Lord Sinha of Raipur and the Government of India Act 1919

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Library Briefing

Summary

23 December 2019 marks 100 years since the Government of India Act 1919 received royal assent. The Act sought to institute the declarations of Edwin Montagu, then Secretary of State for India, made on 20 August 1917. In these, he asserted that the objective of British rule in India would be “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”. The main elements of the Act were:

• Transfer of some functions to provincial government, with provincial government also responsible for raising the necessary taxes to fund them. • Introduction of a system of “dyarchy” within provincial governments. Provincial governments were split into two sections, with a governor presiding over both. One, appointed by the Crown and responsible ultimately to the Secretary of State for India, was concerned with “reserved subjects”. The other consisted of ministers appointed by the Governor from the elected members of the provincial legislative council. This body would be responsible for “transferred subjects”. • Several areas, such as Bihar and Orissa and the Punjab, were given a governor and a legislative council each. The size of provincial legislative councils was increased and at least 70 percent of members were required to be elected. • Within central government there was no dyarchy. The Governor-General’s executive council was enlarged, and the legislature itself was remodelled and made bi-cameral. • A commission to examine the workings of the constitution was to be appointed by Parliament after ten years, to report on whether the extent of self-government granted was to be extended, modified or restricted.

This briefing provides information about the origin of the Government of India Act 1919; an overview of some of the key provisions of the 1919 Act; and a biographical profile of the man responsible for piloting the Act through its Lords stages, the first Indian to receive a peerage, Lord Sinha of Raipur.

Heather Evennett ǀ 13 December 2019

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Background

On 23 December 1919, the Government of India Act received royal assent.1 The Act had been foreshadowed by the Secretary of State for India, Edwin Montagu. In August 1917, he declared the objective of British rule in India would be “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”.2

Building on this announcement, in late 1917 Montagu headed a delegation to India, working with the Indian Viceroy, Lord Chelmsford, to formulate proposals about Indian government and administration. The resulting Montagu-Chelmsford report, as it became known, was presented to the cabinet in May 1918.

Following discussion of the report at cabinet, two committees, chaired by Lord Southborough, former permanent under-secretary of state for the colonies, were sent to India. The committees sought to demarcate electorates and also to identify what powers should be “reserved” and which “transferred” in the new system of government proposed.

A bill was then drafted and was submitted, together with reports of the two committees, to a joint committee presided over by the Earl of Selborne.3 Introducing the bill into the Lords on 11 December 1919, the Under Secretary of State for India, Lord Sinha, noted “the immense amount of care and critical examination from every possible standpoint” that had gone into the bill.4

Outlining the intentions of the bill whilst opening the second reading debate in the Lords on 11 December 1919, Lord Sinha noted:

There may be those amongst your Lordships who think that the passage of this bill will not advance India’s welfare, who think that the system of government which has, with little essential change and with so many beneficial results, endured through the changes of the nineteenth century, should be continued, unchanged in essentials, through the twentieth century, and that the time has not arrived to sever the leading strings. Believe me, my Lords, that is a view which, if you wish to secure a sense of gratitude and contentment amongst the populations of India, can no longer be maintained. The whole course of your administration of India, the whole of its fruitful results, culminating in the recognition which you have accorded during the past five years to India as a real partner in the Empire, have produced expectations (and I say justified expectations) that you will now agree to treat her as having outgrown her political infancy […]

I believe that this bill will enable the British Parliament to adopt that attitude towards India, and I have sufficient faith in the character of my countrymen, and in the essential wisdom and justice of the Mother of Parliaments, to believe that the results of this measure will be to inaugurate a relationship between them which will enable India in due time to reach the full stature of a prosperous, loyal, and grateful partner in the privileges and duties which belong to the great world-family of the British Empire.5

1 HL Hansard, 23 December 1919, col 537. 2 B Metcalf and T Metcalf, A Concise History of Modern India, 2013, p 167. 3 P E Roberts, History of British India, 1952, p 581. 4 HL Hansard, 11 December 1919, cols 941–2. 5 ibid, cols 961–2.

