Colonial Administrative and Constitutional Development

The Constituent Assembly was constituted under the Cabinet Mission Plan of 1946. Seats allotted to each Province were distributed among the three communities, General, Muslim and Sikh, in proportion to population, and the representatives of each community were then elected by the members of that community in the Provincial Legislative Assembly by proportional representation with a single transferable vote.

• Option (c) states this and is correct.
• Option (a) is incorrect because there was no direct election on adult franchise; the Provincial Assemblies that formed the electoral college had themselves been elected in the 1946 elections on the restricted franchise of the Government of India Act, 1935, which covered a small fraction of the adult population. This indirect and narrow base is the standard ground of the criticism that the Assembly was not fully representative.
• Option (b) is incorrect. The Congress and the League dominated the Assembly because they had swept the 1946 provincial elections, but that was the outcome of the election, not a power of nomination vested in the parties.
• Option (d) is incorrect; expertise was not the criterion, and the princely State representatives, who came in separately by nomination of the rulers, are the only nominated element in the Assembly and are outside the scope of the question, which asks about the Provinces.

The Indian Statutory Commission was appointed in November 1927 under section 84A of the Government of India Act, 1919, which required a review after ten years, and it was constituted of seven British parliamentarians under Sir John Simon with no Indian member. That exclusion was the whole ground of the agitation, since it denied Indians any part in determining their own constitutional future, and the boycott resolution of the Madras session of the Congress in December 1927 was joined by the Liberals, the Hindu Mahasabha and one faction of the Muslim League, producing the black flag demonstrations and the cry Simon Go Back when the Commission landed at Bombay in February 1928.

• Option (c) is correct.
• Option (a) is incorrect and inverts the position: Indians wanted the review brought forward, not abandoned, and the British advanced the appointment by two years partly in anticipation of a Labour government.
• Option (b) is incorrect as a cause, though the underlying fact is true, and this is the finest distractor in the paper. The Simon Commission did recommend the abolition of dyarchy and the grant of provincial autonomy, but it did so in its report published in May 1930, more than two years after the agitation began. A recommendation not yet made cannot be the reason for a protest against the Commission's arrival, so the option fails on chronology rather than on fact.
• Option (d) is incorrect; the Commission suggested no partition, and that proposition belongs to a wholly different sequence beginning with the Lahore resolution of 1940.

The Ilbert Bill of 1883, introduced by Sir Courtenay Ilbert as Law Member under Ripon, proposed to remove the racial disqualification that prevented Indian District Magistrates and Sessions Judges in the mofussil from trying European British subjects, a jurisdiction Indian officers already exercised in the Presidency towns.

• Option (c) states this and is correct. The European community in India mounted a ferocious and well organised agitation, forming the Defence Association and raising a large fund, and the Bill was passed in 1884 only in a heavily diluted form allowing a European defendant to claim trial by a jury of which at least half were Europeans. The episode's importance is that it taught educated Indians the lesson of organised agitation and demonstrated that racial equality would not be conceded, and it is conventionally treated as one of the immediate stimuli to the founding of the Indian National Congress in 1885.
• Option (a) is incorrect and refers to the Arms Act of 1878, which required Indians to hold licences for firearms while exempting Europeans and Anglo Indians.
• Option (b) is incorrect and refers to the Vernacular Press Act of 1878, both of these being measures of Lytton's administration.
• Option (d) is incorrect and refers to the cotton duties controversy, in which the import duty on British cloth was removed in 1882 under pressure from Manchester, a standard illustration of the drain and of the subordination of Indian fiscal policy to British industry. The elimination route is chronological and personal: three of the four options belong to Lytton's viceroyalty of 1876 to 1880 and the fourth to Ripon's.

• Option (c) is correct. Two Boundary Commissions, one for Punjab and one for Bengal, were constituted in July 1947 under the chairmanship of Sir Cyril Radcliffe, each with two nominees of the Congress and two of the Muslim League, to demarcate the boundaries of the two Dominions on the basis of contiguous majority areas of Muslims and non-Muslims, while also taking into account other factors. Radcliffe, who had never been to India before and arrived on 8 July, submitted the awards on 12 August and they were published on 17 August 1947, two days after independence.
• Option (a) is incorrect. The minorities question was handled by the Advisory Committee on Minorities under the Constituent Assembly and, earlier, through the Communal Award of 1932 and the Cabinet Mission proposals.
• Option (b) is incorrect but is the sharpest distractor: the Indian Independence Act 1947 was itself the instrument that gave effect to independence and it provided for the appointment of the boundary commissions, so the Radcliffe exercise was made under that Act rather than being the means of giving it effect.
• Option (d) is incorrect. The disturbances in East Bengal, notably Noakhali in 1946, were not the subject of any Radcliffe inquiry. The name is the key to the item, since the Radcliffe Line remains the accepted name of the India-Pakistan boundary.

