Page:White Paper on Indian States (1950).pdf/143

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247. The problem of Indian States was the most difficult of the legacies of British Rule which devolved on independent India. For over a century the States had dotted the political map of India as disruptive patches retarding the political and economic integration of the life of her people. When the British appeared in India, the Moghul Empire, which had held the States together, was disintegrating and the States were swaying in the wind of history. With the establishment of the British as the dominant power in India a strange process overtook the States. The representatives of the powerful East India Company rescued a number of States from the wreckage that followed the collapse of the Moghul Empire; some Princes were lifted from chaos; others were confirmed in their possessions whether acquired legitimately or otherwise; yet others were sent into oblivion. The Subsidiary System of alliance imposed on the States broke their internal strength and independence. The authority and prestige of the larger of the States was further undermined by the stabilisation of the position of the small feudatory States and by the interposal of British power as the supreme arbiter between them and the parent States. Having thus broken the strength of the States, the dominant power then set itself to guarantee and perpetuate their existence. So effective was the enforcement of the Pax Britannica, and so abrupt its effect that, guarded against the normal evolutionary and revolutionary processes, the States assumed in the first quarter of the 19th century the "appearance of a sea suddenly petrified in a condition of stormy unrest and disquietude". Firmly set under the external pressure of a resourceful foreign power, the monarchical system in India, which was as old as India's history itself, shifted from its traditional moral plane and lost its own innate strength. Inevitably the Indian Rulership turned into a product and a prop of British Imperialism.  

248. It was one of the principal contradictions of the British rule in India, that while in England and elsewhere, feudalisma had died long ago, in India feudal rights continued to be guaranteed as a British obligation. It was a rather curious notion of treaty obligations that engagements entered into a long time ago on the fields of battle or immediately afterwards between rival commanders or their chiefs should last for ever and hold up the march of history. 