Provisions of the Act

The main elements of the Act are outlined below:6

• Central government remained wholly under British control and retained power over areas such as defence. Provincial governments were transferred responsibility for areas such as education and agriculture, and also the responsibility for raising the necessary taxes to fund them. • Within provincial governments a system known as “dyarchy” was introduced. Dyarchy involved provincial governments being split into two sections, with the governor presiding over both. One, responsible ultimately to the Secretary of State for India, was concerned with “reserved subjects”. This body was made up of two to four members of the governor’s executive council. The other consisted of ministers appointed by the governor from the elected members of the provincial legislative council. This body was in charge of “transferred subjects”. Reserved subjects came under the heading of law and order and included justice, the police, land revenue, and irrigation. The transferred subjects included education, agriculture, public health and local self-government. • Several areas, such as Bihar and Orissa and the Punjab, were given a governor and a council each. • The size of provincial legislative councils was increased and at least 70 percent of members were required to be elected. Councils were given the power to vote and withhold supplies, although the governor could demand grants for reserved subjects if he certified that the expenditure was essential. After four years the councils had the right to elect their own president. • Within central government there was no dyarchy and the Governor-General, also known as the Viceroy, was directly responsible to the Secretary of State and Parliament. The executive council was enlarged, and the legislature itself was remodelled and made bi-cameral. The upper chamber, called the council of state, was largely elected, with a franchise based on a high property qualification. The lower chamber, the legislative assembly, was 106 elected members and 40 nominated, with a wider franchise than the upper chamber. • A commission was to be appointed by Parliament after ten years to examine the working of the Indian constitution and to report on whether the degree of government granted was to be extended, modified or restricted.

The commission promised in the Act was eventually appointed on 7 November 1927 “in reply to constant pressure”.7 The commission was made up of seven members under the joint chairmanship of the Liberal former Home Secretary, Sir John Simon, and Clement Attlee, the future prime minister.

It arrived in India in 1928 to consider further reform of India’s constitution and the impact of the 1919 Act but was met with “animosity” due to its exclusion of Indian members, and was boycotted.8

6 Encyclopaedia Britannica, ‘Dyarchy’, accessed 30 November 2019; and P E Roberts, History of British India, 1952, pp 582–4. 7 P E Roberts, History of British India, 1952, p 598. 8 B Metcalf and T Metcalf, A Concise History of Modern India, 2013, p 190.

The historians Barbara and Thomas Metcalf note:

[T]he commissioners were all members of the British Parliament. Across an extraordinarily wide spectrum of Indian opinion, from Congress and the Muslim League to Hindu nationalists and modern Liberals, this all-British commission carried with it the implication that Indians were incapable of deciding their own fate, that they were still children who needed all-knowing parents to legislate for them. This blunder set in motion the second great cycle of Gandhian non-cooperation, which lasted, with a brief truce in 1931, from 1930 to 1934.9

The Simon Commission published a two-volume report in 1930. The report argued for greater provincial autonomy in India, whilst retaining direct contact between the British crown and the Indian states. However, prior to its publication, a declaration had been made in October 1929 which stated that dominion status was to be the goal of Indian constitutional development, thus outdating some of the report’s conclusions.10

Lord Sinha of Raipur

Notable during the passage of the Government of India Bill through Parliament was the role of the Lord Sinha of Raipur, the Under Secretary of State for India from 1919–20.

