Читать книгу The Central Legislature in British India, 192147 - Mohammad Rashiduzzaman - Страница 13

| xv →

PREFACE

Unfolding beyond a dissertation-based book, THE CENTRAL LEGISLATURE IN BRITISH INDIA 1921–47: Parliamentary Experiences under the Raj, is an exposé of the highest Indian legislative body of that epoch; it belongs to the larger genre of the British Indian narratives on the continuing constitutional encounters between the rulers and the ruled. What’s more, this book illuminates a neglected quarter of the past—the record of parliamentary practices and the representative institution-building under the British Raj. Definitely, the Central Legislature was the only acknowledged all-India forum where the Indian legislators and the Imperial Executive, time and again, met each other. Yet, even at the worst moments of the Indian members’ political disenchantment, the two flanks showed a modicum of mutual respect, indirect access to power and a share in policy-making typically over a strip of non-controversial subjects.

A matter of record: the Indian members boldly fought for their own turfs when the circumstances demanded for doing so, they did not hesitate to cross the verbal swords with their official counterparts. Not surprisingly, the square-shooter lawyer-politicians inside the legislative rostrum did not offer unruffled logistics for the official members who represented the government and defended their ramparts in that arena. Inside the meandering corridors of ← xv | xvi → power, the Governor General and his Executive Council were not accountable to the Central Legislature; it was patently less than a sovereign parliament. It never rose above its ceiling set by the Colonial juggernaut. Even when they decided to work with it since 1921, the Indian politicians apparently did not have any illusion about the legislative body’s ultimate weakness before the overriding executive. Indeed, the Indian politicians, both inside the legislatures and outside endured a sense of betrayal by the British Imperial Rulers. Conceivably, the British Government promised to offer India an installment of self-government matching the Dominion Status enjoyed by Canada and Australia, as recognition of its sacrifices and support during the WWI. But the Government of India Act 1919 that came into force in 1921 only offered indirect “association” and “influence” through elected non-official members in the Central Legislative Assembly accompanied by a “strange dyarchy” that tendered limited autonomy over a few provincial subjects.

Nevertheless, it was a “center of resistance” against the Central Executive and the stage for constitutional struggle against the Colonial hegemony. Noticeably, it was the beginning of a dent on the old Vice-regal regime, credibly, a majestically impregnable system now facing the parliamentary slings and arrows, in the country’s uppermost legislative podium. Over the stretch of history, neither the Indian legislators nor the Governor General-led regime absolutely ditched that legislative dais even at the peak of the unprecedented anti-British non-cooperation and nationalist campaigns, Hindu-Muslim tumults, periodic terrorist outbursts, World War II, devastating famine in Bengal and the outright “Quit-India” movement to end the foreign control. The Central Legislature had its ups and downs in its aggravation. Different Governor Generals too had different rhythms of their treatment of the legislature during their respective tenures. The reality was a paradoxical interface between the eloquent Indian legislators and the Governor General’s Executive Council, which did not easily nudge. Nevertheless, both sides jolted each other depending on time, circumstances and personalities on the fore.

Amazingly, the Indian lawmakers survived the seismic tides of history of their time; it also demonstrated the quasi-parliament’s institutional resilience. As an institution, the Central Legislature did not collapse under the stupendous Vice-regal authority or during the stunning pro-Home Rule struggle in the streets. Those demonstrators cared little for the predetermined outlets of grievances in the legislative platform. Though the Governor General was above the legislative compulsion with his endowed special powers, he did not readily and dramatically silence the lawmakers from saying what they wanted ← xvi | xvii → to speak. Remarkably, the Indian politicians’ buoyancy was their forte against the British Raj and their account needs to be told in more than one forum. Once a leader of the Swarajist group, the virtual legislative wing of the Indian National Congress Party in the 1920s publicly warned that they came to the Central Assembly only to “break the system from within.” But they stayed on and nonetheless played a constructive role inside the legislative chambers. Only a few are possibly aware now what the Indian members could or couldn’t accomplish in the legislature at the cusp of the most trying times in the sub-continent’s political history.

