresistible.’ And so, most of the bureaucrats looked upon ‘every

Indian college (as) a nursery for hatching broods of vipers; the

less, therefore, the better.’

In another speech, commenting on the official desire to

transfer public funds from higher to primary education, he said

he was reminded of ‘the amiable and well-meaning father of a

somewhat numerous family, addicted unfortunately to slipping

off a little too often of an evening to the house over the way, who,

when the mother appealed to him to do something for the

education of the grown-up boys, begged of her with tears in his

eyes to consider if her request was not unreasonable, when there

was not even enough food and clothes for the younger children.

The poor woman could not gainsay the fact, with the hungry eyes

staring before her; but she could not help bitterly reflecting that

the children could have food and clothes, and education to boot, if the kindly father could be induced to be good enough to spend

a little less on drink and cards. Similarly, gentlemen, when we

are reminded of the crying wants Of the poor masses for

sanitation and pure water and medical relief and primary

education, might we not respectfully venture to submit that there

would be funds, and to spare, for all these things, and higher

education too, if the enormous and growing resources of the

country were not ruthlessly squandered on a variety of whims

and luxuries, on costly residences and Sumptuous furniture, on

summer trips to the hills, on little holiday excursions to the

frontiers, but above and beyond all, on the lavish and insatiable

humours of an irresponsible military policy, enforced by the very

men whose view and opinions of its necessity cannot but

accommodate themselves to their own interests and ambitions.”

The officials were fond of blaming the Indian peasant’s

poverty and indebtedness on his propensity to spend recklessly

on marriages and festivals. In 1901, a Bill was brought in the

Bombay Legislative to take away the peasant’s right of ownership

of land to prevent him from bartering it away because of his

thriftlessness. Denying this charge and opposing the bill, Mehta

defended the right of the peasant to have some joy, colour, and

moments of brightness in his life. In the case of average Indian

peasant, he said, ‘a few new earthenware a few wild flowers, the

village tom-tom, a stomach-full meal, bad arecanut and betel

leaves and a few stalks of cheap tobacco, and in some cases a few

cheap tawdry trinkets, exhaust the joys of a festive occasion in

the life of a household which has known only an unbroken period

of unshrinking labour from morn to sunset.”° And when the

Government insisted on using its official majority to push

through the Bill, Mehta along. With Gokhale, G.K. Parekh,

Balachandra Krishna and D.A. Khare took the unprecedented

step of organizing the first walk-out in India’s legis1atj history.

Once again officialdom was furious with Mehta. The Times of

India, then British-owned even suggested that these members

should be made to resign their seats!

Criticizing the Government’s excise policy for encouraging

drinking in the name of curbing it, he remarked in 1898 that the

excise department ‘seems to follow the example of the preacher

who said that though he was bound to teach good principles, he

was by no ‘means bound to practice themPherozeshah Mehta retired from the Imperial Legislative

Council in 1901 due to bad health. He got elected in his place

thirty-five-year-old Gokhale, who had already made his mark as

the Secretary of the Poona Sarvajanik Sabha and the editor of the

Sudharak. In 1897, as a witness in London before the Royal

Commission on Expenditure in India, Gokhale had outshone

veterans like Surendranath Banerjea, D.E. Wacha, G.

Subramaniya Iyer and Dadabhai Naoroji. Gokhale was to prove a

more than worthy successor to Mehta.

Gopal Krishna Gokhale was an outstanding intellectual who

had been carefully trained in Indian economics by Justice

Ranade and G.V. Josh’. He was no orator. He did not use strong

and forceful language as Tilak, Dadabhai Naoroji and R.C. Dun

did. Nor did he take recourse, as Mehta did, to humour, irony

and courteous, sarcasm. As a speaker he was gentle, reasonable,

courteous, non-flamboyant and lucid. He relied primarily upon

detailed knowledge and the careful data. Consequently, while his

speeches did not entertain or hurt, they gradually took hold of

the listeners’ or readers’ attention by their sheer intellectual

power.

Gokhale was to gain great fame for his budget speeches

which used to be reported extensively by the newspapers and

whose readers would wait eagerly for their morning copy. He was

to transform the Legislative Council into an open university for

imparting political education to the people.

