The Government of India Act 1935

The Government of India Act, 1935

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The Government of India Act, 1935 was originally passed in August 1935, and at the time was the longest British Act of Parliament ever enacted — a distinction owed partly to the fact that the Government of Burma Act, 1935 was incorporated within it. Conceived as Britain’s answer to two decades of escalating constitutional agitation, the Act proposed an elaborate federal structure combining British India and the princely states, alongside full provincial autonomy.

Yet its very design — riddled with safeguards, discretionary powers, and an unrealised federation — ensured it satisfied almost no one, Indian or British, even as it went on to serve, with relatively few amendments, as the functioning interim constitution of both India and Pakistan after 1947.

Background to the Act

• Indians had been demanding a greater role in governing their own country since the late 19th century.
  • India’s contribution to the British war effort during the First World War convinced even conservative elements within the British establishment of the need for constitutional change, culminating in the Government of India Act, 1919.
  • That Act introduced a novel system of provincial government known as “dyarchy.”
  • The Congress considered the resulting Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms of 1919 “inadequate, unsatisfactory and disappointing,” yet resolved to work them “so far as may be possible,” while pressing the government to speedily establish full responsible government based on the principle of self-determination.
• Although the government had successfully suppressed the mass Civil Disobedience movement of 1932–33, it recognised that suppression alone was only a short-term tactic, incapable of preventing another powerful movement from re-emerging in future.
  • Permanently weakening the national movement, colonial policymakers concluded, required the Congress to be internally divided, with large segments co-opted into the colonial constitutional and administrative structure.
  • The phase of suppression was therefore to be followed by a fresh phase of constitutional reform.
• The 1919 Act had impressed neither Indian opinion nor the Conservatives in London, and continuing political agitation made clear that the Congress would have to be given some genuine share of power — without, however, endangering British control over the central government.
  • Fresh discussions on reform began in the late 1920s, with a parliamentary commission appointed in 1927 under Lord Simon.
  • When the Simon Commission arrived in India, it was boycotted by every political party, since it was composed wholly of Europeans and included no Indian member.
  • In October 1929, Lord Irwin offered a further concession, announcing that full dominion status would be the natural goal of India’s constitutional progress — though, given Conservative opposition at home, this promise carried little real weight.
  • The Simon Commission’s report, released in June 1930, proposed replacing dyarchy with full responsible government in the provinces, alongside emergency powers for the governors, but suggested no change to the constitution of the central government. Designed chiefly to protect imperial control at the centre, the proposal satisfied no Indian political group and could not be implemented once the Civil Disobedience Movement began.
  • After the report’s release, the new Labour Government in Britain declared it was not final, and that the matter would be settled only after consulting representatives of all Indian communities — leading Irwin to offer, as a further concession, a Round Table Conference in London.
  • Three sessions of the Round Table Conference were held in 1930, 1931, and 1932, whose recommendations were embodied in a White Paper published in 1933 and examined by a Joint Select Committee of the British Parliament, chaired by Lord Linlithgow.
  • Deep divisions between Congress and Muslim representatives, however, prevented agreement on much of the detail of how a federation would actually work, prompting the new Conservative-dominated National Government in London to press ahead with drafting its own proposals.
  • A committee of 20 representatives from British India and 7 from the Indian States (including 5 Muslims) deliberated from April 1933 to December 1934, submitting its report to Parliament at the end of 1934.
  • Parliament debated the report and passed the bill in February 1935, which received royal assent on 24 July 1935, and was finally brought into force on 1 April 1937 as the Government of India Act, 1935.
• Though intended to go some way toward meeting Indian demands, both the detail of the bill and the near-total absence of Indian involvement in drafting it meant the Act met with a lukewarm response at best in India, while still proving too radical for a significant section of opinion in Britain.
• Among the principal sources from which the Act drew its material were: the Simon Commission Report; the Report of the All Parties Conference (the Nehru Report); the discussions of the three Round Table Conferences; the White Paper; the Joint Select Committee Report; and the Lothian Report, which determined the Act’s electoral provisions.

Provisions of the Act

The Government of India Act, 1935 was an unusually lengthy and elaborate document, comprising 32 Sections, 14 Parts, and 10 Schedules, arranged across two major parts. Its three central features provided for: an All-India Federation; responsible government with safeguards; and separate representation for communal and other groups.