Sadly, the recount of Colonial India, brilliantly recorded by numerous outstanding historians from all over the world, stated very little about the legislative encounters during the British rule. Their consistent narratives are more about the nationalist movements and host of other socio-economic issues spread across the panorama. Few of them explored how the Indian lawmakers, both at the central and provincial legislatures, delineated their restraints and hauled the independence struggle inside the legislative platform and adroitly battled with the keepers of the Raj and even with their local promoters. Ordinary readers or historians are less familiar with a bunch of outstanding Indian representatives who rocked the legislative chambers with high oratory and statesman-like speeches while the anti-British roil and communal blood-letting continued in the Indian cities and towns.

Why did the Central Legislature, the modern Indian Parliament’s earlier predecessor, by and large, escape the deserving intellectual as well as popular concentration in independent India and Pakistan? Within the limits of this preface, I can only outline the answer to such a seminal query and that’s what makes this volume meaningful. Habitually, the post-colonial narratives are dominated by the outstanding leaders who become larger than history. Ordinarily they bypass the less flamboyant constitutional experiences and institutional development of the pre-independence days. Under charismatic Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru (Nehru) and his luminous cohorts who took up the independent Indian leadership, the Indian Parliament paled into the background and it was apparently less than the “grand inquest” and the “mother of all national policy making.” In Pakistan, during M. A. Jinnah’s brief stint as the Governor General, the new National Assembly was overshadowed. In post-independent India, there is a tsunami of books on Gandhi, Nehru and most other nationalist personalities as well as the Indian National Congress. But only a few volumes came out on the Indian Parliament and its political inheritance excluding, perhaps, the solitary scholars who authored them: one ← xvii | xviii → such innovative academic was late Professor Morris-Jones; he was my Ph.D. supervisor.

The British Indian Central government, virtually a unitary political system, never had the equivalent of an elected/nominated Indian prime minister or such Indian ministers who were answerable to the Central Assembly. However, most provinces had popularly chosen premiers and ministers accountable to their respective legislatures since 1937. A few provinces had prominent leaders in charge of the new provincial autonomy under the Reforms of the Government of India Act, 1935. Bengal, for example, had A. K. Fazlul Huq, a populist leader, as its first premier in 1937. He attracted national attention in the wake of catastrophic events in India. As a result, the provincial legislatures and their parliamentary experiences attracted relatively more interest from the scholars, historians and even novelists. Another likely explanation: the Western social scientists, historians and their South Asian adherents, who otherwise enriched the Indian political genre, had been more tuned to research on the perceived dichotomy over tradition versus modernity in the post-colonial subcontinent. Political modernity in South Asia, as short steps of representative institutions, is both a colonial and post-colonial phenomenon. With representative institutions like the old central and provincial legislatures, the British imperialist experiences were not monolithic. However the intellectual and popular attention has been more focused on South Asia’s post-independent political modernization: India’s Colonial era’s representative institution-building experiences, with a few exceptions, were over and over sidestepped.

The extent of influence that the Indian legislators could exercise against an enigmatic, not-easily-responsive executive, was only as good as the Central Legislature’s demarcated terrain. They tried several devices to pressurize the executive to respond to them. Broadly, they staged their struggle in a peaceful manner—they were not the populist boycotts or violent street stir up: they used legitimate parliamentary questions and adjournment motions to drive their demands. And the walkout from the floor as a group was the ultimate form of nonviolently demonstrated rage against the imperial government. But it was not a daily event. Moving amendments, sometimes too many of them, to rein in the executive-steered legislative proposals were the Indian legislators’ preferred contrivance. On an annual average, the Central Legislature passed 27 bills during its tenure from 1921 to 1947. It was a substantial output in Colonial India even compared to the provincial legislatures that apparently had more powers over the so-called “transferred subjects” since 1937. Except ← xviii | xix → the non-controversial and consolidating bills, each legislative measure, affecting the life, liberty and the daily grind of average citizens, was hotly debated in the committees and the legislative floors.

