Nehru asked the Congress Working Committee to direct Ministries to obtain the Committee’s clearance for political arrests or prosecutions. But the Committee was unwilling to go so far. While advising Ministers not to object to criticism, it acknowledged their right to act against incitement to violence.
If he was wooing the British, C.R. also strove to defend the frontiers of his autonomy. Thus he objected to the draft of the Governor’s first speech to the legislature following Congress’s assumption of office. Erskine asked the Viceroy for the latter’s ‘full support in preventing this invasion of the discretionary power of the Governor’ but was advised by Linlithgow to exclude ‘matter which might have a controversial or argumentative tinge.’16
C.R. claimed a ‘right’ to see files on subjects assigned by the 1935 Act to the Governor’s own domain, but Erskine was unyielding. ‘Nobody,’ the Governor minuted, ‘either a Minister or Secretary, can advise me in regard to matters in which I exercise “my discretion.” ’17
Selected by Premier Stanley Baldwin for the Governorship, ‘Jock’ Erskine, a bespectacled and stocky Scot and a son of the Earl of Mar and Kellie, had been an MP before coming to Madras and expected a place before long in the British Cabinet. He had been anti-Congress and pro-Justice before the 1937 elections but he liked C.R.’s wit and reasonableness and enjoyed dealing with one whom he described as ‘a big figure’ belonging to ‘the inner ring of the Congress.’18 To King George V, Erskine sent this account of C.R. (29.12.37):
As to the Premier himself, I get on quite well with him, but he is an odd mixture . . . He is an idealist and his main object in life seems to to get India back to what it was in the days of King Asoka. He runs the whole show and if anything were to happen to him we should be all over the place . . .19
On his part C.R. had a warm spot, nourished by memories of his teacher John Tait, for the Scots, and he liked Erskine’s sense of humour. However, the tussle between Congress and the Raj and the jealous attitude of both C.R. and Erskine towards their rights ensured tension. Always more than willing to rule without Ministers, Erskine from time to time gave the Viceroy a fair idea of the money Governor’s rule would save, and a less realistic estimate of the response Governor’s rule might get.
Erskine spent three months in a year in Government House on Mount Road, the mansion Clive’s son had used, three months in Guindy Lodge — the present residence of Tamil Nadu’s Governor, first acquired by Sir Thomas Munro in 1821 for use as the Governor’s country house — and six months in Ooty.
C.R. lived in a modest dwelling on Bazlulla Road in the suburb of Mambalam. Jamnalal Bajaj, friend and supporter of Gandhi, C.R. and others, had bought the house for C.R.’s use and rented it to him. (Five years later, when Bajaj died and C.R. was in political wilderness, the Bajaj family transferred the ownership of the house to C.R. The house stood next to the home of C.R.’s son Krishnaswami, who was on the editorial staff of The Hindu).
Namagiri, C.R.’s widowed daughter, kept house for him. From seven in the morning there were visitors — officials, partymen, and others. C.R. received them in the small ‘swing room’ into which the front-door opened, named after the most prominent item of furniture in it. He would sit on the swing, the visitors in chairs, if they were trousered officials, or on straw mats on the floor. From 9.30 to 4.30 he would work in Fort St. George, with a ten-minute interruption for coffee and an idli or two brought from home.
In C.R.’s ten-man Cabinet, T. Prakasam, V.V. Giri and Gopala Reddi represented the Telugu districts, and P. Subbaroyan, T.S.S. Rajan, S. Ramanathan, Muniswami Pillai and C.R. the Tamil areas. Pillai, in addition, was a Harijan. From Malabar C.R. took Ramana Menon, replaced by C.J. Varkey following Menon’s death. Yakub Hasan was the Cabinet’s Muslim member. Subbaroyan alone had previous ministerial experience; and Prakasam was the only colleague to question some of C.R.’s decisions.
For most of his colleagues C.R. was a mentor and a backstop. Besides leading them, he was apt on occasion to do their work even before they showed their unfitness for it. ‘Why do you try to mind the portfolios of others?’ Gandhi asked him. ‘I have not acquired the art of controlling my swabhava,’ C.R. replied.20
The Assembly sessions were held in the University Senate House, familiar to C.R. from his college days. The Speaker, Bulusu Sambamurti, a Telugu lawyer who had discarded his practice to join the Gandhi-led movement, would come to the House in a dhoti with a sheet draped over a bare chest. The opening day’s proceedings have been described in Triveni (Oct. 1937):
The hall was filled with khaddar-clad ladies and gentlemen in as many types of unconventional attire as one could imagine. The few Europeans present looked almost apologetic for the clothes they were in. The people at last seemed to be tenanting the central seat of power.