• Statements 1 and 2 are correct and statement 3 is incorrect, so the official answer is (a). The Proclamation, read out by Lord Canning at Allahabad on 1 November 1858, gave public effect to the Government of India Act, 1858.
• Statement 2 is correct: the Act abolished the Court of Directors and the Board of Control, transferred the government of India to the Crown, and created the office of Secretary of State for India assisted by a Council of India, the Governor-General becoming also the Viceroy as the Crown's representative.
• Statement 1 is correct: the Proclamation renounced the desire for extension of territorial possessions and promised to respect the rights, dignity and honour of the Indian princes, which meant in substance the abandonment of the doctrine of lapse and the beginning of the policy of treating the princely states as subordinate allies rather than as candidates for annexation; it also promised religious non-interference, equal treatment in appointments and an amnesty for those not directly implicated in the killing of British subjects.
• Statement 3 is incorrect and is anachronistic by twenty-five years: the Company's commercial functions had already been ended by the Charter Act of 1833, which converted it into a purely administrative body, so by 1858 there was no Company trade left to regulate. Rejecting statement 3 removes (c) and (d).

• Option (b) is correct. The Montagu-Chelmsford reforms enacted as the Government of India Act 1919 for the first time separated central and provincial subjects and provincial sources of revenue, relaxing the total central control that the 1861 and 1919 predecessors had maintained, and then subdivided the provincial list into reserved subjects administered by the Governor with his executive council and transferred subjects administered by ministers responsible to the legislature, the arrangement known as dyarchy. That demarcation of jurisdiction is the Act's defining structural contribution and the seed of the federal division completed in 1935.
• Option (a) is wrong: separation of the judiciary from the executive was a Directive Principle of the Constitution of India, and no colonial statute of this period effected it.
• Option (c) is wrong: the powers of the Secretary of State and the Viceroy were not the subject of clear definition in the Act, although the Act did provide for a High Commissioner and shifted part of the Secretary of State's expenditure to the British exchequer.
• Option (d) fails once (b) is established. The elimination route is that the terms central and provincial subjects belong to 1919 in the way that provincial autonomy and federation belong to 1935.

• Statement 1 is correct. The Cabinet Mission of 1946, comprising Pethick-Lawrence, Stafford Cripps and A. V. Alexander, rejected the demand for a separate Pakistan and proposed instead a Union of India embracing British India and the princely states, with the Union confined to foreign affairs, defence and communications and all residuary powers vesting in the provinces, the provinces being free to form groups with their own executives and legislatures. That three tier arrangement is a federal, indeed confederal, scheme.
• Statement 2 is incorrect. The Mission proposed no change to the judicial structure; the enlargement of judicial power in this period belongs to the Government of India Act 1935, which created the Federal Court in 1937.
• Statement 3 is incorrect. Indianisation of the services was the subject of the Islington Commission of 1917 and the Lee Commission of 1924, which fixed recruitment ratios for the Indian Civil Service, and had nothing to do with the Cabinet Mission, whose business was the transfer of power and the framing of a constitution by an elected Constituent Assembly. The official answer (a) follows. Elimination route: statement 1 is secure and its acceptance removes options (b) and (d), after which the item turns on statement 3.

The Cripps Mission of March 1942 offered, after the conclusion of the war, the establishment of an Indian Union with Dominion status, associated with the United Kingdom and the other Dominions by a common allegiance to the Crown but equal to them in every respect and in no way subordinate in domestic or external affairs. A constitution-making body would be set up, provinces unwilling to accede would be entitled to retain their existing constitutional position and to negotiate a separate Union, and the British would retain responsibility for defence during the war. Hence (d).