Provincial Part of the Act: Introduction of Provincial Autonomy

• In place of dyarchy, the 1935 Act provided for responsible government in all provincial departments — but this was carefully balanced by wide discretionary powers granted to the governors over summoning legislatures, giving assent to bills, and administering tribal regions.
• Governors were also given special powers to safeguard minority rights, the privileges of civil servants, and British business interests, and could, under a special provision, take over and run a province’s administration indefinitely.

Political Executive

• As with the Federation, executive authority in a province was vested in a Governor representing the Crown, whose position was largely modelled on that of the Governor-General.
• Dyarchy was abolished in the provinces: there were now no Reserved Subjects and no Executive Council. Instead, a Council of Ministers administered all provincial subjects, except in matters — such as law and order — carrying the Governor’s “special responsibilities.”
  • Ministers were drawn from the elected members of the provincial legislature, were collectively responsible to it, and held office during the Governor’s pleasure.
  • The British-appointed provincial governors — themselves responsible to the British Government via the Viceroy and Secretary of State for India — were bound to accept ministerial recommendations, unless these touched on statutory “special responsibilities” such as preventing a grave menace to a province’s peace, or safeguarding minority interests and civil servants’ rights.
  • In discharging these “special responsibilities,” the Governor could act entirely at his discretion on some matters without consulting ministers, and on others could exercise his individual judgment after considering ministerial advice.
  • If any dispute arose over which capacity the Governor was acting in — as constitutional head, in his discretion, or in his individual judgment — his own decision on that question, made in his discretion, was final. The field of ministerial responsibility on any given matter was, in effect, as wide or as narrow as the Governor chose to make it.
  • The Governor’s powers under the Act were enormous, encompassing significant legislative authority as well as control over non-votable budget items (roughly 40% of the budget). He could, and in several instances did, dismiss ministers outright, and could take over partial or total provincial government by proclamation (initially for six months) if satisfied that normal constitutional government could not continue — and, under Viceregal supervision, assume total control during any political breakdown.
  • Following the resignation of Congress provincial ministries in 1939, governors ruled the ex-Congress provinces directly for the rest of the war.
• Provincial ministers under the 1935 Act were genuinely more powerful than their 1919 predecessors: there were no “Reserved” provincial departments, and ministers were appointed on the advice of the Chief Minister (who himself had to command the legislature’s confidence), though the Governor still had to ensure minorities were duly represented in the ministry. The Governor was also expected to encourage collective responsibility, though in practice the ministry’s actual functioning depended heavily on factors like the ruling party’s legislative strength and the personalities of the ministers and Governor involved.
• It was generally recognised that the provincial part of the Act conferred substantial power and patronage on provincial politicians — so long as both British officials and Indian politicians played by the rules. Even so, the ever-present, paternalistic threat of gubernatorial intervention continued to rankle.

Provincial Legislature

• The composition of the provincial legislature naturally varied from province to province. In every Provincial Legislative Assembly, all members were directly elected by the people.
• Six provinces — Madras, Bombay, Bengal, U.P., Bihar, and Assam — had a bicameral legislature, comprising a Legislative Council and a Legislative Assembly; in each of these Councils, a few seats were filled by direct Governor nomination.
• The Act’s electoral provisions were governed by the Communal Award, as modified by the Poona Pact in respect of the Scheduled Castes, dividing legislative seats among various communities and groups. Separate constituencies existed for General, Muslim, European, Anglo-Indian, Indian Christian, and Sikh communities, with qualified electors outside these specific communities voting in a General constituency — some of whose seats were themselves reserved for Scheduled Castes. There were, in addition, separate constituencies for Labour, Landholders, and Commerce and Industry, among others.

Federal Part of the Act: The All-India Federation

• The Act proposed establishing an All-India Federation combining the British Indian Provinces and the Princely States. Its constituent units were to be 11 Governor’s provinces, 6 Chief Commissioner’s provinces, and any Indian states that chose to join — states being entirely free to accede or not.
• On joining, a state’s ruler had to execute an Instrument of Accession in favour of the Crown, overriding any earlier treaties with the Crown; once accepted, the state became a unit of the Federation, on terms laid out within that same Instrument.
• The terms offered to the Princes were generous: each Prince would personally select his state’s representative to the Federal Legislature, with no pressure to democratise their administrations or hold elections for these representatives, and the Princes were given heavy weightage overall — even though the Princely States accounted for roughly a quarter of India’s population but produced well under a quarter of its wealth.
• Federation could not come into being until states whose rulers could together choose at least 50% of the 104 seats in the Council of State, and whose aggregate population amounted to at least 50% of the total princely state population, had acceded. Unlike the provincial portion of the Act, then, the federal portion would take effect only once half the states, by weight, agreed to federate.
• This threshold was never reached, owing to opposition from the princely rulers, and the establishment of the Federation was indefinitely postponed after the outbreak of the Second World War. The remaining, non-federal parts of the Act came into force in 1937, alongside the first elections held under it.

