Edwin Montagu’s letters

THE letters of the late Edwin Montagu, former Secretary of State, published by the Right Hon’ble Srinivas Sastri in Servant of India, throw an interesting sidelight on the views held by Montagu about the position of the Civil Services under the Reforms. His views, in several respects, were antagonistic to those that find favour with the men who are at present in charge of Indian affairs at Whitehall. Not only did he want the executive organisation to be fitted into the new order of things, but he wanted to make the “reforms of pay” conditional “on a reorganisation which made the Services an instrument of the Reforms Act and its developments.” This is what he wrote to Sastri on 5th March, 1923, when the question of the appointment of the Public Services Commission was being fought out by the Indian Legislature: “I desire to place in writing before you, in order that in after years you may remember it, my conviction that the progress of India to Self-Government must not be hampered by the absence of a reform in the organisation of the Civil Services, and that the work which Lord Chelmsford and I accomplished in India is incomplete until that reorganisation occurs. We altered the political constitution of India and gave a new trend and direction to the future, but we left untouched the executive organisation. That executive organisation has got to be fitted into the new order of things, and until this is accomplished, the existing and now anachronistic organisation will always prove to be, and be quoted as, an obstacle to progress even though a general acceptance of the new ideal characterises the members of the Services.”