Vol. 6 · pages 246–250

231 THE NECESSITY FOR A CHANGE is permanently fixed, while in other cases the amount of the tax payable in respect of land revenue is periodically revised. Now there is no justifying circumstance why some citizens should be exempted from contributing their quota to the growing needs of the State when the same is rigorously exacted from their fellows. This is, however, only one point of injustice to those whose taxable capacity in respect of land revenue is subject to periodical revisions. There is another which consists in the adoption of a wrong measure of capacity to pay. The cardinal feature of this revisable part of the land tax in India is to be found in the basis of the tax which, as is well known to every student of Indian Finance, is a certain unit of land. Now nobody has ever suspected the pernicious effect of the system which bases the tax on a unit of land held ; but surely there can hardly be a system more mistaken in thought or more mischievous in practice. It ignores the commonplace of economists which asserts that taxes are paid not by things but by persons,1 and if it is persons who ultimately pay the taxes then it is manifest that they must be required to contribute not according to the land they hold but in proportion to the total income derived. On the contrary the system, in undertaking to tax per unit of land, taxes the poor peasant with only one acre to cultivate and the landlord owing hundreds of acres at a uniform rate without realizing that as the total incomes of the two must be vastly different this uniformity of taxation must produce a glaring inequity of treatment as between the rich and the poor. If the revenue thus raised by sacrificing equity to the dictates of order had been spent on services promoting progress there would have been some compensation. But such was not the case. All the revenue that was collected was spent on Services such as Police, Military and Administration which are calculated to maintain order. Such services as Education, State aid to industries, hardly found any place in the scheme of public expenditure as managed by this irresponsible Executive. But it may be asked as to why the Executive, sovereign as it was, should have stood for order and against progress ? The answer 1 Cf. the criticism by Prof. Cannan on the Terms of Reference to the Royal Commission on Local Taxation in the Memoranda chiefly relating to the classification and incidence of Imperial and Local Taxation, C. 9528 of 1899, p. 160.

232 DR. BABASAHEB AMBEDKAR : WRITINGS AND SPEECHES PERCENTAGE OF EXPENDITURE (Excluding expenditure on commercial services, i.e., Post Office and Telegraph Dept., Railways and Irrigation). In thousands of rupees. Periods District Administration Forest Other Heads, including Opium Debt Sources Civil Depts. Civil Changes Civil Works Army (Includeing Military Works and Special Defence Works) Famine Relief and Insurance Total 1877-78 to 1881-82 5.2 .8 5.6 8.9 18.7 6.8 5.8 39.2 2.6 93.6 1882-83 to 1886-87 6.0 1.2 6.6 8.2 21.4 7.5 7.6 35.6 2.3 96.4 1887-88 to 1891-92 6.0 1.3 5.4 7.6 22.1 7.5 7.3 37.7 2.8 95.7 1892-93 to 1896-97 6.1 1.3 4.9 6.4 22.5 8.4 6.9 38.5 1.6 96.6 1897-98 to 1901-02 5.8 1.4 5.5 4.3 22.6 7.8 6.8 35.2 4.8 94.2 1902-03 to 1906-07 5.9 1.6 8.2 3.1 23.2 7.3 9 37.1 1.8 97.2 1907-08 to 1911-12 6.3 1.8 7.1 3.5 25.7 7.7 8.5 35.6 2.1 98.3 1912-13 to 1916-17 6.0 1.9 6.2 2.1 28.2 7.3 9.3 35.1 1.5 97.6 From the statistics of British India, Vol. II, Financial Statistics, 1920, p. 7.

233 THE NECESSITY FOR A CHANGE is that an irresponsible government, however sovereign, is incapable of progress, for in the exercise of its sovereign powers it is hampered by two very serious limitations. 1 There is first of all the internal limitation which arises from the character, motives and interests of those who are in power. If the Sultan does not abolish Mahomedanism, Pope ban Catholicism, the Brahmin condemn caste, or the British Parliament declare the preservation of blue-eyed babies illegal, it is not because they cannot do things, but it is because they will not do these things. In the same way if the Executive in India did not do certain things most conducive to progress it was because by reason of its being impersonal 2 and also by reason of its character, motives and interests it could not sympathize with the living forces operating in the Indian Society, was not charged with its wants, its pains, its cravings and its desires, was inimical to its aspirations, did not advance Education, disfavoured Swadeshi or snapped at anything that smacked of nationalism, it was because all these things went against its grain. But an irresponsible government is powerless to do even such things as it may like to do. For its authority is limited by the possibility of external resistance. There are things which it would do but dare not do for the fear of provoking thereby resistance to its authority. Caesar dare not subvert the worship of the Roman people, a modern parliament dare not tax the Colonies, however much they would. For the same reason the Government of India dared not abolish the caste system, prescribe monogamy, alter the laws of succession, legalize intermarriage or venture to tax the tea planters. Progress involves interference with the existing code of social life and interference is likely to cause resistance. None the less 1 For an illuminating discussion of this, cf. A. V. Dicey, Law of the Constitution, 1915, pp. 74-82. 2 Impersonal because the higher and controlling grades of public services are devoid of Indian element. Although the eligibility of the natives of India for employment in public services was proclaimed as far back as 1833, the regulations made by the Secretary of State for admission to the Public Services in India has had the tendency to exclude them from the employment of the right granted to them by statute. Under the regulations made by the Secretary of State for War, candidates for Commission in the Army were to be of pure European descent and a similar regulation was adopted by the Admiralty for cadetship in the Navy, thereby excluding Indians. As to the Civil Service the Statute (Government of India Act, 1858, s. 32) laid down that all “natural-born subjects” of the Crown be admitted for examination, thereby including the natives of India. But the ruling of the Secretary of State that that examination should be held only in London had indirectly debarred many natives of the country from benefiting themselves under the statute. Regulations for admission to other public services varied. For the Indian Medical Service, candidates were to be naturalborn subjects of European or East Indian descent; for the Indian Police Service they were to be British subjects of European descent; for the Forest Service they were to be natural-born British subjects ; for Public Works Department one-tenth might be natives of India who are British subjects.—Cf. in this connection Halsbury, Laws of England, Vol. X, pp. 588-9.