The Federal Executive: Introduction of Dyarchy at the Centre

• Dyarchy, though rejected outright by the Simon Commission for the provinces, was nonetheless introduced by the 1935 Act at the centre. Federal subjects were divided into two categories:
  • Reserved subjects — administered by the Governor-General on the advice of up to three executive councillors of his own appointment, and covering Defence, External Affairs, Ecclesiastical Affairs, and the Administration of Tribal Areas.
  • Transferred subjects — all other subjects, administered by the Governor-General with the help of a Council of Ministers (no more than 10), chosen by him and holding office at his pleasure, but required to include representatives of the Indian States and minorities as laid down in an Instrument of Instructions, and responsible to the Federal Legislature. The Governor-General’s special powers, however, allowed him to dominate these ministers freely — his “special responsibilities” over specified subjects, such as preventing any grave menace to India’s peace, gave him full freedom to accept or reject their advice.
• The British Government, through the Secretary of State for India and the Governor-General (Viceroy), continued to control India’s financial obligations, defence, foreign affairs, and the British Indian Army, and made key appointments to the Reserve Bank of India and the Railway Board. No finance bill could reach the Central Legislature without the Governor-General’s consent.
• Funding for British responsibilities and foreign obligations — such as loan repayments and pensions — made up at least 80 percent of federal expenditure, and was rendered entirely non-votable, taken off the top before any funds could be considered for social or economic development. The Viceroy, under the Secretary of State’s supervision, was granted overriding and certifying powers substantial enough that, in theory, he could rule almost autocratically.

Protection of Minorities

• A significant provision of the Act offered safeguards for minorities, ostensibly to protect them from majority-community dominance. In practice, however, these so-called safeguards functioned chiefly as a device to empower the Governor-General and the Governors to override both ministers and legislators whenever they chose.

The Federal Legislature

The proposed federal legislature was a bicameral body, consisting of the Council of States (Upper House) and the Federal Assembly (Lower House).

Upper House (Council of States)

• A permanent body, with one-third of its membership vacated and renewed triennially, the Council of States had a total strength of 260 members:
  • 104 representing the native Indian states, nominated directly by their rulers.
  • 156 elected members from British India representing the provinces — of which 150 were elected on a communal basis, with Hindu, Muslim, and Sikh seats filled by direct election, and Indian Christian, Anglo-Indian, and European seats filled indirectly through an electoral college of their own community representatives.

Lower House (Federal Assembly)

• The Federal Assembly had a life of five years, unless dissolved earlier by the Governor-General, and consisted of 375 members — 250 representing British India and 125 the Indian States.
• Members from British India were indirectly elected, drawn from the members of the Lower Houses of the provincial legislatures, while members from the Indian States were simply nominated by their rulers. Election to the Upper House was thus direct, while election to the Lower — theoretically the more “popular” house — was indirect. The princes, moreover, nominated one-third of the Lower House’s representatives and two-fifths of the Upper House’s.
• In terms of legislative reach, the Federal Legislature could make laws for the whole or any part of British India, or for any federated state, while a Provincial Legislature’s authority was confined strictly to its own province.

Division of Federal Subjects

• The scheme of federation, combined with provincial autonomy, required a clear division of subjects between the centre and the provinces. Revising the division found in the 1919 Act, the 1935 Act introduced three legislative lists: the Federal Legislative List, the Provincial Legislative List, and the Concurrent Legislative List — with residuary powers vested in the Governor-General’s sole discretion to decide which list any particular subject fell under.
• Legislative powers were, in practice, tightly “cribbed and confined.” Certain subjects were excluded entirely from the purview of both Federal and Provincial legislatures — including laws affecting the British Sovereign or Royal Family, matters under the Army Act and Air Force Act, the law of Prize Courts, and any amendment to the 1935 Act itself. Discriminatory legislation against British commercial interests was banned outright, and legislation on many important subjects required the prior sanction of the Governor-General (for the Federal legislature) or of both the Governor-General and the Governor (for a Provincial legislature).
• Non-votable items made up roughly four-fifths of the total federal budget. Any budget item rejected by the Federal Assembly could still be placed, on the Governor-General’s direction, before the Council of State; and in the event of disagreement between the two Houses, the Governor-General could summon a joint sitting. Even a Bill passed by both Houses could be vetoed, sent back for reconsideration, or reserved for His Majesty’s consideration by the Governor-General — and Acts he had already assented to could still be disallowed by the King in Council.
• Six of the eleven provinces were given a bicameral legislature under the Act. The Act also enlarged the overall size of the legislatures, extended the franchise, allocated special seats for women, and restructured provincial assembly membership to include more elected Indian representatives — who, for the first time, were now able to form majorities and be appointed to form governments.