By and large, the institutional influence of the colonial period is still entrenched between the available storylines of British India; the avenues of those ventures are yet to be fully unveiled. Several years ago, a Ph.D. student at a Canadian University whom I met at the Asian Studies Annual Conference told me that, with some difficulty, he got hold of an earlier version of this book from one source. He was impressed that it was one of the rare studies of British India’s highest law-making establishment, the forerunner of the modern Indian Parliament. Contrary to the paucity of legislative studies, there are numerous studies of the previous Indian Civil Service, for example: the predecessor of the Indian Administrative Services that still essentially maintained the old British model of a generalist and non-political bureaucracy. One exception was Profess W. H. Morris-Jones’ The Indian Parliament. In the introductory chapter, he acknowledged the legislative experiences that the post-independence Indian national parliament diligently inherited from its earlier predecessors. This book, in its former and in the current new edition, partially fills the knowledge gap about the old Central Legislature and its impact on the gamut of British Indian politics. Also it modestly contributes to the larger, popular and even the controversial variety of writings on the Indian Colonial experiences.

In my post-doctoral academic journey, I veered away from continuing the legislative research. One exception was a study of Pakistan’s parliament under the executive-controlled Ayub regime that was published as “The National Assembly of Pakistan under the 1962 Constitution” in the Pacific Affairs, University of British Columbia, (Winter), 1969–70. The parliaments under the military-supported governments in Pakistan and later in Bangladesh were constrained in the exercise of their power since the executive was not in their direct control except in a few defined areas. In the second half of 1960s, when I was in the middle of studying the Pakistan’s National Assembly, I could not help feeling that the parliament in a way resembled the previous Central Legislature’s tapered path under the Colonial supremacy. However, my enduring research interest in South Asian politics and the continued teaching in comparative political systems kept me up to date about the institutional growth in both developed and developing countries. Whenever I compared my historical study of the old Indian legislature with the modern Indian and other parliaments in South Asia, I could easily reckon the critical differences between ← xix | xx → a sovereign legislature and the quasi-parliaments in the colonial regimes that gradually faded away since the end of the World War II.

Over the decades, I noticed a remarkable shift in the composition and quality of the parliamentary leadership. In India and the neighboring South Asian countries, the old grip of the lawyer-politicians has sharply declined—they have been largely replaced by the businessmen and a sprinkling of other professions. Furthermore, the deliberative excellence has gone downhill in most of those parliaments on account of several perceptible reasons: lack of debating skills, poor understanding of the legislative procedures, irresistible partisanship, peripatetic attendance in the legislative sittings, meager knowledge of technical and fiscal matters, to name a few of those shortcomings. As I recall my readings of the Central Legislature’s old debates, they were typically sharper, well informed and often daring though occasionally rhetoric had the upper hand in their deliberations. The key Indian leaders in the erstwhile Legislative Assembly refused to hunker down under their perimeters. And then, most of the South Asian parliaments, even in the cabinet form of democracies, have waned in their stand against the executive power abuses. Worse still is the growing unpopularity of legislators virtually all over the world. There is a perceptible feeling that the legislators are, largely, more committed to enjoy the privileges of power, and once they are elected, they are isolated and lose contact with their constituents.

In the late 1960s, Dr. (Mrs.) Najma Choudhury, a former student and later a colleague in Political Science at the Dhaka University, Bangladesh was then preparing her thesis proposal for her anticipated Ph.D. studies at the University of London. At that time, she shared her dissertation ideas on the former East Pakistan Legislative Assembly with me. Her work was later published as The Legislative Process in Bangladesh: Politics and Functioning of the East Bengal Legislature 1947–58, Dhaka University Press, 1980. Dr. Nizam Ahmed, another former student from Dhaka University, now a Professor at the Chittagong University, Bangladesh occasionally shared his research when he was working on the Bangladeshi legislature. His, The Parliament of Bangladesh, Ashgate, 2002, is the classic study of that national legislature’s tortuous path over decades. There are possibly other studies on the subject, but those are the works with which I had a wisp of academic involvement.

