The Simon Commission Had Seven British Members and No Indian, Met Black Flags From Bombay to Lahore, and Reported in 1930 That Responsible Government at the Centre Was Premature

The Indian Statutory Commission, known by the name of its chairman Sir John Simon, had seven members and not one of them was Indian. Lord Birkenhead, the Secretary of State for India, read out the names in the House of Lords on 8 November 1927. Within weeks Congress and the National Liberal Federation had resolved to boycott it, and by February 1928 Muhammad Ali Jinnah had signed the party leaders’ statement saying the same. When the Commission landed at Bombay on 3 February 1928, the Indian Annual Register’s chronicle records a deserted city, black flags and cries of “Simon, go back.”

The Commission’s report was signed on 27 May 1930. It recommended ending dyarchy, the 1919 arrangement under which elected Indian ministers ran some provincial departments while the governor ran the rest, and it proposed no responsible government at the Centre. What follows is how the boycott was built, who stayed out of it, and what the Commission and its critics each put on paper.

Why there was no Indian on it

The Government of India Act 1919 required a commission to review the new constitution after ten years. A 1927 amending Act changed the wording from “at the expiration of” ten years to “within” ten years, according to a footnote in the Commission’s own report, and that let the Government appoint early. Birkenhead told the Lords on 8 November 1927 that the Act had contemplated December 1929, and gave his reasons for moving sooner only as “various reasons which I need not, perhaps, on this occasion discuss.”

His case for an all-British body came on 24 November, and it rested on numbers. A mixed commission would need a Hindu, a non-Brahmin Hindu, a Muslim and a Sikh “to begin with,” he said, then Christians, then the depressed classes, whom he put at 60,000,000 people, and it could not leave out the Indian Civil Service. He reckoned the result at “some eighteen or twenty people” and doubted such a body could agree on a report. He called the seven “an exceptionally intelligent jury, going to India without any preconceived ideas at all,” and said committees of the Indian legislatures were “invited in a spirit of great sincerity to co-operate as colleagues with the Commission.”

One of the seven changed before the first meeting. Stephen Walsh resigned for ill health, and a royal warrant of 7 December 1927 appointed Vernon Hartshorn in his place. That left Simon, Viscount Burnham, Lord Strathcona, Edward Cadogan, Hartshorn, G. R. Lane-Fox and Major C. R. Attlee.

Whether the exclusion amounted to an insult is where the two sides parted. Lord Olivier, in a statement the Register prints under May 1928, held there was “nothing inherently insulting to India” in a commission that was not mixed. The Register’s account of the Assembly debate has Jinnah arguing that the basis of the appointment assumed India could not advance constitutionally, and S. Srinivasa Iyengar warning Muslims, Parsis and Christians that the Government’s concern for minorities was meant to protect the British commercial and official minority.

How the boycott was organised

The Congress Working Committee issued its call before the party’s Madras session, and the Register prints it: the committee appealed to all parties “to abstain from co-operating” with the Commission by giving evidence or by voting for or serving on any select committee. At the Madras session in December 1927, a Reception Committee speaker closing the session listed the boycott among the three main resolutions passed, alongside independence and Hindu-Muslim unity. The National Liberal Federation, a moderate body, met at Bombay on 27 December 1927 and passed a boycott resolution moved by Sir Sivaswami Iyer.

An all-party conference at Benares under Dr. M. A. Ansari then fixed a hartal, a general shutdown, for 3 February 1928, the day the Commission landed. The Register’s chronicle for that date records Bombay deserted, a meeting of 50,000 resolving to boycott the Commission at every stage, and police opening fire in Madras.

Simon tried to meet the objection. In a letter to the Viceroy dated 6 February 1928 he proposed a “Joint Free Conference”: the seven British commissioners sitting with a matching body chosen by the Indian legislatures, just as the commissioners had been chosen by the British Parliament. Party leaders met at New Delhi the next day and rejected it, saying they would have nothing to do with the Commission “at any stage or in any form.” Their statement of 20 February, signed by Motilal Nehru, S. Srinivasa Iyengar, Madan Mohan Malaviya, Jinnah, Lajpat Rai and Sir Purshotamdas Thakurdas, listed what they saw as the gap: some evidence taken in camera, no vote for Indian members in the Commission’s proceedings, and a secondary place for the Indian committee’s report.