The Federal Structure: The Governor-General’s Pivotal Role

• The Act made the Governor-General the pivot of the entire Indian constitution, giving unity and direction to its diverse and often conflicting elements. He acted in three distinct capacities:
  1. Normally, on the advice of his Ministers.
  2. In his individual judgment — particularly in matters of his Special Responsibilities, where he could consider ministerial advice while ultimately choosing to accept or disregard it.
  3. In his own discretion, on a third category of matters where he did not consult his Ministers at all.
• His special responsibilities covered: safeguarding India’s financial stability and credit; preventing any grave menace to the country’s peace or tranquility; protecting the legitimate interests of minorities and public servants (and their dependents); preventing commercial discrimination against goods of British or Burmese origin; safeguarding the interests and dignity of the Indian princes; and securing the proper discharge of his own discretionary powers.
• Matters falling under his discretion alone — where he did not even consult his ministers — included: the Reserved Departments of Defence, External Affairs, Ecclesiastical Affairs, and Tribal Areas (in which he was assisted by three appointed Councillors); the appointment and dismissal of the Council of Ministers; ordinance-making and the enactment of Governor-General’s Acts; control over the non-votable 80% of the budget; issuing instructions to Governors on their own special responsibilities; the power to summon joint sittings, address the legislatures, and send messages on particular bills; and the power to sanction bills before the Federal and Provincial legislatures, halt discussion of any bill at any time, withhold assent to a passed bill, or reserve it for His Majesty’s consideration.
• Beyond these reserved departments and safeguards, other subjects were to be administered by the Governor-General with the aid and advice of his Council of Ministers — though even here, wherever his individual judgment applied, he retained the right to disregard that advice. Ministers were chosen and summoned entirely at his discretion, and held office purely at his pleasure. In sum, responsible government was introduced only in a very limited way at the Federal Centre under the 1935 Act.

Other Provisions of the Act

Establishment of a Federal Court

• The Act provided for a Federal Court, with both original and appellate powers, to adjudicate inter-state disputes and questions of constitutional interpretation — though it was not the final court of appeal, since certain cases could still go to the Privy Council in England. Even though the Federation itself never came into being, the Federal Court was established and began functioning from 1 October 1937, with Sir Maurice Gwyer as its first Chief Justice; it consisted of one Chief Justice and no more than six judges.

Federal Railway Authority

• Control of the railways was vested in a new Federal Railway Authority, a seven-member body kept deliberately free from ministerial or councillor control — a design intended to reassure British stakeholders in the railways that their investments remained secure.

The Reserve Bank of India

• The Reserve Bank of India was established under the Act, alongside a broader transfer of financial control from London to New Delhi, answering a long-standing demand from the Government of India for greater fiscal autonomy.

An Enlarged Electorate, With Real Limitations

• The electorate was expanded to roughly 30 million, though high property qualifications meant only about 10 percent of the Indian population was actually enfranchised. In rural India, voting rights extended chiefly to rich and middle peasants — presumed to form the main constituency of Congress politics.
• Historian D.A. Low has suggested the Act was, in this sense, a deliberate ploy to corrode the Congress’s support base and tie these influential rural classes more closely to the Raj, describing a “competition for the allegiance of the dominant peasant communities” as lying at the very heart of the Congress-Raj conflict of this period.
• In the bicameral central legislature, members nominated by the princes were set to constitute 30 to 40 percent of the seats — permanently eliminating any realistic possibility of an outright Congress majority.

