Part 4 (1/2)

THE MORLEY-MINTO REFORMS

A British Government of a more advanced type of liberalism than any of its Liberal predecessors found itself confronted as soon as it took office with a more difficult situation in India than had ever been dreamt of since the Mutiny, and the difficulties grew rapidly more grave. When Mr. Morley went to the India Office during the respite from agitation against the Part.i.tion of Bengal, procured by the visit of the Prince and Princess of Wales to India even more than by Lord Curzon's departure from India, the new Secretary of State allowed himself to be persuaded that an agitation directed, so far, mainly against a harmless measure of mere administrative importance must be largely artificial, and he determined to maintain the Part.i.tion. He was entirely new to Indian affairs, and his _Recollections_ show him to have been often sorely perplexed by the conflict between his own political instincts and the picture of Indian conditions placed before him by his official advisers at home and in India. He felt, however, on the whole fairly confident that he could deal with the situation by producing a moderate measure of reforms which would satisfy India's political aspirations and by keeping an extremely vigilant eye on Indian methods of administration of which ”sympathy” was in future to be the key-note rather than mere efficiency. But when in the course of 1907 the agitation broke out afresh with increased fury and began to produce a crop of political outrages, Mr. Morley found himself in a particularly awkward position.

He was known from his Irish days to be no believer in coercion. But the Government of India was not to be denied when it insisted that a campaign of murder could not be tolerated and that repression was as necessary as reform. The Secretary of State agreed reluctantly to sanction more stringent legislation for dealing with the excesses of the Extremist press in India, but he was only the more resolved that it must be accompanied by a liberal reforms scheme. The Viceroy himself shared this view and lent willing a.s.sistance. But the interchange of opinions between India and Whitehall was as usual terribly lengthy and laborious.

A Royal Proclamation on November 28, 1908, the fiftieth anniversary of Queen Victoria's Proclamation after the Mutiny, foreshadowed reforms in ”political satisfaction of the claims of important cla.s.ses representing ideas that have been fostered and encouraged by British rule.” But not till the following month, _i.e._ three years after Mr. Morley had taken over the India Office, did the reforms scheme see the light of day.

It bore his impress. He had a ready ear for Indian grievances and much understanding for the Moderate Indian point of view. He was prepared to give Indians a larger consultative voice in the conduct of Indian affairs, and even to introduce individual Indians not only into his own Council at Whitehall but even into the Viceroy's Executive Council, the citadel of British authority in India. He was determined to enforce far more energetically than most of his predecessors the const.i.tutional right of the Secretary of State to form and lay down the policy for which his responsibility was to the British Parliament alone, while the function of the Government of India was, after making to him whatever representations it might deem desirable, to carry his decisions faithfully and fully into execution. He was prepared to exercise also to the full his right to control the administrative as well as the executive acts of the Government of India and its officers. He was not prepared to devolve upon Indians collectively any part of the const.i.tutional powers vested in the Indian Executive and ultimately through the Secretary of State in the British Parliament. He was not therefore prepared to give India any representative inst.i.tutions that should circ.u.mscribe or share the power of the Indian Executive. The Indian Councils Act of 1909 was drawn up on those lines. It enlarged the members.h.i.+p and the functions of the Indian Legislative Councils, and placed them definitely on an elective basis without doing away altogether with nominations by Government. The only point upon which Mr.

Morley yielded to pressure was in conceding the principle of community representation in favour of the Mahomedans, to whom, at a time when they not only held rigidly aloof from all political agitation but professed great anxiety as to political concessions of which the benefit would, they submitted, accrue mainly to the Hindus, Lord Minto had given a promise that in any future reforms scheme full consideration should be given to the historical importance and actual influence of their community rather than to its mere numerical strength.

The Indian Councils Act, 1909, fell considerably short of the demands put forward even by the founders of the Congress five-and-twenty years before, as the new Councils, greatly enlarged, were still to be merely consultative a.s.semblies. But it did for the first time admit ”the living forces of the elective principle,” and to that extent it met the demand for representative inst.i.tutions. Indian Moderates could point also to the presence of an Indian member, Sir Satyendra (now Lord) Sinha, in the Viceroy's Executive Council and of two Indian members in the Secretary of State's Council at Whitehall as a definite proof that India would have henceforth a hearing before, and not as in the past merely after, the adoption of vital lines of policy. The Act was accepted by the Moderate leaders as a genuine if not a generous instalment of reform, and it restored to some extent their influence as the advocates of const.i.tutional progress by showing that the British Government had not been altogether deaf to their appeals. It did not of course satisfy the Extremists, but their influence had suffered a great set-back from the wrecking of the Surat Congress, their great Deccanee leader was working out a long term of imprisonment at Mandalay, and with the tide of anarchism still spreading and visibly demoralising the student cla.s.s all over India, even to the undermining of parental authority, the first feeling of suppressed and largely inarticulate alarm and resentment developed into a definite reaction in favour of government as by law established.