The first Indian Peer, thought to be the first peer from a non-European background, 11 Sir Satyendra Prasanna Sinha was elevated to the peerage, as Lord Sinha of Raipur, by George V on 14 February 1919.12

Commenting on the background to the peerage and his role in the passage of the Act, the Times noted in 1928:

He had given Mr Montagu more whole-hearted and unequivocal support in the details of the reform policy envisaged in the Montagu-Chelmsford report than any other prominent Indian. The Secretary of State naturally felt it desirable to associate this acceptable and eloquent Indian directly with himself in piloting the reform bill 1919 through Parliament. […] In order that he might conduct the Bill in the Lords he was created Baron Sinha of Raipur, and was so far the only Indian to be raised to the peerage, while he was the second Indian to be called to the Privy Council, the first having been Mr Ameer Ali. He conducted the bill through the upper house, where he was confronted with the opposition of several ex-Indian governors, with modesty, skill and judgment.13

This view of his contributions was echoed by the Earl of Selborne, who noted at third reading of the

9 B Metcalf and T Metcalf, A Concise History of Modern India, 2013, p 190. 10 Encyclopaedia Britannica, ‘Simon Commission’, accessed 5 December 2019. 11 House of Lords Library, Ethnic and Religious Diversity in the House of Lords, 5 November 2019, p 4. 12 House of Lords, Proceedings before the Committee for Privileges on the Petition of Aroon Kumar Sinha Praying for a Writ of Summons to Parliament, 25 July 1939. 13 Times, ‘Obituaries: Lord Sinha’, 6 March 1928.

bill in the House of Lords in 1919:

I should like to congratulate my noble friend Lord Sinha upon the way in which he has carried this bill through the House […] And also on the fact that it has fallen to his lot to be Under- Secretary for India at this particular moment. I think he is the first British subject of Indian race who has been a member of this House, and that he should have taken his seat here at this juncture, with the object of carrying this bill through the House with the skill that he has displayed, is a landmark in the connection between the British Parliament and India. I can only express the hope that my noble friend will be spared for many years to serve his own country at home in making this bill that great success which all the friends of India and this country pray for it.14

Early Life and Career

Born in June 1864, in the small village of Raipur, Lord Sinha “owed nothing to early advantages or family influence”.15 The youngest son of a “middle-ranking bureaucrat”, he passed the entrance examination for Birbhum Zilla school and in 1878 entered Presidency College at the University of Calcutta with a scholarship.16

In 1881 he left for England without taking a degree, and although he reportedly arrived in England with insufficient means, “the scholarships and prizes he won relieved him of financial difficulty”.17 In 1886 he was called to the Bar by Lincoln’s Inn, soon after returning to Calcutta where he began to practise as a barrister.

Sinha rose to be leading junior and “one of the foremost figures at the Calcutta Bar”.18 In 1903 he was appointed standing counsel to the Government of India, a position only once before held by an Indian. He continued his rise in 1905 when he was appointed to officiate as Advocate-General of Bengal, and was confirmed to his post in 1908, the first Indian to receive the post on a permanent basis.

Governor-General’s Executive Council and Indian National Congress

In 1909, the then Secretary of State for India, Viscount Morley of Blackburn, appointed him to be legal member of the Governor-General’s executive council, also known as the Viceroy’s executive council. The idea of making the Governor-General’s executive council accessible to Indians was reportedly met with concern from both the Marquess of Lansdowne and Lord Curzon of Kedleston, two former Viceroys, in addition to King Edward himself.19 However, Lord Morley “strongly backed by the Viceroy, and with a unanimous cabinet, gained his point”.20 In the event, Mr Sinha did not stay in post beyond 18 months, resigning when the Earl of Minto’s term as Viceroy of India came to an end in November 1910.

14 HL Hansard, 18 December 1919, cols 439–40. 15 Times, ‘Obituaries: Lord Sinha’, 6 March 1928. 16 S V FitzGerald and T Raychaudhuri, ‘Sinha, Satyendra Prasanno, first Baron Sinha (1863–1928)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 23 September 2004. 17 ibid. 18 Times, ‘Obituaries: Lord Sinha’, 6 March 1928. 19 ibid. 20 ibid.

The role in the Governor-General’s executive council had led to “heavy pecuniary loss and the necessity […] of spending a large part of the year at Simla away from his home and all his friends and connections in Bengal”.21 Upon his resignation he returned to the Bar.

