Reforms committee’s report

EVER since it was semi-officially announced that the Reforms Enquiry Committee had submitted its report, speculation has been rife in all interested quarters as to what that report contains. And the long and almost unconscionable delay which the Government of India has made in publishing the report was, if anything, bound to make it still more so. The matter was one of the utmost importance and urgency. The whole country had demanded an enquiry into the reforms, not, indeed, an enquiry such as the government actually ordered, but a real enquiry by a representative commission or conference with a virtually unlimited scope of reference. It might have been expected that having disappointed the public on the main issue, the government would at least have had the sense to make the best of a bad case and taken steps both to expedite the labours of the committee and publish the results of those labours along with its own conclusions without any avoidable delay. This is precisely what it did not do. Had the committee been appointed in time and directed to complete its work without unnecessary delay, it might have finished its labours in time for the Labour Government to take its report into consideration. But it did not seriously begin its work until that government had very nearly come to the end of its short term, and its report has not seen the light of day even three months after the Conservative Government was firmly seated in power. And yet while the delay, in the first case, served some useful bureaucratic purpose, the delay in the second can serve no purpose.