May be with a little nostalgia, I feel that the elected members of the preceding Central Legislature were typically keener to represent their constituencies. They did their homework earnestly even when their own ability was still marginalized by the foreign predicators. The pre-1947 Indian ← xx | xxi → Legislature, no doubt a Colonial establishment, was, to a varying degree, the “mother-ship” of legislative institutions in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and numerous other British-colonized countries. Unlike the post-independence Indian Parliament’s stable growth, the Bangladeshi and Pakistani parliaments suffered from the imperious charisma of the national leaders, unmitigated partisanship, extra-constitutional interruptions, rhetorical overtone and lack of sound and continuous legislative traditions, skills and leadership.

The new edition of this volume after more than half a century since the dissertation was finished in 1964 and published as a book in 1965 is an intellectual and emotional homecoming for me in more than one way. It brings me back, in some degree, to my old passion for legislative study. Happily, this is an opportunity for a fresh look at my old findings and narrative—I have done this here and in a few subsequent chapters including the refurbished conclusion. In the new preface here, blended with the tone of an epilogue, I have added an overview of the British Indian legislature in comparative perspectives with the post-Colonial parliaments in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. I did not try that in this volume’s earlier version. But this occasion also ushers an undeniable surfeit of personal memories of my university days in England deeply occupied with my study. Almost consistently, there is an individual toll in course of a doctoral research that I personally experienced as a Ph.D. student and also a young man with a wife and a new born child—Lilya, my eldest daughter, was born in England within a little over a year of my studentship there. With my pressure for daily library work, class, writing and meeting deadlines with my supervisor, I had little time for my family. Maliha, my wife carried the brunt of raising a child, shopping, cooking and feeding the family for which I cannot make enough acknowledgments to her. And whatever credit, I earned for this work in the past and whatever appreciation, I might deserve for its new version, I would share it with my wife, no matter if I pay her formal tributes here or elsewhere.

Sometime after my return from England, possibly in 1965, I met poet Benazir Ahmad, an elderly gentleman, in fact my wife’s relative; he was a member of the Pakistan National Assembly at that time. When I told him about my thesis on the British Indian Central Legislature and that I just started working on Pakistan’s National Assembly, he was very happy. When I was complaining about consecutively working on two restricted legislatures, in Colonial India as well as in Pakistan, the gentleman, a former anti-British rebel in his youth and an accomplished writer, counseled me that even a handicapped legislature was, at times, better than no legislature at all! He ← xxi | xxii → encouraged me to study the Pakistan National Assembly even though at that nick of time, it was dwarfed by an undeniable executive dominance. He was glad to receive a copy of my published thesis. What’s more, he told me that he made a proposal to the then Pakistan National Assembly to establish a good research library for reference purposes.

Two important feedbacks on this work are worth mentioning in this Preface for the book’s new edition: When I returned to Dhaka in 1964, I was invited by the local Asiatic Society to make a presentation on my Ph.D. dissertation and I accepted the invitation. In course of my speech, I used the term Muhammadan when talking about the Muslim members of the legislature and the Muslim constituencies were too officially listed as the Muhammadan electorate. Most Muslims were then elected from the separate communally designated seats. One senior Professor of Islamic Studies at the Dhaka University made a serious objection to the use of the term Muhammadan: it was wrong to categorize the Muslims under that banner since they pray to Allah only and not to Prophet Muhammad, he reminded. He admonished me for using the Muhammadan badge for the Muslims; it was routinely done by the Western Orientalist scholars out of ignorance and disregard, the faculty insisted. Personally, I had little problem in respecting this critique, but, as a matter of documents, the term Muhammadan continued in the Central Legislature’s debates and other records in British India. As a result, I was unable to change it in my text.