The great wave of unrest which had swept over India was already subsiding when Lord Minto left India in 1910 amidst genuine demonstrations of returning goodwill, and the appointment of Lord Hardinge of Penshurst as his successor was welcomed in the same spirit, not because Lord Kitchener, who had run him very hard for the Viceroyalty, was personally unpopular in India, but because he owed to reactionary supporters the quite unmerited reputation of being ”the man with the big stick.”

The visit of the King and Queen to India at the end of 1911 was therefore well timed, and it provoked a still greater outburst of popular enthusiasm than their visit as Prince and Princess of Wales in 1905. For it was the first time that the Sovereign to whom it was given to rule over India from a remote Western island travelled out to receive on Indian soil the homage of his Indian subjects and appeared before them in the full majesty of crown, orb, and sceptre. Apart entirely from the merits of the measure, the dramatic transfer of the capital of his Indian Empire from Calcutta to Delhi appealed to the imagination of Indians as a demonstration of the Royal power no less impressive than the splendours of the great Durbar at which the Royal command went forth. Equally did their Majesties fulfil another of the time-honoured conceptions of royalty by knowing, so to say, when to step down from their throne and mix freely with the people. It has been from times immemorial one of the principles of Indian rulers.h.i.+p that the ruler cannot deny to his subjects the privilege of access to his person, and many are those who have gained more popularity by giving ample opportunity to their subjects for stating to them their grievances in the royal presence than by ever actually redressing them. In Calcutta especially when the King and Queen moved cheerfully amongst the delirious crowds that had thronged to the Maidan to wors.h.i.+p them, the scene surpa.s.sed all previous experiences. For had not one of the measures announced as the Royal will at the Delhi Durbar been the revision at last of Lord Curzon's detested Part.i.tion of Bengal? The furious agitation of the first few years had broken in vain against the dead wall of the _chose jugee_ which Mr. Morley had upheld, and it had gradually died down. The wound, however, had been still there, and now the King's hand had touched and healed it. The old Province of Bengal was not indeed restored within its former limits, but Eastern Bengal, created as the Hindu Bengalees believed, in favour of Mahomedan ascendancy, disappeared, and in its stead Behar and Orissa, where a large part of the population was of a different stock and spoke a different tongue, were detached to the west and south of Bengal proper and formed into a separate province which served equally well to relieve administrative congestion without doing violence to Bengalee sentiment.

On the very first anniversary, however, of the day of the great Delhi Durbar an audacious attempt to murder the Viceroy at the moment when he was making his solemn entry into the new capital came as a painful reminder that the fangs of Indian anarchism had not yet been drawn. From one of the balconies of the Chandni Chauk, the chief thoroughfare of the native city, a bomb was thrown at Lord Hardinge who was riding with Lady Hardinge on a State elephant, in accordance with Indian usage, on his way to the Fort where he was to have delivered a message of greeting to the people of India recalling the memorable results of the Royal visit.

The Viceroy was severely wounded and Lady Hardinge, though she escaped without any apparent hurt, suffered a shock which at least hastened her premature death two and a half years later. Lord Hardinge had already earned the widespread confidence of Indians by his undisguised sympathy with all their legitimate aspirations, and the Lady Hardinge's School of Medicine for Indian women stands now at Delhi as an enduring monument, not only of the keen interest which she took in the cause of Indian womanhood and in everything that could tend to its advancement, but of the affection she had won by a rare charm of manner that was, with her, merely the outward reflection of a gentle and finely tempered nature.

