Anglo-American Establishment by Carroll Quigley

Author:Carroll Quigley
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Tags: Cecil Rhodes, green_pill_short, Royal Institute of International Afffairs, Milner
ISBN: 9781939438041
Publisher: Dauphin Publications Incorporated
Published: 2013-11-15T04:05:21.895492+00:00

Lord Irwin's announcement of the Round Table Conference and of the goal of Dominion status, made in India on 31 October 1929, brought a storm of protest in England. It was rejected by Lord Reading

and Lloyd George for the Liberals and by Lord Birkenhead and Stanley Baldwin for the Conservatives. It is highly unlikely that the Milner Group were much disturbed by this storm. The reason is that the members of the Croup had already decided that "Dominion status" had two meanings—one meaning for Englishmen, and a second, rather different, meaning for Indians. As Lord Irwin wrote in a private memorandum in November 1929:

"To the English conception, Dominion Status now connotes, as indeed the word itself implies, an achieved constitutional position of complete freedom and immunity from interference by His Majesty's Government in London.... The Indian seems generally to mean something different. . . . The underlying element in much of Indian political thought seems to have been the desire that, by free conference between Great Britain and India, a constitution should be fashioned which may contain within itself the seed of full Dominion Status, growing naturally to its full development in accordance with the particular circumstances of India, without the necessity—the implications of which the Indian mind resents—of further periodic enquiries by way of Commission. What is to the Englishman an accomplished process is to the Indian rather a declaration of right, from which future and complete enjoyment of Dominion privilege will spring." (3)

This distinction, without any reference to Lord Irwin (whose memorandum was not published until 1941), was also made in the September 1930 issue of The Round Table. On this basis, for the sake of appeasement of India, the Milner Group was willing to promise India "Dominion status" in the Indian meaning of the expression and allow the English who misunderstood to cool off gradually as they saw that the development was not the one they had feared. Indeed, to the Milner Group, it probably appeared that the greater the rage in Britain, the greater the appeasement in India.

Accordingly, the first session of the Round Table Conference was called for November 1930. It marked an innovation not only because of the status of equality and responsibility which it placed on the Indians, but also because, for the first time, it tried to settle the problem of the Indian States within the same framework as it settled the constitutional problem of British India. This was a revolutionary effort, and its degree of success was very largely due to the preparatory work of Lord Irwin, acting on the advice of Malcolm Hailey.

The Indian States had remained as backward, feudalistic, and absolutist enclaves, within the territorial extent of British India and bound to the British Raj by individual treaties and agreements. As might be expected from the Milner Group, the solution which they proposed was federation. They hoped that devolution in British India would secure a degree of provincial autonomy that would make it possible to bind the provinces and the Indian States within the same federal structure and with similar local autonomy.

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