Another opportunity to draw on this book and the research behind it came in 1975 when I was invited to Pakistan’s Islamabad University’s Commemorative Conference on M. A. Jinnah, the acclaimed founder of Pakistan. I was asked to speak on Jinnah’s role in the Central Legislative Assembly, which I did in person. One of the anecdotes I shared in my seminar was a recollection of my 1963 interview with Lord M. Hailey, once upon a time an outstanding member of the Viceroy’s Executive Council in India. One of the episodes he remembered about Jinnah was his sharp skill in the legislative debates. Jinnah was precise in his speech and, consistently, he picked up such points on which the official members of the Central Assembly, time and again, found themselves on the defensive. Few of his colleagues would miss Jinnah’s speech and they would always take notes of what he delivered, Lord Hailey reminisced. In sharing that one-time interview with the audience in the seminar, I was throwing light on the bizarre relationship between the non-official Indian legislators and the executive members in the Central Legislature of the bye gone days who were not accountable to the legislative body. ← xxii | xxiii →

When I returned to the Dhaka University, then East Pakistan in 1964, the “publish or perish” pressure obliged me to bring out my Ph.D. thesis in Dhaka with a local publisher. But I did it in a rush, with a slice of disappointment, without much of revision, polishing and serious editing even though a few generous people helped me towards the publication. They were acknowledged in its first edition and I have later reprinted it here as a matter of a chronological testimony of this book. The limited printing of the book was, however, stuck in poor marketing: I thought about a revised second edition, a wish that is fulfilled now after 54 years in hibernation! Meanwhile, in 1965, my thesis earned the Lord Campion Award of the British Hansard Society for Parliamentary Government, for its contribution towards the “understanding of a representative institution”.

I am indeed delighted with this edition of the book and what I have been able to append to the earlier publication are summed up below:

• I have added a fresh comment or two to most of the chapters except my old Preface and a Foreword from my doctoral supervisor late Professor W. H. Morris-Jones for whose profound intellectual wisdom, I have maintained a life-long respect and gratitude.

• I have nearly rewritten the Conclusion Chapter (XI) with a new voice on quite a few points.

• At several chapters, I have changed or consolidated numerous sentences and restored the slips caused during the transcribing process from the original volume.

• The earlier graduate research done in England is intact in its detailed description laid across the chapters dealing with the Central Legislature’s structural-functional working—the original focus of this study. But I have added flashes of new perceptions drawn from my diverse research on Pakistan, Bangladesh, British India and Colonial Bengal over the last few decades. Rewritten comments and a few additions are more embedded in the Chapters VI, VII, IX and XI.

• I have added fresh points at different spots, but I did not radically change the original contents and quality of the chapters; Chapter I establishes the key stages of legislative history from 1861 to 1921, and there was not much of recent findings to add there. Chapter II puts the Central Legislature in the backdrop of Indian politics from 1921 to 1947—it falls in line with Chapters VI and IX, which too, in different ways, examine the Indian Legislature’s political relevance to the emerging ← xxiii | xxiv → nationalist campaigns, conflicting political trends, ventilation of grievances and the obdurate Hindu-Muslim discords. Chapter III lays out the legislative body’s electoral setting and Chapters V to VIII and X examine the composition, leadership, professional credentials and the social background of the legislators, law-making process, the institutional features and the relations between its two chambers. In addition, Chapter XI (Conclusion) sums up the achievements as well as the limitations of the Central Legislature, the Colonial India’s summit parliamentary institution.

• Partly based on my post-doctoral and more contemporary works, I have added that the political groupings in the Central Legislature, especially from the 1930s, reflected the growing Hindu-Muslim conflicts that ultimately catapulted to the 1947 division of India. Both the Hindu and Muslim religiosity and their respective communal colors found their expressions in the legislative chambers from 1926 as detailed in Chapters II, IX and XI (Conclusion).

• In course of a three-generational narrative in a village in Colonial Bengal, I found that my family elders’ remembrances about the Hindu-Muslim identity conflicts in the early decades of the 20th Century resonated in the larger provincial and central political forums: strikingly, some of those echoes were heard in New Delhi’s legislative floor long before the communal disputes transitioned themselves into a demand for Pakistan. I have touched on a few of such supplementary versions across this book’s couple of chapters; those are among the new elements added to this revised volume.

• Chapter VII’s title has been modified and there is a stroke of new analysis of the old data on the non-official members’ law-making achievements.

• The former statistical tables did not undergo any changes, but I tried my best to minimize the typographical errors, which were further checked during the polishing stage. As of this writing, I don’t have the resources to go back to the previous legislative research that I did in England in the 1960s.