There had been abortive plots against Lord Minto's life, but it had been deemed politic to minimise their importance. This, however, was an attempt too flagrant and too nearly fatal to be disguised or denied, and a thrill of horror which hushed even the Extremists went through the whole of India, for to the office of the Viceroy as the personal representative of the sovereign there had always. .h.i.therto attached something of the sanct.i.ty with which, according to Indian beliefs, all kings.h.i.+p is invested. All the more grateful was the response elicited by the a.s.surance which Lord Hardinge hastened to convey from his sick-bed that what had happened could and would in no way diminish his affection and devotion to the people of India or modify the policy of goodwill and progress for which he stood. Neither he nor India ever forgot that a.s.surance.

Unfortunately the artificial basis upon which the Morley-Minto reforms had been built revealed itself very soon under the searching test of practical experience. The Councils Act of 1909 had made no attempt to organise on an effective and genuine basis ”the living forces of the elective principle.” The indirect system of election established under the Act could only produce haphazard and misleading results. An indirect chain of elections afforded no means of appraising the true relations.h.i.+p between the elected members of the Councils and their original electors. The qualifications of candidates, as well as of electors, varied widely from province to province, but shared one common characteristic, that the election was more often a matter of form.

Members of the Provincial Councils were returned partly by Munic.i.p.al and Local Boards arranged in various groups, without any connection with, or mandate from, the const.i.tuencies by which these bodies had been chosen, partly by a land-holding community which did not consider itself bound by the acts of its const.i.tuted representatives. The so-called electorates were never known to give definite mandates to those who professed to represent them or to p.r.o.nounce upon any course of action which their representatives might pursue. n.o.body knew what was the numerical foundation on which an elected member took his seat. It was almost impossible to trace it back along the chain of indirect elections. Before the British Reform Bill of 1832 much play was made of pocket boroughs of twenty or thirty electors. In India, one const.i.tuency electing a member to the Imperial Legislative Council numbered exactly seven, and there were cases where the representation was pretty well known to have been divided by agreement between two individuals. Nor did the recommendations of a Royal Commission on Decentralisation avail to break down that spirit of over-centralisation which had of late years marked the policy of the Government of India. The Provincial Governments still remained bound hand and foot by the necessity of constant reference to the Central Government, while the latter in its turn was forced to make an ever-increasing number of references to Whitehall, where Mr. Morley enforced, far beyond the practice of any previous Secretary of State, the principle that the Provincial Governments were responsible to the Central Government, and the Central Government to the India Office for every detail of administration.

More galling to Indians was it to have to admit that the expansion of Indian representation in the Councils had not been followed by any visible increase of Indian control over the conduct of public affairs.

Whilst disclaiming warmly any intention of paving the way for the introduction of parliamentary inst.i.tutions into India, Mr. Morley had allowed an illusory semblance of parliamentary inst.i.tutions to be introduced into the enlarged Councils by requiring their sanction for legislative measures brought forward by the Executive. The latter had to go through the same forms of procedure as if its existence depended upon the support of a parliamentary majority to which it was responsible, whereas it continued to be irremovable and responsible only to the Secretary of State. These were in fact mere empty forms, for however unpalatable any measure might be to the Indian members, or however powerful their arguments against it, Government could always vote the Indian opposition down in the Viceroy's Legislative Council, the most important of all, by mustering the official majority in full force to deliver their votes according to instructions. In the Provincial Councils on the other hand in which an unofficial majority had been conceded, the Indian members were in a position to create a deadlock by refusing to vote for measures indispensable to the proper conduct of Government; but whilst the power they could thus exercise might go far enough to paralyse the Executive, they had no power to turn it out.

These new Councils had been invested with large but mostly negative powers, and with no positive responsibilities.

For a time the sentiment of trust which underlay the granting of the reforms had its effect. Both sides seemed to display a more conciliatory spirit and the relations between the official and unofficial benches in the enlarged Councils a.s.sumed a more friendly character. In many cases the influence of the non-official members was successfully exerted to secure modifications in the legislative measures of Government, though from a mistaken desire to ”save its face” Government too often preferred to make concessions at private conferences with the Indian leaders rather than as the outcome of public discussion, and lost thereby a good deal of the credit which it might have secured by a more open display of its desire to meet Indian objections. On some occasions before the war the pressure of Indian opinion even deterred Provincial Governments from introducing legislative measures which they considered essential to public safety because they apprehended defeat at the hands of the unofficial majority in the legislative Councils. But the Indian public remained generally in ignorance of the extent to which the influence of the Indian representatives made itself felt, either for good or for evil, on Government. The bureaucracy, more secretive in India than elsewhere, had never realised the importance of guiding public opinion, or, _a fortiori_, the necessity of keeping it informed if you wish to guide it. The politicians, on the other hand, preferred to make capital out of those questions on which they failed to make any impression upon Government, though the real difficulty very often lay in the rigidity of the statutory control exercised by the Central Government over Provincial Governments, and by Whitehall over the Central Government.