His very first budget speech on 26 March 1902 established

him as the greatest parliamentarian that India has produced. The

Finance Member, Edward Law, had just presented a budget with

a seven-crore-rupees surplus for which he had received with

great pride the congratulations, of the house. At this point

Gokhale rose to speak. He could not, he said, ‘conscientiously

join in the congratulations’ because of the huge surplus. On the

contrary, the surplus budget ‘illustrated the utter absence of a

due correspondence between the Condition of the country and

the condition of the finances of the country.’ In fact, this surplus

coming in times of serious depression and suffering, constituted

‘a wrong to the community.’ The keynote of his speech was the poverty of the people. He examined the problem in all its aspects

and came to the conclusion that the material condition of the

mass of the people was ‘steadily deteriorating’ and that the

phenomenon was ‘the saddest in the whole range of the economic

history of the world.’ He then set out to analyze the budget in

detail. He showed how land revenue and the salt tax had been

going up even in times of drought and famine. He asked for the

reduction of these two taxes and for raising the minimum level of

income liable to income tax to Rs. 1,000 so that the lower middle

classes would not be harassed. He condemned the large

expenditure on the army and territorial expansion beyond Indian

frontiers and demanded greater expenditure on education and

industry instead. The management of Indian finances, he said,

revealed that Indian interests were invariably subordinated to

foreign interests. He linked the poor state of Indian finances and

the poverty of the people with the colonial status of the Indian

economy and polity. And he did all this by citing at length from

the Government’s own blue books.’

Gokhale’s first budget speech had ‘an electrifying effect’

upon the people. As his biographer, B.R. Nanda, has put it: ‘Like

Byron, he could have said that he woke up one fine morning and

found himself famous”. He won instant praise even from his

severest critics and was applauded by the entire nationalist

Press. It was felt that he had raised Indian pride many notches

higher. The Amrita Bazar Patrika, which had missed no

opportunity in the past to berate and belittle him, gave unstinted

expression to this pride: ‘We had ever entertained the ambition of

seeing some Indian member openly and fearlessly criticizing the

Financial Statement of the Government. But this ambition was

never satisfied. When members had ability, they had not the

requisite courage. When they had the requisite courage, they had

not the ability. . . For the first time in the annals of British rule in

India, a native of India has not only succeeded in exposing the

fallacies which underlie these Government statements, but has

ventured to do it in an uncompromising manner.” All this well￾deserved acclaim did not go to Gokhale’s head. He remained

unassuming and modest as before. To G.V. Joshi (leading

economist and one of his gurus), he wrote: ‘Of course it is your

speech more than mine and I almost feel I am practicing a fraud

on the public in that I let all the credit for it come to me.” 

In the next ten years, Gokhale was to bring this ‘mixture of

courage, tenacity and ability’ to bear upon every annual budget

and all legislation, highlighting in the process the misery and

poverty of the peasants, the drain of wealth from India, the

Government neglect of industrial development, the taxation of the

poor, the lack of welfare measures such as primary education

and health and medical facilities, the official efforts to suppress

the freedom of the Press and other civil liberties, the enslavement

of Indian labourers in British colonies, the moral dwarfing of

Indians, the underdevelopment of the Indian economy and the

complete neglect and subordination of Indian interests by the

rulers.

Officials from the Viceroy downwards squirmed with

impotent fury under his sharp and incisive indictments of their

policies. In 1904, Edward Law, the Finance Member, cried out in

exasperation: ‘When he takes his seat at this Council table he

unconsciously perhaps adopts the role and demeanour of the

habitual mourner, and his sad wails and lamentations at the

delinquencies of Government are as piteous as long practice and

training can make them.” Such was the fear Gokhale’s budget

speeches aroused among officials that in 1910, Lord Minto, the

Viceroy, asked the Secretary of State to appoint R.W. Carlyle as

Revenue Member because he had come to know privately of ‘an

intended attack in which Gokhale is interested on the whole of

our revenue system and it is important that we should be well

prepared to meet it.

Gokhale was to be repaid in plenty by the love and

recognition of his own people. Proud of his legislative

achievement they were to confer him the title of ‘the leader of the

opposition’. Gandhiji was to declare him his political guru. And

Tilak, his lifelong political opponent, said at his funeral: ‘This

diamond of India, this jewel of Maharashtra, this prince of

workers, is taking eternal rest on the funeral ground. Look at him

and try to emulate him