BPSC 71st CCE Prelims General Studies · Question 76 of 150

Correct — C, Simon Commission. Its formal name was the Indian Statutory Commission; it is remembered by its chairman, Sir John Simon. It had seven members drawn from the British Parliament — Simon himself, Clement Attlee, Viscount Burnham, Edward Cadogan, Vernon Hartshorn, George Lane-Fox and Lord Strathcona — and not one Indian among them. The Government of India Act 1919 had itself promised that a statutory commission would be appointed at the end of ten years to review how diarchy was working, so a commission was expected; what was not expected was its date or its composition. The Secretary of State for India, Lord Birkenhead, appointed it in November 1927, two years early, because he feared his Conservative government would lose office to Labour and did not want the review handed to Labour sympathisers. He kept Indians off it deliberately, on the calculation that Indian members would vote with the Labour MPs, and Viceroy Lord Irwin backed the exclusion. The reaction is precisely what the stem describes. At its Madras session in December 1927 the Congress resolved to boycott the Commission and challenged Birkenhead to produce a constitution Indians would accept — a challenge answered by the Nehru Report of 1928. A faction of the Muslim League under Jinnah boycotted as well, and Gandhi and Nehru both condemned it. The Commission landed at Bombay on 3 February 1928 to a strike and to black flags reading 'Simon Go Back'; in Patna the demonstration was led by Maghfoor Ahmad Ajazi. At Lahore on 30 October 1928 the police, under Superintendent James Scott, beat the protesters; Lala Lajpat Rai, who led them, was critically injured and died on 17 November 1928. Note honestly that the boycott was not universal — B. R. Ambedkar, Periyar E. V. Ramasamy and Chhotu Ram supported the Commission, and an All-India Committee for Cooperation with it was formed under C. Sankaran Nair. The stem's 'all the political groups and parties' is BPSC's shorthand for the mainstream nationalist parties, not literally every organisation in India.

• (a)Welby Commission — The exact opposite case, which is what makes it a fair distractor for a candidate who only recognises the name. The Welby Commission — properly the Royal Commission on the Administration of the Expenditure of India, set up in 1895 under Lord Welby to examine how costs were shared between Britain and India — did have an Indian member: Dadabhai Naoroji sat on it, and G. K. Gokhale and Dinshaw Wacha gave evidence before it in 1897. A commission with a serving Indian member cannot be the one attacked for having none.
• (b)Cripps Mission — A mission, not a commission, and its function was the reverse of an inquiry. Sir Stafford Cripps landed in Delhi on 22 March 1942 to negotiate with Indian leaders; his draft declaration of 29 March 1942 offered Dominion status after the war, a constituent assembly, and a right for any province to opt out. The talks collapsed in April 1942 over the content of that offer — the deferral to the post-war future and the opt-out clause — never over who had been sent to make it.
• (d)Cabinet Mission — The intelligent wrong answer, because it too was all-British: Lord Pethick-Lawrence, Sir Stafford Cripps and A. V. Alexander, three British Cabinet ministers who reached India on 24 March 1946. But it was a negotiating delegation sent to settle a transfer of power WITH the Indian parties, and both the Congress and the League sat down with it. The quarrel was over the plan of 16 May 1946 — the grouping of provinces into Sections A, B and C — not over its composition. Nobody boycotted the Cabinet Mission for excluding Indians.

The Raj wrote its own review clock into its statutes. The Government of India Act 1919, built on the Montagu-Chelmsford Report, introduced diarchy in the major provinces: subjects were split into a 'reserved' list (law and order, finance, land revenue, police) run by the British Governor through his executive council, and a 'transferred' list (education, health, local self-government) run by Indian ministers answerable to the provincial council. Because everyone expected diarchy to need repair, the Act provided that a statutory commission would examine its working after ten years. That single clause is the ancestor of the Simon Commission. The chain it started is the spine of late-colonial constitutional history: Simon Commission (1927-30) to the Nehru Report (1928) to the three Round Table Conferences in London (1930-32) to the White Paper and then the Government of India Act 1935, which abolished provincial diarchy, granted provincial autonomy, created a Federal Court and the Reserve Bank of India, separated Burma and Aden, and proposed an All-India Federation that never came into being. Underneath the whole sequence sits a distinction the options are built to test: a COMMISSION is an inquiry body that takes evidence and reports, so its composition is its legitimacy, while a MISSION is a negotiating delegation sent to reach an agreement, so its offer is what is judged. Two of the four options here are missions.