234 DR. BABASAHEB AMBEDKAR : WRITINGS AND SPEECHES a government which is of the people and is not detached from them can venture on the path of progress, because it is in a position to know where obedience will end and resistance will begin. But the Indian Executive not being of the people could not feel the pulse of the people. The gist of the matter is that the irresponsible Executive which had been in power in India was paralysed between these two limitations on its authority and much of what went to make life good was held up. Part of the programme it would not undertake and the other part it could not undertake. As a result of this, so far as the moral and social life of the people was concerned, the change of government by the Moghuls to a government by the British was only a change of rulers rather than a change of system. Owing to the adoption of the principle of non-interference partly by preference and partly by necessity by the British “the natives of India found themselves under a government distinguished in no vital respect from those under which they had toiled and worshipped, lived and died through all their weary and forgotten history. From a political standpoint, the change was but the replacement of one despotism by another. It accepted the arrangements as it found them 1 and preserved them faithfully in the manner of the Chinese tailor who, when given an old coat as a pattern, produced with pride an exact replica, rents, patches and all.” 2 That there was some advancement in material progress is not to be denied. But no people in the world can long remain contented with the benefits of peace and order, for they are not dumb brutes. It is foolish to suppose that a people will indefinitely favour a bureaucracy because it has improved their roads, constructed canals on more scientific principles, effected their transportation by rail, carried their letters by penny post, flashed their messages by lightning, improved their currency, regulated their weights and measures, corrected their notions of geography, astronomy and medicine and stopped their internal quarrels. Any people, however patient, will sooner or later demand a government that will be more than a mere engine of efficiency. Under the influence of Western ideas of representative govern1 The poll tax has been continued in Burma simply because it was found to exist there on the day of conquest. 2 Benard Houghton, Bureaucratic Government.

235 THE NECESSITY FOR A CHANGE ment the Indian people had for some time been demanding a change in the form of the government. A Parliamentary form of government with a Parliamentary Executive was the goal they had laid before themselves. The popular agitation for achieving this end assumed such proportions that, in the course of time, there was presented a serious issue for the consideration of the Executive in India. How was the government of the country to be carried on ? By force or by consent, Power seldom commits suicide of its own accord. Rather, when it fails to secure the willing compliance of the people, it resorts to force. That was the resource adopted by the Executive in India. Not satisfied with the aid of the power with which the Executive was endowed by the provisions of the Criminal and Penal Codes to anticipate offences by preventive acts, it besmeared the Indian Statute Book with a set of repressive laws hardly paralleled in any other part of the world. The Criminal Law Amendment Act XIV of 1908 empowered a magistrate with special sanction of the Government to hold an ex-parte inquiry without the presence of the accused or of his legal representative and commit him for trial to be conducted without a jury. Under another provision of the same Act the Executive could declare unlawful any association which in its view interfered with the maintenance of law and order. The State Prisoners Regulations1 and Acts 2 authorizing the Executive to place under restraint any person whom it suspected but against whom it had no proof, constituted by themselves a perpetual suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act : 3 while under another Act 4 the Executive was empowered to proclaim “a State of Siege” or martial law in any area and suspend therein the jurisdiction of the civil courts in favour of the military courts. The Indian Press Act of 1910 put a complete muzzle on the Press. So wide were its provisions that in the opinion of a learned judge 5 of one of the Indian High Courts it was “difficult to see to what length its operation might not be plausibly extended by an ingenious mind” 1 Bengal Regulation III of 1818 ; Bombay Regulation XXV of 1827 ; Madras Regulation II of 1819. 2 Act XXIV of 1850 and Act III of 1858. 3 N. Ghose, Comparative Administrative Law, 1918, p. 480. 4 Act IX of 1857. 5 Sir Lawrence Jenkins, C. J., in re Mahomedali, I.L.R. 40, Cal. 466 (1913), quoted by N. Ghose, op. cit., p. 567.