• Option (a) is wrong because Dominion status is not complete independence; that gap is exactly what Gandhi's reported description of the offer as a post-dated cheque was about, and the Congress rejection followed.
• Option (b) is wrong: the plan did not partition India, though the non-accession clause conceded the principle of separation and was criticised on that ground.
• Option (c) is wrong: no republic was contemplated, Dominion status presupposing allegiance to the Crown; India's decision to remain in the Commonwealth as a republic came only with the London Declaration of 1949. The discriminator throughout is the distinction between Dominion status and independence.

• Option (d) is correct. The Indian States Committee, appointed in 1927 under Sir Harcourt Butler, was charged with inquiring into the relationship between the Paramount Power and the Indian States, and specifically into the financial and economic relations between British India and the States. Its report of 1929 held that paramountcy must remain paramount and cannot be limited, that the States' relationship was with the Crown and not with the Government of India, and that the States should not be transferred to a future responsible government in British India without their consent. The princes had sought the appointment of the committee precisely in order to have their relationship clarified and protected, so improving and defining that relationship is an accurate statement of its object.
• Option (a) is wrong: the distribution of powers between the Centre and the Provinces was the business of the Montagu Chelmsford scheme of 1919 and later of the Government of India Act, 1935, not of Butler.
• Option (b) is wrong: the powers of the Secretary of State were a statutory matter settled by the Government of India Acts, not referred to a committee of inquiry.
• Option (c) is wrong: press censorship was pursued through the Vernacular Press Act, 1878, the Indian Press Act, 1910 and the Press Ordinances of the 1930s, and no committee of this period had censorship as its object. Governing principle: fix each named committee to its single question, Butler to paramountcy and the princely States, Simon to constitutional advance, Hunter to Jallianwala Bagh, Sapru and Nehru to constitutional proposals.

• Option (d) is correct. Dyarchy was introduced at the provincial level by the Government of India Act, 1919, giving effect to the Montagu Chelmsford Report. The subjects transferred to the provinces were divided into two categories: transferred subjects, such as education, local self government, public health, agriculture and public works, administered by the Governor with ministers responsible to the legislative council; and reserved subjects, such as law and order, police, land revenue, finance and irrigation, administered by the Governor with his executive council and answerable only to him. Two authorities within a single provincial government, hence dyarchy.
• Option (a) is wrong because the bicameral central legislature created in 1919, the Council of State and the Legislative Assembly, is bicameralism and not dyarchy.
• Option (b) is wrong and is the designed trap, since two governments in a Centre and State arrangement sounds like double rule; that is federalism, and it belongs to the Government of India Act, 1935, which in fact abolished provincial dyarchy while introducing dyarchy at the Centre, a scheme that never came into force.
• Option (c) is wrong because two sets of rulers in London and Delhi describes the Home Government and the Government of India, which is the ordinary structure of colonial administration throughout, not a principle introduced under any name. Governing principle: dyarchy is a division within one government of one tier, not a division between tiers.

• Option (b) is correct. The Government of India Act, 1935 divided legislative power into three lists, Federal, Provincial and Concurrent, and vested the residuary power, that is the power to legislate on matters not enumerated in any of the three lists, in the Governor General, who could authorise either the Federal or a Provincial legislature to enact such a law.
• Options (a) and (c) are wrong because the residuary power was withheld from both legislatures precisely so that it should not accrue to elected Indian representatives at either level.
• Option (d) is wrong because Provincial Governors, though armed with special responsibilities and with the power to act against ministerial advice, had no share in residuary legislative competence. The comparative point is the one worth teaching. In Canada residuary power lies with the Centre and in the United States and Australia with the States, and the framers of the Indian Constitution followed the Canadian model by placing it with the Union in Entry 97 of the Union List with Article 248. The 1935 Act did neither: it gave the power to the Crown's representative rather than to any legislature, which is the sharpest single illustration that the 1935 federation was a federation without responsible government at the apex.

Hence (b).

• Statement 1 is correct. The Charter Act of 1813 threw open the India trade to all British merchants subject to licence, while reserving to the Company its monopoly of the China trade and of the trade in tea. This partial opening is the single most examined feature of the Act and reflects the pressure of British industrial interests after the Industrial Revolution.
• Statement 2 is correct. The Act for the first time expressly asserted the sovereignty of the British Crown over the territorial possessions held by the Company in India, resolving the constitutional ambiguity left by earlier Acts.
• Statement 3 is incorrect. Parliamentary control over Indian revenues was not established in 1813. The Company continued to administer Indian revenues, and the Act in fact required the Company to keep its territorial and commercial accounts separate and to set aside one lakh of rupees annually for education, which is the well known corollary provision. Full accountability of Indian finance to the British Parliament came only with the assumption of direct Crown rule in 1858. Since statements 1 and 2 hold and statement 3 fails, the official answer (a) follows. The clean elimination route is the education grant clause, which is remembered alongside the separation of accounts and signals that finance remained a Company matter in 1813.

