John Morley and the Communal Question

A disproportionate amount of scholarly attention has already been lavished upon the provision for communal electorates in the 1909 Morley-Minto reform scheme, imparting to it a significance which it lacked during both John Morley's secretaryship of state for India and his lifetime. Most recently, M. N. Das has stretched the elastic material in the Morley and Minto collections—his only sources—over a prefabricated ideological structure; he portrays Lord Minto as a Machiavellian schemer, who introduced communal electorates in a deliberate attempt to disrupt the forces of Indian nationalism and thereby perpetuate the British Raj, and he assumes that Morley—who chose the Florentine statesman as the subject of his 1897 Romanes Lectures—was unable to recognize a twentieth-century facsimile. Without attempting to absolve two centuries of British rule in India of its Divide and Rule stigma, one may confidently assert that during the first decade of the twentieth century, neither the Viceroy nor the Secretary of State consciously implemented the pernicious theories which allegedly produced two warring nations within the bosom of Mother India.