On 16 February the Assembly took up a motion by Lala Lajpat Rai conveying its “entire lack of confidence” in the Commission. It passed 68 to 62. In March the Assembly also voted 66 to 59 to delete the Commission’s money from the India Office grant.

Who did not boycott

The boycott was not complete, and the Commission’s report says so. The Council of State elected three members to work with it. The Legislative Assembly, in the report’s words, “by a small majority decided not to co-operate,” so the Viceroy appointed a nine-member Indian Central Committee of four Council members and five Assembly members. Every provincial legislature except the Central Provinces appointed a committee, and Burma did so in December 1928.

The Register’s chronicle records two other breaks. The All-India Depressed Classes Conference, meeting in special session under Rao Bahadur M. C. Rajah, advocated co-operation on 25 February 1928, and on 14 March the Punjab Council voted to elect a committee.

B. R. Ambedkar served on the Bombay committee and gave evidence at the Joint Free Conference on 23 October 1928, according to the Register. He asked that the depressed classes be treated as a distinct minority and that at least 22 of the 140 seats in the Bombay Council be reserved for them. His later work is in tuput’s account of Ambedkar and the writing of the Constitution.

Lahore and Lucknow, autumn 1928

The Commission’s second visit ran from 11 October 1928 to 13 April 1929. At Lahore on 30 October a boycott procession halted at a barbed-wire barricade about 200 yards from the station’s main gate, and Lala Lajpat Rai told a public meeting that evening that a police officer, whose name was afterwards given as Scott, had struck him. The Register’s chronicle records his death on 17 November. Earl Winterton told the Commons on 26 November that “no evidence has been produced to show that the death of Lala Lajpat Rai was due to blows received on that occasion,” and that there was “no deliberate or unprovoked attack by the police.” The Congress at Calcutta resolved on 26 December that the attack was “deliberate and unprovoked.” The evidence and the inquiries are set out in tuput’s piece on the lathi charge at Lahore.

At Lucknow, on the eve of the Commission’s arrival in late November, the Register’s chronicle records that Jawaharlal Nehru and Govind Ballabh Pant received lathi blows when police charged boycott processionists. The Chief Secretary of the United Provinces told the Legislative Council that processions in Lucknow needed a police licence, that the boycott committee had not applied for one on 29 November, and that demonstrators would not keep to the place assigned on 30 November. On 13 December the Council carried a censure of the police moved by Chintamani.

The Nehru Report: the Indian reply

Congress had authorised its Working Committee at Madras to draft a Swaraj Constitution with other parties. An All Parties Conference first met at Delhi on 12 February 1928, and the meeting at Bombay on 19 May appointed a committee under Motilal Nehru to “consider and determine the principles of the Constitution for India.” Its ten named members included Sir Tej Bahadur Sapru, Subhas Chandra Bose, Sir Ali Imam and Shuaib Qureshi for Muslim opinion, and Sardar Mangal Singh for the Sikhs. Eight signed the report, which is dated 10 August 1928.

The committee chose dominion status as the model, which the report says was the most agreement obtainable, since Congress had declared independence its goal at Madras. It proposed a “Commonwealth of India” with an executive responsible to Parliament and a list of nineteen fundamental rights, among them equality before the law, no state religion, and equal rights for men and women as citizens. It recommended adult suffrage, the separation of Sind from Bombay after an inquiry, and a Karnataka province.

The communal clauses were the contested part. The report asked for joint mixed electorates everywhere. Seats would be reserved only for Muslim minorities in provinces other than the Punjab and Bengal, and for non-Muslims in the North-West Frontier Province, in strict proportion to population, for ten years and with the right to contest further seats. In the Punjab and Bengal no seats would be reserved for any community. The committee also declined the one-third Muslim share of the central legislature that some Muslim leaders wanted, and Qureshi’s note in the report dissents on exactly that point. It described what it was looking for as “a just and equitable compromise.”

