Page:White Paper on Indian States (1950).pdf/69

   

148. The institution of Indian Rulership as it existed under British rule was essentially based on the personal autocracy of the Ruler. Unlike the official autocracy, by which British India was governed before the Montague-Chelmsford reforms, and which was exercised indirectly by the official agents of a distant authority, the Ruler was on the spot and his rule was direct and personal. Subject to the over-riding authority of the Paramount Power and, to a certain extent in a limited number of cases, to the prescriptive rights and privileges of the nobles of his class, the Ruler was virtually the State. He was the source of all authority in theory as well as in practice. In his discretion he sometimes chose to rule through Ministers or Advisers; at any time he was free to remove them and to take up the reins of the administration himself. Several Rulers administered their States directly, and some of them did so with ability and to the benefit of their people.

149. The growth of parliamentary institutions in the Provinces heightened the contrast between the form of their government and the Governments of States and stimulated, during the last phase of British rule in India, some activity in the direction of the establishment of representative institutions in the States. However, the approach of the Rulers to this vital problem was half-hearted and the advance in the direction of the constitutional reform of States was halting and tardy. Representative Assemblies and Councils were established only in certain progressive States. These bodies met rarely and for only short periods; they were consulted more as a matter of courtesy than of right, and their advice was not binding on the Ruler. These institutions served to create an illusion of democracy while retaining the autocratic set-up with the help of large blocks o£ members nominated by the executive. "The point of advance", writes Coupland, "reached by 1937—to speak only of the more progressive States—lay roughly between the points reached by the Provinces in 1909 and 1919". The period between 1937 and 1947 was one of political stalemate; the political conditions in States in 1947, therefore, showed no appreciable improvement on Coupland's assessment of the situation in 1937. The position on the eve of transfer of power to India was that in most cases autocracy continued unmasked and in a few States it was covered by a thin veneer of democratic facade On the whole, the Ruler's absolutism was the dominant note of the polity of States. 