The disallowed resolutions

The laconic statement in an Associated Press telegram, that the resolutions proposing to raise the issue of the Bengal ordinance in the Assembly have been disallowed, does call for further explanation, as stated by Rangaswami Iyengar in the course of an interview at Bombay. The resolutions could only have been disallowed on one of the two grounds; either that the matter dealt with by them was not primarily the concern of the Governor-General in Council or that the proper authority for dealing with it was the Bengal Government, which was directly charged with the responsibility of maintaining law and order in the province to which the ordinance related. Both these grounds, however, are equally untenable, and amount equally, in the expressive words of Iyengar, to petty quibbling. As regards the first, it is absurd to say that the very authority that has issued the ordinance in one capacity cannot in another capacity be asked to cancel it. If it was, indeed, the intention of Parliament, in vesting the power of issuing the ordinance in the Governor-General, to make it impossible for the legislature to interfere with the use of his power even to the extent of making a recommendation to him, all we can say is that we have conclusive proof of the fact that so far as the administration of law and justice is concerned, the Government of India remains just as autocratic as it was before the reforms, and the legislature is, for all practical purposes, non-existent.

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