The inevitable consequences soon became clear. The enlarged Indian representation appeared to have less power than it really enjoyed, and, having no responsibility whatever, it was free to make its own bids for popularity with const.i.tuencies equally irresponsible. Resolutions were introduced which, if they could have carried them, the unofficial members would often have been much puzzled to carry into effect, and grievances were voiced which, even when well founded, it was frequently beyond the power of any Government to remedy. On the other hand, the Executive was threatened with the possibility of a complete deadlock, and the concessions by which it could be averted often alarmed not merely the innate conservatism of the official world but many Indian interests scarcely less conservative.

Not till after Mr. Morley had been raised to the peerage and Lord Crewe had succeeded him at the India Office was anything done to meet the demand of the Western-educated cla.s.ses for a larger share in the administrative work of the country or to redress the very reasonable grievances of Indians employed in the Government services who were still for the most part penned up in the Provincial Services as established on the recommendations of the Aitcheson Committee more than twenty-five years earlier. In 1912 a Royal Commission went out to India with Lord Islington as Chairman. It was a body on which the British element in the Indian Public Services was only represented by a small minority, and amongst the European members Lord Ronaldshay and Mr. Ramsay Macdonald, both then in the House of Commons, stood for widely different schools of politics. Of the three Indian members, Mr. Gokhale, who had become one of the most influential leaders of the Moderate party, carried by far the greatest weight, and his premature death before the Commission completed its Report seriously impaired its usefulness. It spent two successive winters in taking a ma.s.s of evidence from Indians and Europeans all over India, but its sittings held, except in very rare cases, in public served chiefly at the time to stir up Indian opinion by bringing into sharp relief the profound divergencies between the Indian and the Anglo-Indian point of view, and in a form which on the one hand, unfortunately, was bound to offend Indian susceptibilities, and on the other hand was apt to produce the impression that Indians were chiefly concerned to subst.i.tute an indigenous for an alien bureaucracy. Anyhow, while the Western-educated cla.s.ses were rapidly coming to the conclusion that the Minto-Morley reforms had given them the shadow rather than the substance of political power, they saw in the proceedings of the Public Services Commission little indication of any radical change in the att.i.tude of the British official cla.s.ses towards the question of training up the people of India to a larger share in the administration.

In such circ.u.mstances the Extremists saw their opportunity to pour ridicule on the new Councils and preach once more the futility of const.i.tutional agitation. The Indian National Congress, overshadowed for a time by the new Councils, began to recover its popularity, and though the split which had taken place at Surat between Moderates and Extremists had not yet been mended, there was much talk of reunion. Some of the Moderates had grown once more faint-hearted. The Extremists who knew their own minds still const.i.tuted a very formidable party, and they were finding new allies in an unexpected quarter.

When the Indian National Congress was founded in 1885 and for nearly thirty years afterwards, the Indian Mahomedans kept severely aloof from it, partly because they had kept equally aloof from Western education which had originally brought the leaders of the new political movement together, and partly because most of those leaders were Hindus, and the ancient antagonism between Mahomedans and Hindus led the former to distrust profoundly anything that seemed likely to enhance the influence of the latter. One intellectual giant among the Mahomedans had indeed arisen after the Mutiny, during which his loyalty had never wavered, who laboured hard to convert his co-religionists to Western education. In spite of bitter opposition from a powerful party, rooted in the old fanatical orthodoxy of Islam, who resented his broad-mindedness which went to the length of trying to explain, and even to explain away much of, the Koran, Sir Seyyid Ahmed Khan succeeded in founding at Aligurh in 1880 a Mahomedan College which soon attracted students from the best Mahomedan families all over India. His idea was to create there a centre which should do for young Mahomedans what he himself had watched Oxford and Cambridge doing for young Englishmen. Education was not to be divorced as in most Indian colleges from religion, and he was convinced that a liberal interpretation of the Mahomedan doctrine was no more incompatible with the essence of Islam than with that of Western civilisation, with which British rule had come to bring India into providential contact. Loyalty to British rule was with him synonymous with loyalty to all the high ideals which he himself pursued and set before his students. For a whole generation success appeared to crown this work to which he brought all the fervour of missionary enterprise.