In 1915, the Indian National Congress elected Sinha to be its president. A “moderate nationalist”, in his presidential address to the Congress he put forward a plea for a declaration of the ultimate goal of British policy in India.22 The declaration by Montagu, then Secretary of State for India, in August 1917 regarding British aims, was partly in response to that plea.23

War Cabinet, Privy Council and House of Lords

Although Mr Sinha joined the Bengal executive council in 1917, he was almost immediately summoned to assist Edwin Montagu, then Secretary of State for India, in Britain. He went on to represent India in the Imperial Conference and was a member of the Imperial War Cabinet.24 The Imperial Conference had been established in the nineteenth century as an opportunity to discuss topics of general imperial interest. The conference was essentially a meeting of governments, with each self-governing unit in the Empire represented by its prime minister and one other member of his cabinet. Each country had one vote.25

The Imperial War Cabinet was “an entirely unknown organ, unknown to the constitution of Great Britain or of the Empire”, which was set up by Lloyd George in 1917.26 The cabinet was made up of prime ministers of the Dominions and representatives from India, alongside a British war cabinet of five. It was summoned to discuss urgent questions affecting the war.

In addition, Sinha attended the peace conference in Paris in 1919, to agree peace terms following the conclusion of the First World War, the Times noted:

He was thus the only Indian commoner to share in Imperial and inter-Allied deliberations on the War and on the Peace terms.27

In 1918, Sinha was appointed a King’s Counsel, the first time the honour had been conferred on a barrister of Indian birth or practice.28 In 1919, he was sworn in to the privy council and made parliamentary Under Secretary of State for India. He was raised to the peerage in February 1919 as Lord Sinha of Raipur.

21 Times, ‘Obituaries: Lord Sinha’, 6 March 1928. 22 S V FitzGerald and T Raychaudhuri, ‘Sinha, Satyendra Prasanno, first Baron Sinha (1863–1928)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 23 September 2004. 23 ibid. 24 Who Was Who, ‘Sinha: 1st Baron cr 1919, of Raipur (Satyendra Prassano Sinha)’, 1 December 2007. 25 R M Dawson, ‘The Imperial Conference’, The Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science, February 1937, vol 3 no 1, p 23. 26 ibid, p 25. 27 Times, ‘Obituaries: Lord Sinha’, 6 March 1928. 28 ibid.

Later Years

After the passage of the Government of India Act, in 1920 Lord Sinha returned to India. There, he took the post of governor of Bihar and Orissa under the new constitution, the first Indian to assume the headship of a province.29

He held the post for eleven months. He reportedly suffered a breakdown in 1921, and spent the next four years nursing his health.30 In the latter part of 1925, he again began to interest himself in public life, contributing a series of articles to The Bengalee newspaper that argued for the cause of political moderation.31 In 1926, he returned to England where he was appointed to the judicial committee of the privy council in London. However, he was twice forced in winter to return to India due to his health, and during the second of these trips he died, on 4 March 1928, at Berhampore in Bengal.32 P E Roberts, in his history of India, has argued that Lord Sinha’s death “was a great loss to the British Raj and to the peoples of India. The list of great offices he held both in his own country and at the centre of the empire is a measure of the vast distance that India has travelled in political evolution during the last thirty years”.33

The Times, meanwhile, commented:

He was the first Indian to enter the executive council of the Viceroy, and so far the only Indian to become a K.C., to be a member of the home ministry, to be raised to the British peerage and to be appointed a Governor of British India. He was the second Indian to be appointed to the judicial committee. His career was thus one of high achievement, which is without parallel in the history of British and Indian relations.34

29 Times, ‘Obituaries: Lord Sinha’, 6 March 1928. 30 ibid. 31 S V FitzGerald and T Raychaudhuri, ‘Sinha, Satyendra Prasanno, first Baron Sinha (1863–1928)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 23 September 2004. 32 ibid. 33 P E Roberts, History of British India, 1952, p 584. 34 Times, ‘Obituaries: Lord Sinha’, 6 March 1928.