Communal and Separate Electorates, and Reservations

• Separate electorates were retained for Muslims, while reserved seats were introduced for the Scheduled Castes — the new official term for the “depressed classes,” or untouchables — in both the provincial and central legislatures. The Act not only preserved the separate electorate system inherited from 1919 but enlarged its scope further, extending it to Anglo-Indians and Indian Christians as well.
• Women were granted reservation of 41 seats across the provincial legislatures, along with limited reservation in the central legislature — though even this women’s representation was itself subdivided along religious lines.

Supremacy of the British Parliament

• The supremacy of the British Parliament remained fully intact under the 1935 Act. No Indian legislature — federal or provincial — was authorised to modify or amend the constitution; only the British Parliament itself retained that power.

Separation of Burma from India

• Burma was separated from India with effect from April 1937, while Aden was simultaneously transferred out of Government of India’s administrative control and placed under the colonial office, becoming a Crown colony in its own right.

Abolition of the Council of the Secretary of State

• The Act abolished the Council of the Secretary of State for India, a body originally created in 1858, replacing it with informal advisers whom the Secretary of State was free to consult or ignore, except in matters relating to the Services. The Council had drawn heavy criticism in India for its persistently anti-Indian policies, and its removal reflected this pressure.
• With the introduction of provincial autonomy and partial responsible government at the centre, the Secretary of State’s control over Transferred Subjects diminished considerably — though his control over the powers of the Governor-General and Governors remained fully intact, and wherever they acted in their individual judgment or discretion, they remained strictly answerable to him.

Reorganisation of Provinces

• The Act carried out a partial reorganisation of the provinces: Sindh was separated from Bombay, and Bihar and Orissa were split into two distinct provinces. Together with the existing North-West Frontier Province, these two new provinces — Sindh and Orissa — brought the total number of Governor’s provinces to 11.

Rights and Obligations of the Crown Regarding the Indian States

• Beyond the powers the Federation would have derived through the Instrument of Accession, the Crown’s existing rights and obligations toward the Indian States remained entirely unaffected, and continued to rest with the Crown Representative — an office that could, under the Act, be combined with that of the Governor-General.
• The Government of India Bill received royal assent in August 1935. The British Government subsequently decided that provincial autonomy would take effect from 1 April 1937, leaving the Federation itself in abeyance — where it remained, never coming into existence. The operative parts of the 1935 Act stayed in force until 15 August 1947, when they were superseded by the Indian Independence Act, 1947.

Analysis of the Act

The Act’s Basic Conception

• The Act’s underlying conception was that the government of India was fundamentally the government of the Crown, exercised by authorities deriving their functions directly from it, wherever the Crown did not retain executive functions itself — a conception familiar from dominion constitutions elsewhere, but entirely absent from earlier Acts governing India.
• The experiment of provincial autonomy under the 1935 Act undeniably served some genuinely useful purposes, and in this sense the Act marks a real point of no return in India’s constitutional development. Notably, though, it made no mention of the dominion status that had been promised during the Civil Disobedience Movement.

No Preamble: The Ambiguity Around Dominion Status

• Although it had become uncommon for British Acts of Parliament to include a preamble by this point, the complete absence of one in the 1935 Act stood in sharp contrast to the 1919 Act, whose preamble had set out its underlying philosophy at length.
• That 1919 preamble had centred on a statement made by Secretary of State Edwin Montagu to the House of Commons on 20 August 1917, pledging “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.”
• By the 1930s, Indian demands had shifted toward constitutional parity with existing Dominions such as Canada and Australia — effectively, complete autonomy within the Commonwealth. Yet a significant section of British political opinion doubted Indians were capable of governing on this basis, viewing Dominion status as, at best, a distant goal reachable only after a long period of gradual development.
• This underlying tension produced an awkward compromise: the 1935 Act had no preamble of its own, but simply retained the 1919 Act’s original preamble unchanged — a decision widely read in India as yet more evidence of mixed British signals and, at best, a lukewarm commitment to genuine Indian self-government.

No “Bill of Rights” or Fundamental Rights

• Unlike most modern constitutions — though consistent with contemporary Commonwealth constitutional legislation — the Act contained no “bill of rights” or set of fundamental rights, even though the draft constitution proposed in the Nehru Report had itself included one.
• A further complication arose specifically from the proposed Federation: incorporating such a set of rights would have been difficult given that the new federal entity was to include nominally sovereign, and generally autocratic, princely states.