He died full of years and honour in 1898, and one of his last efforts was an historical refutation of the Ottoman Sultan's claim to the Khalifate of Islam. He already realised the reactionary tendencies of the Pan-Islamic propaganda which Abdul Hamid was trying to spread into India. So great and enduring was the hold of Sir Seyyid Ahmed's teachings upon the progressive elements in Mahomedan India that the All-India Moslem League was founded in 1905, almost avowedly in opposition to the subversive activities which the Indian National Congress was beginning to develop. It was in this spirit, too, that the influential deputation headed by the Agha Khan, who, though himself the head of a dissenting and thoroughly unorthodox Mahomedan community claiming descent from the Old Man of the Mountain, was then the recognised political leader of the whole Indian Mahomedan community, waited on Lord Minto to press upon the Government of India the Mahomedan view of the political situation created by the Part.i.tion of Bengal, lest political concessions should be hastily made to the Hindus which would pave the way for the ascendancy of a Hindu majority equally dangerous to the stability of British rule and to the interests of the Mahomedan minority whose loyalty was beyond dispute. It was again in the same spirit, and fortified by the promise which Lord Minto had on that occasion given them, that they insisted, and insisted successfully, on the principle of community representation being applied for their benefit in the Indian Councils Act of 1909.

A new generation of young Mahomedans had nevertheless been growing up who knew not Seyyid Ahmed and regarded his teachings as obsolete. The lessons which they had learnt from their Western education were not his.

They were much more nearly those that the more ardent spirits amongst the Hindus had imbibed, and they were ready to share with them the new creed of Indian Nationalism in its most extreme form. Other circ.u.mstances were tending to weaken the faith of the Mahomedan community in the goodwill, not only of the Government of India, but of the British Government. Even the most conservative Mahomedans were disappointed and irritated by the revision of the Part.i.tion of Bengal in 1911 when the predominantly Mahomedan Province of Eastern Bengal, created under Lord Curzon, was merged once more into a largely Hindu Bengal. The more advanced Mahomedans had been stirred by the revolutionary upheaval in Constantinople to seek contact with the Turkish Nationalist leaders who now ruled the one great Mahomedan power in the world, and they learnt from them to read into British foreign policy a purpose of deliberate hostility to Islam itself inspired by dread of the renewed vitality it might derive from the returning consciousness in many Mahomedan countries of their own independent nationhood. In that light they saw in the British occupation of Egypt, in the Anglo-French agreement with regard to Morocco and the Anglo-Russian agreement with regard to Persia, and last but not least, in the Italian invasion of Tripoli, the gradual development of a scheme in which all the powers of Christendom were involved for the extinction of the temporal power of Islam and, with it inevitably, according to orthodox doctrine, of its spiritual authority. The Ottoman Empire had been saved for a time by the protection extended to it for her own purposes by Germany who had alone stood between it and the disintegrating machinations of the ”European Concert” in Constantinople, bent on undermining the ascendancy of the ruling Mahomedan race by its menacing insistence on reforms for the benefit of the subject Christian races which could result only in the further aggrandis.e.m.e.nt of the independent Christian states already carved out of the Sultans' former dominions in Europe and in the introduction of similar processes even into their Asiatic dominions. The Balkan wars of 1912-1913 appeared to bear out the theory of a great European conspiracy directed against Turkey as ”the sword of Islam,” and whilst the sympathies of Indian Mahomedans of all cla.s.ses and schools of thought were naturally enlisted in favour of their Turkish co-religionists, the leaders of the advanced Mahomedan party themselves went to Constantinople in charge of the Red Crescent funds collected in India and got into close personal touch with the Turkish Nationalists who ruled in the name of the Sultan but derived their authority from the ”Committee of Union and Progress.” The same party had in the meantime gone a long way towards capturing the All-India Moslem League and bringing it into line with the advanced wing of the Indian National Congress. The fusion between the League and the Congress, which was still very repugnant both to the politically conservative and to the religious orthodox majority of the Indian Mahomedan community, was not completed, nor was the reunion of the Moderate and Extremist parties within the Congress itself, when India was caught up with Great Britain and most of the nations of the world into the whirlpool of the Great War on August 4, 1914.

