Shifting the ground
LORD Birkenhead’s address to Indian students at Glasgow, a brief summary of which was sent by Reuter, contains three important points. One is that half the number of recruits to the Indian Civil Service (ICS) should be British in any circumstance. This proportion, he said, should be maintained if the statutory responsibilities of the Secretary of State for India and Parliament for the good government of India were to be adequately discharged. We should like to know how His Lordship arrived at the conclusion that good government of India would only be possible with the hard and fast condition he imposes. Good government has been possible in countries where the British element is absent because goodness, like other virtues, is not the monopoly of any one nationality. Indians, who have come out successfully through the same system of training and the same test as British recruits, have been tried and found not wanting in the art of good government. Lord Birkenhead said: “The justification for British recruits was not that they necessarily possessed innate superiority over Indian recruits but that they contributed something distinctive, just as India might be expected to contribute something which the British recruits would only attain by long residence.” It is obvious that what the Secretary of State wants to convey is that there is no question of superiority of British recruits but there is some undefinable virtue which is a distinctive characteristic of the British. There was a time when this merit was not at all discovered. For a long period, only a few Indians were able to proceed to England and compete for the ICS.