Safeguards

• The Act was not merely detailed but genuinely riddled with “safeguards,” designed to let the British Government intervene wherever it judged necessary to protect its own responsibilities and interests. These elaborate safeguards amounted to a substantial subtraction from the underlying principle of self-government.
• Beyond restricting the legislatures’ own law-making powers, the Governor-General and Governors were empowered to override both ministers and legislatures under specified circumstances — and in the event of what either might consider a genuine breakdown of constitutional machinery, could assume absolute dictatorial powers.

Reality of Responsible Government: Cup Half-Full or Half-Empty?

• A close reading of the Act shows that the British Government had carefully equipped itself with the legal instruments needed to reclaim total control whenever it judged this desirable — though doing so without good cause would have severely damaged its credibility with precisely the Indian groups whose support the Act was meant to secure.
• Lord Lothian offered a notably more sanguine reading of the same provisions: “If you look at the constitution it looks as if all the powers are vested in the Governor-General and the Governor. But is not every power here vested in the King? Everything is done in the name of the King but does the King ever interfere? Once the power passes into the hands of the legislature, the Governor or the Governor-General is never going to interfere.”

The Problem With Federation

• The Federation scheme, as envisaged in the Act, attempted to bring together two fundamentally disparate elements: the Indian States, largely under autocratic princely rule, and the British Indian Provinces, enjoying at least some measure of responsible government. Grouping these two heterogeneous elements together was almost bound to produce friction, hindering the system’s smooth working.
• The very process prescribed for forming the Federation was, moreover, ill-conceived: accession was entirely voluntary for the princely states, yet effectively compulsory for the provinces of British India. To induce the Princes to join at all, they were offered preferential terms — disproportionately large representation through a system of nomination by rulers — since they were, in effect, expected to act as reactionary counterweights and checks upon the nationalists.

Dyarchy at the Centre

• Dyarchy, though thoroughly condemned by contemporary opinion, was nonetheless still proposed for the centre, with important departments such as Defence (which claimed the lion’s share of the budget) and External Affairs kept firmly Reserved.
• India’s underlying constitutional status as a dependency did not meaningfully improve either: the powers of constitutional amendment and ultimate responsibility for Indian administration remained squarely with the British Parliament, while the Secretary of State retained control over the various All-India Services. The Act’s system of separate representation for communal and other groups was, in this light, widely seen as iniquitous and scandalously unreasonable.

False Equivalences

• Under the Act, British citizens resident in the UK, and British companies registered there, had to be treated on the same footing as Indian citizens and Indian-registered companies — unless UK law itself denied reciprocal treatment.
• The unfairness of this arrangement becomes obvious once one accounts for the dominant position British capital already held across much of India’s modern economic sector, sustained through distinctly unfair commercial practices — including the near-total insignificance of Indian capital in Britain, and the complete absence of Indian involvement in shipping to or within the UK.
• The Act, accordingly, contained highly detailed provisions requiring the Viceroy to intervene whenever, in his view, any Indian law or regulation was intended to — or would in practice — discriminate against UK-resident British subjects, British-registered companies, or, in particular, British shipping interests.

British Political Needs vs. Indian Constitutional Needs

• From the moment of Montagu’s original 1917 statement, it had been vital for Britain’s reform process to stay ahead of Indian political demands if it hoped to retain the strategic initiative — yet imperialist sentiment, and a persistent lack of realism within British political circles, made this all but impossible.
• The grudging, conditional concessions embodied in both the 1919 and 1935 Acts consistently generated more resentment than goodwill, and signally failed to secure the backing of the influential Indian groups the Raj so badly needed. There is evidence that Montagu himself might have backed a more liberal settlement, but his cabinet colleagues would not have entertained it — and given the balance of power within the Conservative Party at the time, a genuinely more liberal Act than that passed in 1935 was, in practice, inconceivable.

Relationship to a Dominion Constitution

• In 1947, remarkably few amendments were needed to turn the 1935 Act into the functioning interim constitution of both India and Pakistan.
• The Act itself, however, was condemned by nearly every section of Indian opinion, and unanimously rejected by the Congress, which demanded instead the convening of a Constituent Assembly, elected on the basis of adult franchise, to frame a constitution for an independent India.
• Jawaharlal Nehru, then Congress President, reminded the country in a press statement of 1 April 1937 — the day the “unwanted, undemocratic and anti-national” constitution set out in the 1935 Act would be forced upon the country against its wholehearted and unanimous will. On another occasion, Nehru famously dismissed the new constitution as “a machine with strong brakes but no engine.”