Reason to this in three steps. First, read the noun. The stem says 'Commission', and two of the four options — Cripps and Cabinet — are Missions. That is not pedantry: an inquiry commission is supposed to represent the people whose constitution it is examining, so excluding them is itself the insult, whereas a negotiating mission is expected to be foreign, because it is the other side of the table. Second, apply the date. The grievance described is composition, and only two bodies in this list ever faced that charge — Simon in 1927-28 and, on a purely literal reading, the Cabinet Mission in 1946. Third, apply the discriminator: which body did the Congress formally resolve to BOYCOTT? Only Simon. The Madras Congress of December 1927 passed that resolution, the League under Jinnah joined it, and the country met the Commission at Bombay on 3 February 1928 with black flags. The Cabinet Mission, by contrast, was negotiated with by every major party. The trap is the Welby Commission, and it is a good one because the name is unfamiliar and 'commission' matches the stem — but Welby is the counter-example, the commission that DID carry an Indian member in Dadabhai Naoroji. A candidate who guesses the unfamiliar name because it sounds like a colonial inquiry loses the mark to a fact that is easy to hold: Naoroji sat on Welby, nobody sat on Simon.

• The Indian Statutory Commission was appointed in November 1927 — its appointment appears in the House of Commons order of business for 8 November 1927 — with seven members including the chairman Sir John Simon, all from the British Parliament and none Indian; it reached Bombay on 3 February 1928.
• Clement Attlee was one of the seven. The experience turned him into the British politician most sympathetic to Indian independence, and as Prime Minister in 1947 he announced on 20 February that Britain would quit India and then carried the Indian Independence Act.
• The Congress resolved to boycott the Commission at its Madras session in December 1927 and challenged Lord Birkenhead to draft an acceptable constitution; the answer was the Nehru Report of 1928, prepared under Motilal Nehru, to which Jinnah replied with his Fourteen Points.
• Lala Lajpat Rai led the Lahore protest of 30 October 1928, was injured when the police under Superintendent James Scott beat the demonstrators, and died on 17 November 1928. The Patna demonstration against the Commission was led by Maghfoor Ahmad Ajazi.
• The Commission's two-volume report appeared in June 1930: abolish provincial diarchy, extend responsible government in the provinces, retain separate electorates — and no mention of Dominion status. Its provincial recommendations passed almost intact into the Government of India Act 1935.
• By contrast the Welby Commission of 1895, the Royal Commission on the Administration of the Expenditure of India, included Dadabhai Naoroji as a member and heard evidence from G. K. Gokhale and Dinshaw Wacha in 1897 — an inquiry into Indian finance that did associate Indians with itself.

• Choosing 'Cabinet Mission' because it too was entirely British — true, but it was a negotiating delegation both Congress and the League talked to, and it was never boycotted over its composition
• Assuming the Simon Commission was universally opposed — Ambedkar, Periyar and Chhotu Ram supported it, and a cooperation committee under C. Sankaran Nair worked with it
• Confusing the Commission's arrival (Bombay, 3 February 1928) with its appointment (November 1927) or its report (June 1930) in a chronology question

BPSC asks this as a single-clause identification — name the body, take the mark, move on — and builds the option set from mixed categories, putting two Missions beside two Commissions so that a candidate who is reading only for 'British body Indians disliked' has four plausible answers. UPSC has asked the same fact twice as a causal question, in 1998 and again in 2013, both times phrased as 'the Commission was boycotted/agitated against BECAUSE', and its harder version moves to the report's content — the 2010 paper asked what the Simon Commission actually recommended, which no amount of slogan memory answers.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Simon Commission was appointed two years ahead of the schedule laid down in the Government of India Act 1919 mainly because the Secretary of State for India

  • (a)wished to reward the Indian provinces that had cooperated in the First World War
  • (b)feared that a Labour government would soon replace the Conservatives and would appoint its own commission
  • (c)had been directed to do so by a resolution of the Indian Legislative Assembly
  • (d)wanted the review completed before the Nehru Report was published

  Answer(b) feared that a Labour government would soon replace the Conservatives and would appoint its own commission — Lord Birkenhead advanced the appointment to November 1927 for that reason, and also kept Indians off it so that they could not vote with the Labour members. The Nehru Report of 1928 came after, not before, the Commission.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Which one of the following Royal Commissions on Indian affairs included Dadabhai Naoroji among its members ?

  • (a)The Welby Commission on Indian Expenditure
  • (b)The Indian Statutory Commission
  • (c)The Hunter Committee
  • (d)The Butler Committee

  Answer(a) The Welby Commission on Indian Expenditure — set up in 1895 as the Royal Commission on the Administration of the Expenditure of India, it had Dadabhai Naoroji as a member and heard Gokhale and Dinshaw Wacha in 1897. The Indian Statutory Commission of 1927 had no Indian member at all.