Members spoke in Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Kannada, Urdu and English. Except when a member interpreted a colleague, there was no translation — the House would not hear, Sambamurti ruled, the voice of an outsider. C.R. instructed MLAs in the art of speaking into a mike and in the culture of parliamentary politics.
At the first session he asked the Speaker to ensure the opposition’s rights and his partymen not to make personal references to any opposition member. Congress MLAs speaking of Europeans in India as ‘parasites’ and ‘bloodsuckers’ were rebuked by him, and when a Minister was found absent, C.R. delivered an open reprimand.
‘I consider the opposition strong and important and I respect it. That is why I have accepted so many amendments.’21 This remark by C.R., made during the debate on his Debt Relief Bill, was both true and misleading. While ready to accept improvements, C.R. was unwilling to yield on a core issue, and he disarmed the opposition with his courtesy.
On 1 October 1937 — within three months of Congress taking over — Salem district, C.R.’s own, went dry, and a programme of gradual extension of prohibition was announced. Despite the loss this entailed in excise, which along with land revenue formed the bulk of the government’s income, C.R. presented a balanced budget in 1937 and was to do so again in the two following years.
There were misgivings over the dry law. Drinkers would surely violate it by making their own brew or by buying grog made illicitly by others. And were there officials to enforce the law? C.R. found a remarkable one from the ranks of the ICS, A.F.W. Dixon, ‘a tall popular officer determined to make prohibition a success though no teetotaller himself.’22
Dixon and most other officials stuck loyally to a convention that C.R. proposed: officials in a district going dry would neither drink within its confines nor ask for a permit, which was easily available to Europeans pleading habit and somewhat less easily to Indians pleading addiction.
Salem’s officers could, however, go to Bangalore for a drink, a detour to which C.R. did not object. Clubs could apply for licences to keep liquor for sale to permit-holding members; bishops and priests were authorized to keep wine for religious purposes; and hospitals could stock brandy. A sense of proportion was thus retained. When C.R. heard that a magistrate had fined a European Rs 500 for a dry law violation, he reduced the penalty to five rupees.
Such was Dixon’s zeal, and such the climate of the time, that in the dry law’s first year there were only 110 cases of illicit distillation and no more than 170 of illicit tapping of toddy palm; there had been 265 and 470 cases, respectively, of the offences in the previous (and wet) year. Employers spoke of a fall in absenteeism and a rise in real earnings among their workers. After four months of prohibition, Dixon reported that ‘conditions have changed to a remarkable extent’ in ‘thousands of homes.’ ‘Domestic brawls have ceased, a sufficiency of food is available, and the grip of the money-lender has relaxed.’ A Madras University study of the first year of the dry law suggested that over 200,000 persons formerly paying the drink bill were no longer doing so, while a report of the Annamalai University referred to ‘a phenomenal improvement.’23
Erskine wrote to the King that prohibition had ‘succeeded far b
etter than was expected’ and that ‘there has been a great diminution in the consumption of alcohol in the Salem district.’ He noted that the public had ‘calmly acquiesced’ in ‘the forcible removal’ of its liquor. ‘Your Prime Minister seems to have plenty of character,’ the King’s secretary wrote back, adding that the news of prohibiton had ‘particularly interested’ the King.24
To C.R. the dry law was part of a bigger programme of influencing the countryside. He hoped to popularize games, ballad and bhajan singing, folk dances, street dramas and the cinema, and tea and coffee. However, he was unable to forge instruments for achieving the interesting vision.
The Telugu districts of Chittoor and Cuddappah went dry a year after Salem, and North Arcot in the Tamil country followed a year later, all three witnessing, though perhaps to a lesser extent, the gains that had come to Salem. But illicit tapping and distillation seemed also to increase. However, no study pronounced the experiment a failure when in October 1939, in the aftermath of the declaration of war, the C.R. Ministry was to resign.
