Impartial Rule in the United Provinces The achievements and the weaknesses of the Congress regime in the United Provinces, of which he was Governor until a month after the Ministry resigned late last year, were discussed by Sir Harry Haig at a meeting in London recently of the East India Association.
The Congress, he said, brought into the administration of the province the virtues and also the defects of the democratic system. "Conspicuous among the virtues were a rapid response to public grievances, a new spirit of enterprise and drive, and a courage to experiment and to take measures from which Governments under the previous Constitution would have shrunk, These qualities were due on the one hand to the close touch of the members of the Legislature with their constituencies, and on the other hand to the support of a large and disciplined Parliamentary majority on which the Ministers could depend.
"With regard to this majority, however, there was one serious difficulty. While the Congress party presented a united front to their opponents, they suffered from the beginning from internal dissensions. The Left Wing were not, I should judge, very numerous, but they were vigorous and persistent in their demands for action which was unwise. Their influence seemed to me to be a constant embarrassment, and in the conduct of the Administration it might almost be said that the Congress had as much to fear from their friends as from their enemies.
"A factor which greatly strengthened the position of the Congress was that for the most part they monopolized the machinery of popular appeal, and if they did not choose to set it in motion or used it positively to maintain tran-quality the country was quiet, and toa large extent measures went uncriticized.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.