• Statement 1 is incorrect: the Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms and the resulting Government of India Act, 1919 did not grant universal adult franchise to women. The franchise remained tied to property, tax and educational qualifications, and the Act left it to the provincial legislatures to decide whether women could vote at all, which several provinces then permitted on the same restricted qualifications as men.
• Statement 2 is correct: the Government of India Act, 1935 provided reserved seats for women in the provincial legislatures, a departure that followed sustained campaigning by women's organisations and the debates around the Communal Award and the Poona Pact. Hence (b). The general principle is that universal adult franchise arrived only with the Constitution in 1950, so any colonial era claim of voting rights for all is almost always wrong.

The dyarchy introduced by the Montagu Chelmsford reforms split the provincial subjects into two lists. Reserved subjects stayed with the Governor acting through his Executive Council, which answered to the Secretary of State and not to the legislature, and these were the subjects the British judged essential to the security of the raj and to its revenues. Transferred subjects passed to ministers drawn from and responsible to the enlarged legislative council.

• Item 1, administration of justice, was reserved, since control over the courts was central to authority.
• Item 3, land revenue, was reserved, being the principal source of provincial income.
• Item 4, police, was reserved for the plainest reason of all, the maintenance of order.
• Item 2, local self government, was transferred, and it belongs with the other nation building subjects handed to ministers such as education, public health, agriculture and industries, which were characteristically those that cost money and carried little power.
• Items 1, 3 and 4 therefore qualify, giving (c).
• Options (a), (b) and (d) each admit local self government, and a candidate who grasps the underlying logic that revenue, order and justice were never surrendered can reach the answer without memorising the full lists.

• Statement 1 is incorrect, and the error lies in a single word applied to both halves of the sentence. Under the Cripps proposals the constitution making body was to be composed of members elected by the newly elected lower houses of the provincial legislatures through proportional representation, together with members nominated by the rulers of the Indian states. Nomination applied to the princely states alone; the provincial component was elective, and this asymmetry was itself a point of criticism, since the states' representatives would be the rulers' men rather than the people's.
• Statement 2 is correct. The draft declaration provided that any province not prepared to accept the new constitution could retain its existing constitutional position, and that His Majesty's Government would be prepared to agree to a new constitution giving such a province the same full status as the Indian Union. This local option clause was the germ of partition, and Gandhi's description of the offer as a post dated cheque and the Congress objection to the provision for non accession both turned on it. Only statement 2 stands, giving (b).
• Options (a) and (c) accept the nomination error, and (d) rejects the accession clause that is the best remembered feature of the scheme.

• Statement 1 is correct. The Act provided for an All India Federation comprising the British Indian Provinces and those Princely States that acceded. The federation never came into being, since the required number of princely accessions was not obtained, but the provision existed in the statute, which is what the statement asserts.
• Statement 2 is incorrect and is the heart of the question. Under the scheme of dyarchy at the Centre, defence and external affairs were reserved subjects administered by the Governor General in his discretion through counsellors answerable to him, and were expressly kept outside the control of the federal legislature. Placing them under legislative control would have amounted to responsible government at the Centre, which the Act was designed to withhold. Hence (a).
• Options (b) and (c) accept the false claim about legislative control, and (d) wrongly denies the federation provision.

All three support the assertion, so (d) is correct.

• Statement 1 is factually right and is the core of the argument, since the Government of India Act 1919 not only continued the Muslim separate electorates conceded in 1909 but extended the device to Sikhs, Indian Christians, Anglo-Indians and Europeans, so that the electoral system itself was organised around community.
• Statement 2 supplies the motive, because a franchise divided by community made a united nationalist demand harder to express and gave the administration counterweights to the Congress, which is the classic account of the intent behind the device.
• Statement 3 supplies the consequence, since once representation was distributed as a communal entitlement, other groups including the depressed classes had every incentive to press for the same treatment, and by 1932 that logic reached the Communal Award.
• Options (a), (b) and (c) each drop one of these three links, but the assertion is about genesis, motive and effect together, so nothing in the set can be discarded.