The Debt Relief Bill that C.R. piloted with passion was strongly opposed. Damdupat was the broad principle laid down by him: if, in interest and principal instalments, a farmer had paid back more than twice the principal, his debt would stand cancelled. (We should mark that the rate of inflation was zero at the time.)
Sir A.T. Pannirselvam of the Justice Party termed the Bill a cheap device for winning the sympathy of ‘the poorer people, who are naturally more numerous.’ Leading the European block, W.E.M. Langley complained that approaching the Assembly not ‘claws and all, as a lion,’ but disarmingly, C.R. was bringing in ‘pale-pink socialism or even communism’ through the Bill. Krishnamachari said it was a balm, not a cure: debts would accumulate again. He also regretted the absence of detailed statistics to justify the Bill.
C.R. likened Krishnamachari’s criticism to ‘laughing at a bullock cart because it was not a motor car [or] at our feet because we have bought a bicycle.’ As for statistics, C.R. said that ‘if mosquitos had to be escaped in Madras, it was better to buy a net in time, before the statistician could collect figures as to the distribution of mosquitos between Mylapore and Triplicane.’25
The Hindu’s columns in November and December 1937 were filled with protests assailing the measure as ‘un-Hindu’ and likely to ‘frighten away credit.’ Close to 300 amendments were proposed in the Assembly, which sat well into the night while discussing the Bill for four days. It was passed more or less as C.R. wanted it.
Bombay copied C.R.’s Act and Sikandar Hyat Khan, Premier of the Punjab, termed it ‘a lead’ (The Hindu, 19.7.38). Though, as C.R. admitted, the Act did not help the agricultural labourer, the tenant was relieved. C.R.’s hope to ‘devise and introduce a measure to emancipate’ the rural labourer as well (The Hindu, 1.2.38) was not to be fulfilled.
Over its life of two years and three months, the Rajaji Ministry gave modest subsidies to handspinners and to what C.R. called ‘the valiant handloom,’ took water to dry villages, built rural roads and dispensaries, remitted land revenue in areas hit by cyclone or drought, and halved grazing fees. It negotiated a settlement — C.R. playing a personal part — with the states of Hyderabad and Mysore for the use of river waters, and helped launch the Tungabhadra scheme.
Thermal plants were initiated in Bezwada and Vizag in the Telugu districts; power from the hydro stations of Pykara and Mettur was taken to eight additional Tamil districts. In towns new sums were spent on drainage, purification of water and prevention of disease: the Ministry’s Public Health Act was the first of its kind for a province. Buttermilk, newspapers, radio sets and Fuller’s earth for washing clothes were made available to prisoners. Teaching Hindustani was financed in 125 secondary schools. Most expensively, four districts went dry, depriving the government of large sums in excise.
Savings and new levies paid for all this. The transfer of the government each summer to Ooty was stopped, and C.R. fixed lower salaries for new entrants to some provincial services.
‘It must be remembered,’ Erskine wrote to the Viceroy, ‘that the Premier is a terrible miser where public funds are concerned.’26 For travelling expenses in the province in his first eight months in office the Premier claimed the princely sum of Rs 400!
For his second budget, C.R. received Rs 21 lakhs as Madras’s share of the all-India income tax. It was the first time that the tax was shared with provinces, and opposition MLAs called the 21 lakhs ‘a windfall.’ Retorted C.R.: ‘It is a return of stolen property. Is the land revenue which comes with the hot tears of the farmer the only legitimate revenue of the province, and not the income tax?’27
In 1938-9, C.R.’s hungry eye found an unearmarked nest-egg of over Rs 40 lakhs that had accumulated in the Minor Ports Fund, into which ships using the Presidency’s smaller ports had over the years been paying fees. C.R. coolly employed the sum to overcome a financial crunch caused by cyclones, floods, a monsoon failure and an influx of refugees from Burma. Terming this sum a windfall, he added:
Was the failure of the monsoon a windfall? Was the cyclone a windfall? Was the huge remission that had to be given a windfall? If misfortunes befall us, God also sends us a windfall. It should not be grudged.28
His most important innovation was the sales tax, levied by him — for the first time in Asia — in 1939. First he imposed a tax on the sale of petrol and tobacco, then on the sale of electricity, and finally a general sales tax of half-an-anna in the rupee — a 3 per cent levy — payable on sales by anyone with a turnover of over Rs 10,000 a year.