Objectives of the British Government

• Historian B.R. Tomlinson observed that “the progress of constitutional advance in India is determined by the need to attract Indian collaborators to the Raj.” Insofar as any real change did occur, he noted, it lay chiefly in how “the apex of the system of imperial control moved from London to Delhi” — the Viceroy now wielding many of the powers once exercised by the Secretary of State, giving the Indo-British relationship a new orientation best suited to protecting essential imperial interests.
• The federal part of the Act was largely designed to serve Conservative Party aims. Over the long term, Conservative leaders hoped the Act would eventually produce a nominally dominion-status India — conservative in outlook, dominated by an alliance of Hindu princes and right-wing Hindus, and well disposed to remain under British guidance and protection. The Labour opposition in London, by contrast, argued that the Act was designed simply to protect British interests by sharing power with loyalist elements.
• The reforms were also hoped to revive the political standing of the Liberals and other constitutionalist moderates, who had lost public favour during the Civil Disobedience Movement. Given the severe repression that movement had faced, colonial policymakers hoped large sections of Congressmen would now be persuaded of the futility of extra-legal methods and the greater efficacy of constitutional politics — weaning them away from mass agitation. It was further hoped that Congressmen who tasted the power and patronage of office would prove reluctant to return to the sacrifices of mass politics, and that the reforms might even promote splits within a demoralised Congress along constitutionalist-versus-non-constitutionalist, or Right-versus-Left, lines.
• Underlying all of this were several deeper strategic objectives: to retain British control of the Indian Army, Indian finances, and India’s foreign relations for another generation; to win Muslim support by conceding most of Jinnah’s Fourteen Points; and, above all, to ensure that the Congress could never rule alone or gain enough seats to bring down the government — achieved through the over-representation of the Princes, the extension of separate electorates to every possible minority, and an executive that was only theoretically, never practically, removable by the legislature.

The Provincialisation of the Congress

• By granting Indian politicians substantial power at the provincial level while denying them any real responsibility at the centre, British policymakers hoped the Congress — India’s only genuinely national party — would gradually disintegrate into a series of disconnected provincial fiefdoms, weakening or even destroying the authority of its central, all-India leadership.
• Linlithgow himself wrote in 1936 that Britain’s “best hope of avoiding a direct clash is in the potency of Provincial Autonomy to destroy the effectiveness of Congress as an All-India instrument of revolution” — the underlying aim being to divert Congress attention toward the provinces while maintaining firm imperial control at the centre.
• In the event, however, the Congress High Command proved able to control its provincial ministries directly, and successfully forced their mass resignation in 1939 — a demonstration of Congress’s underlying strength and cohesion that, if anything, left the party stronger rather than weaker.

Convincing the Princes

• A further British objective was to persuade the Princes to join the Federation by offering them conditions of entry unlikely ever to be matched again, in the hope that enough would accede to allow the Federation itself to be established.
• The Federation as actually planned, however, was never genuinely viable, and would in all likelihood have broken down rapidly, leaving the British to manage the fallout without any real alternative in hand. The Act’s true underlying purpose was perhaps best captured by Viceroy Lord Linlithgow himself: “After all we framed the constitution … of 1935 because we thought it the best way … to hold India to the Empire.”

Why the Princes Did Not Join the Federation

• British policymakers had hoped the Princes would recognise that their best hope for the future lay in rapidly uniting into a single bloc — since no group, mathematically, could hope to wield real power without such unity. Instead, the Princes chose to stay out altogether, effectively exercising a veto the Act had unintentionally granted them, and thereby preventing the Federation from ever coming into existence. Among the reasons for their reluctance were:
  • Many Princes simply lacked the foresight to recognise this as their one real chance for a secure future.
  • Their central objection was that the Act failed to resolve the underlying issue of paramountcy — the Government of India, as the paramount power, retained the right to intervene in, or even overthrow, their states whenever it judged this necessary.
  • The Princes were never a genuinely cohesive group, and most seem to have recognised that they would never act as one.
  • Each individual Prince appeared chiefly consumed with securing the best possible personal terms — the most money and the greatest autonomy — should his own state choose to join.
  • Larger states were reluctant to surrender their fiscal autonomy, while smaller states complained instead of inadequate representation in the legislature.
  • A deeper fear concerned joining a genuinely democratised federal central government, whose elected British Indian leaders were unlikely to sympathise with autocratic princely rule, and might well encourage democratic movements within princely territories themselves.
  • The Congress, notably, had already begun — and intended to continue — agitating for democratic reform within the Princely States, posing a direct threat to the one interest nearly all of the roughly 600 Princes shared: continuing to rule their states free of outside interference.
  • It seemed entirely plausible that this pressure would eventually produce more democratic state regimes, and the election of largely Congressmen as the Princely States’ own representatives to the Federal Legislature — meaning that, had the Federation actually come into being, this process would have amounted to something close to a Congress takeover from within.
  • This exposed a deep contradiction in British policy: while officially professing support for democratisation within the Princely States, the practical success of the federal scheme actually depended on those states remaining firmly autocratic.