Congress took the report up at Calcutta in December 1928. Gandhi moved the resolution, which welcomed the constitution, set a deadline for the British Parliament to accept it, and promised non-violent non-co-operation including refusal of taxes if it did not. The deadline was moved from 31 December 1930 to 31 December 1929 before adoption.

Jinnah’s amendments and the fourteen points

At the All Parties Convention in Calcutta, Jinnah moved amendments setting out Muslim demands. A League member named Saddiq told the Muslim League at its Calcutta session on 29 December 1928 that the amendments “formulating the minimum demands of the Mussalmans” had been “summarily rejected,” with only four or five Hindus voting in favour. The same session debated whether to send delegates to an All-Parties Muslim Conference at Delhi, and the Register’s chronicle says the League decided to stay away. tuput’s piece on Jinnah’s record follows the Convention exchange and the League’s meeting of 1929 in detail.

The fourteen points are dated 28 March 1929 in the two compilations tuput consulted. They ask for a federal constitution with residuary powers in the provinces, at least one-third Muslim representation in the central legislature, continued separate electorates that any community may give up, the separation of Sind, and at least one-third Muslim ministers in any cabinet.

The Commission, writing in 1930, gave its own reading of the dispute. Objections from the Muslim community, it said, “more than anything else, accentuated division over the Nehru Report,” and it observed that the community as a whole was “not prepared to give up communal representation.” The Nehru Committee had written that the only hope for an agreed constitution lay in “a just and equitable compromise,” and Congress adopted its report in December 1928.

What the report of May 1930 recommended

The report came in two volumes, Cmd. 3568 and Cmd. 3569, signed on 27 May 1930 by Simon, Burnham, Strathcona, Cadogan, Hartshorn, Lane-Fox and Attlee. It describes itself as “unanimous on all fundamental matters.”

In the provinces it proposed ending dyarchy and putting one cabinet of ministers, chosen by the Governor, in charge of every department, with an official element where the Governor thought it necessary. The Governor would keep special powers to protect minorities and the civil service. The legislatures would be enlarged and the franchise widened so as to treble the electorate. Burma would be separated “forthwith,” the North-West Frontier Province would get a local legislature, and Sind and the Oriya-speaking areas would be the first cases considered for new boundaries.

On communal seats the report kept separate electorates for important minorities “unless and until agreement can be reached upon a better method,” and reserved seats for the depressed classes. It refused a claim that would have fixed a Muslim majority of the general seats in the Punjab and Bengal in proportion to population, saying “We cannot go so far.”

At the Centre it recommended renaming the Legislative Assembly the Federal Assembly, with members elected by the provincial councils through proportional representation. The executive would remain the Governor-General in Council, and the Governor-General would pick its members. The report called dyarchy at the Centre “quite impossible,” and said a “premature endeavour to introduce forms of responsible government at the Centre” would end “in retrogression.” It added that “federalism is a form of nationalism,” and proposed a Council for Greater India to bring the princely states closer to British India.

What came after

Viceroy Lord Irwin had already made his statement, on 31 October 1929, before the report appeared: that “it is implicit in the Declaration of 1917 that the natural issue of India’s constitutional progress” is “the attainment of Dominion status.” Congress, meeting at Lahore in December 1929, passed the Purna Swaraj resolution on 19 December 1929, calling for complete independence, and the declaration followed on 26 January 1930. Gandhi set out from Sabarmati Ashram on 12 March 1930 and reached Dandi on 5 April, as tuput’s account of the tax on salt describes.

The Government of India Act, dated 2 August 1935, discarded dyarchy at the provincial level and came into effect in 1937. Section 46 says “Burma shall cease to be part of India,” and section 289 provides for Sind to be separated from the Bombay Presidency.