While C.R.’s ingenuity was praised, his new taxes were fiercely opposed by Justice and pro-business MLAs. The Premier’s answer was that the levies shifted a load from the poor to the not-so-poor, and from the peasantry to urbanites.
He incurred some unpopularity in the Andhra country by accepting the report of a white judge, Horwill, exonerating officials involved in a disturbance in the town of Chirala. ‘Down with Horwill Report!’ chanted young men at a meeting C.R. addressed in Guntur. ‘I have accepted it because it is right,’ replied C.R. ‘You cannot intimidate me,’ he added. ‘Every act of the administration cannot be disposed of by a crowd.’
This was hardly palatable, but the Guntur audience cheered C.R. when he said: ‘Andhra Pradesh is the birthright of the Andhras as much as Swaraj is the birthright of the Indians.’29 The statement was necessary, for it was being rumoured that C.R. had sent a secret letter to London arguing against a separate Andhra province.
The truth was that in the Assembly and to the Raj C.R. had declared his clear support for a separated Andhra. In a memorandum to Zetland, he and his Ministers had asked for steps for its creation. When the Secretary of State expressed his inability to accede to the request, C.R. wrote to him again:
There can be no stable administration of the province unless it is divided as desired by the people of Andhra . . . In the interests of sound administration, the demand of the people should be granted.30
It was, however, the issue of Hindi, or Hindustani, as C.R. preferred to call it, which harassed the Premier the most. His Ministry had introduced its teaching in standards six to eight in 125 schools. Students could choose either the Nagari (Sanskrit) or the Urdu script, and it was clarified that failure in Hindustani would not block a student’s promotion. ‘It was chutney on the leaf,’ said C.R., ‘taste it or leave it alone.’31 He claimed it would equip southerners for jobs across India.
But he had underestimated both the sentiment against the northern tongue and the opposition’s ability to exploit it. Hindustani was successfully portrayed as an alien, Aryan import which the South’s Brahmin minority with its supposed Aryan links might accept but which the sons of the soil, the Dravidians, must oppose.
The initiator and leader of the anti-Hindi movement was E.V.R. Naicker, who had started as C.R.’s ally in Tamil politics and was now his opponent. Called E.V.R. until he was named Periyar, the Big One, Naicker was chairman of the municipality of Erode whi
le C.R. was chairing its counterpart in Salem. C.R. had enlisted him in Gandhi’s non-cooperation battle, but E.V.R. resigned from Congress after the Mahatma suspended his campaign in 1922.
As soon as the Hindustani policy was articulated, E.V.R. attacked it from public platforms and Justice men censured it in the Assembly. Opponents went to C.R.’s public meetings with black flags and shouted slogans against Hindi, Brahmins and the man himself. In Trichy, sandals and shoes were thrown at a platform where C.R. sat.
Demonstrators shouted slogans outside schools teaching Hindi and also outside C.R.’s Bazlulla Road house. Prakasam told the Assembly that life had become ‘intolerable’ for those living in that house.32 Though C.R. claimed that he possessed ‘one ear that works and another that is deaf,’ enabling him to ‘sleep in a market if necessary, by having the wrong ear up,’33 we can be certain that he was personally affected.
That the agitators were parodying satyagraha also outraged C.R.; the Gandhians had never sought to embarrass opponents. C.R. thought, too, that the anti-Hindustani agitators were fostering permanent communal hatred, thereby ‘annoying the national heart.’ Their language affronted him: they were describing some people — C.R. told the Assembly — ‘by caste, by their sacred thread, by the tuft of the hair on their head’ and had descended to an ‘intolerable’ standard of ‘scurrilousness . . . personal libel, and . . . references to the physical processes of physiological regeneration.’34
How was he to deal with them? They could not be booked for posing a threat to a breach of peace, for violence was not really threatened by their noise. There was a law against nuisance, but it sanctioned only a trifling punishment and was moreover powerless against the instigator—‘the man who comes on a bicycle and fixes the boys,’ as C.R. described him.35
In the circumstances, C.R. ironically and unwisely turned to Section 7 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act, offences under which were non-bailable and which the Raj had used to combat Congress’s picketing of cloth and toddy shops. In a note recommending Section 7 to Brackenbury, the Chief Secretary, C.R. said: ‘Those who are organising this [campaign] will not like the application of the penal law and if they see that the arm of the law is long enough, the business will come to an end.’36
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