Indian Reaction to the Proposed Federation

• So little was genuinely offered that virtually every significant political group in British India rejected and denounced the proposed Federation outright — a rejection rooted, in no small part, in a continuing and well-founded distrust of British intentions.
• No significant Indian group accepted the Federal portion of the Act, under which external affairs, defence, and currency and exchange all remained effectively under the Governor-General’s control. Even the newly passed Reserve Bank Bill carried a further reservation preventing any substantial alteration of its provisions without the Governor-General’s consent — leaving, in effect, no real power genuinely conferred at the centre at all.
• Muslim leaders, for their part, feared Hindu domination and viewed the proposed federal structure as still fundamentally too unitary: since all of British India’s representatives to the central legislature were to be elected by the provincial assemblies, this arrangement worked directly against Muslims, who formed a minority in all but four provinces. While they did not oppose federation publicly, they clearly preferred decentralisation instead — a weak centre allowing greater autonomy to provincial governments in Muslim-majority regions.
• The Congress, too, disliked the proposed federal structure, under which one-third of the federal assembly’s seats would be filled by the princes — effectively tying the fate of a democratic India to the whims of autocratic, dynastic rulers. Even so, the Liberals, and some elements within the Congress itself, remained tepidly willing to give the scheme a try.
  • When Linlithgow asked Tej Bahadur Sapru whether he saw any satisfactory alternative to the 1935 scheme, Sapru replied that they should stand firmly behind the Act and its federal plan.
  • G.D. Birla, similarly, argued that while far from ideal, it was “the only thing” available at that stage, and believed the Congress was gradually moving toward accepting Federation. He noted that Gandhi himself was not especially troubled by the centre’s reservation of defence and external affairs, focusing instead on the method by which the States’ representatives would be chosen — and wanted the Viceroy to help Gandhi’s cause by persuading a number of Princes to move toward democratic election of their own representatives.
• In the end, the provincial part of the 1935 Act duly took effect with the elections of 1937, while a persistent stalemate prevailed at the centre, leaving the federal part of the Act a permanent non-starter — since, in truth, no one involved seemed genuinely interested in seeing it through.

The Working of the Act

• The British government sent Lord Linlithgow to India as the new Viceroy, tasked specifically with bringing the Act into effect. He was, by most accounts, intelligent, extremely hard-working, honest, and serious, and genuinely determined to make a success of the new constitutional arrangement — though also unimaginative, stolid, and rigidly legalistic, and notably ill at ease connecting with people outside his own immediate circle.
• In 1937, following the holding of provincial elections, Provincial Autonomy duly commenced. From that point until the declaration of war in 1939, Linlithgow worked tirelessly to secure enough princely accessions to launch the Federation — receiving, however, only the weakest possible backing from the Home Government, and ultimately seeing the Princes reject Federation almost entirely.
• In September 1939, Linlithgow simply declared, on his own authority, that India was at war with Germany. Though constitutionally correct, this decision proved deeply offensive to much of Indian opinion, precisely because the Viceroy had not troubled to consult India’s own elected representatives before taking so momentous a step — a slight that led directly to the resignation of the Congress provincial ministries. From 1939 onward, Linlithgow turned his full attention to supporting the British war effort.

Conclusion

The Government of India Act, 1935, ultimately embodied the central contradiction of late colonial rule in India: an attempt to concede just enough constitutional ground to keep Indian political energy channelled through legal, provincial politics, while retaining every meaningful safeguard needed to reassert British control whenever it judged this necessary. Its provincial half took effect and reshaped Indian political life in real ways, but its federal half — the Act’s true centrepiece — collapsed entirely under the weight of princely reluctance and near-universal Indian distrust. In failing to satisfy either Indian nationalists or British conservatives, the 1935 Act only hardened the conviction, across the political spectrum in India, that genuine self-government would have to be won rather than granted — a conviction that would shape the final decade of the freedom struggle.