CHAPTER VIII

THROUGH THE GREAT WAR TO THE GREAT INDIAN REFORM BILL

The genuine outburst of enthusiasm with which India, whether under direct British administration or under the autonomous rule of indigenous dynasties, responded to the call of the Empire at the beginning of the war came almost as a revelation to the British public generally who knew little about India, and the impression deepened when during the critical winter of 1914-1915 Indian troops stood shoulder to shoulder with British troops in the trenches to fill the gap which could not then have been filled from any other quarter. The loyalty displayed by the Indian princes and the great land-owning gentry and the old fighting races who had stood by the British for many generations was no surprise to Englishmen who knew India; but less expected was the immediate rally to the British cause of the new Western-educated cla.s.ses who, baulked of the political liberties which they regarded as their due, had seemed to be drifting hopelessly into bitter antagonism to British rule--a rally which at first included even those who, like Mr. Tilak, just released from his long detention at Mandalay, had taught hatred and contempt of the British rulers of India with a violence which implied, even when it was not definitely expressed, a fierce desire to sever the British connection altogether. In some cases the homage paid to the righteousness of the British cause may not have been altogether genuine, but with the great majority it sprang from one thought, well expressed by Sir Satyendra Sinha, one of the most gifted and patriotic of India's sons, in his presidential address to the Indian National Congress in 1915, that, at that critical hour in the world's history, it was for India ”to prove to the great British nation her grat.i.tude for peace and the blessings of civilisation secured to her under its aegis for the last hundred and fifty years and more.” The tales of German frightfulness and the guns of the _Emden_ bombarding Madras, which were an ominous reminder that a far worse fate than British rule might conceivably overtake India, helped to confirm Indians in the conviction that the British Empire and India's connection with it were well worth fighting for. This was one of Germany's many miscalculations, and the loyalty of the Indian people quite as much as the watchfulness of Government defeated the few serious efforts made by the disaffected emissaries and agents in whom she had put her trust to raise the standard of rebellion in India. All they could do was to feed the ”Indian Section” of the Berlin Foreign Office with c.o.c.k-and-bull stories of successful Indian mutinies and risings, which the German public, however gullible, ceased at last to swallow. Amongst the Indian Mahomedans there was a small pro-Turkish group, chiefly of an Extremist complexion, whose appeals to the religious solidarity of Islam might have proved troublesome when Turkey herself came into the war, had not Government deemed it advisable to put a stop to the mischievous activities of the two chief firebrands, the brothers Mahomed Ali and Shaukat Ali, by interning them under the discretionary powers conferred upon it by the Defence of India Act. Indian Mahomedan troops fought with the same gallantry and determination against their Turkish co-religionists in Mesopotamia and Palestine as against the German enemy in France and in Africa, and the Mahomedan Punjab answered even more abundantly than any other province of India every successive call for fresh recruits to replenish and strengthen the forces of the Empire.

The British Government and people responded generously to these splendid demonstrations of India's fundamental loyalty to the British cause and the British connection. The Prime Minister, Mr. Asquith, declared with special emphasis that in future Indian questions must be approached from ”a new angle of vision,” and Indians, not least the Western-educated cla.s.ses, construed his utterance into a pledge of the deepest significance. For two years India presented on everything that related to the war a front unbroken by any dissensions. The Imperial Legislative Council pa.s.sed, almost without a murmur even at its most drastic provisions, repugnant as they were to the more advanced Indian members, a Defence of India Act on the lines of the Defence of the Realm Act at home, when Lord Hardinge gave an a.s.surance that it was essential to the proper performance of her part in the war, and it voted spontaneously and unanimously a contribution of one hundred million pounds by the Indian Exchequer to the war expenditure of the Empire. India had thrilled with pride when, at Lord Hardinge's instance, her troops were first sent, not to act as merely subsidiary forces in subsidiary war-areas, but to share with British troops the very forefront of the battle in France, and she thrilled again when an Indian prince, the Maharajah of Bikanir, and Sir Satyendra Sinha, who was once more playing a conspicuous part in the political arena, and had been one of the oldest and ablest members of the moderate Congress party, were sent to represent India at the first Imperial War Conference in London, and took their seats side by side with British Ministers and with the Ministers of the self-governing Dominions.