Simon Commission

Background

The Government of India Act of 1919, which had introduced the system of dyarchy in the provinces alongside limited central legislative reforms, provided for a statutory review of its working after ten years to consider further constitutional advance. The British government, then a Conservative administration under Stanley Baldwin, appointed the commission ahead of the ten-year schedule in November 1927, partly out of concern that a Labour government, expected to be more sympathetic to Indian self-government, might otherwise appoint it on less favourable terms. The commission was headed by the Liberal politician and lawyer Sir John Simon. Its seven members were all drawn from the British Parliament, representing the three main parties; no Indian was appointed to it, a decision defended by the government on the grounds that Indian political leaders and organisations could submit evidence and testimony to the commission, but that the review of imperial constitutional policy was properly a matter to be conducted by Parliament itself.

The boycott

The all-British composition of the commission was met with near-universal condemnation across the Indian political spectrum, one of the few issues on which Congress, the Muslim League under Muhammad Ali Jinnah, and most other parties and provincial groupings were in agreement. They resolved to boycott the commission's proceedings, regarding the exclusion of Indians from a body reviewing India's own constitutional future as a deliberate insult and as proof that reform would continue to be dictated from London without genuine Indian participation in the drafting process itself. When the commission landed in Bombay in February 1928 and travelled to various cities over the following months to take evidence, it was greeted in city after city by black-flag demonstrations, hartals and processions under the slogan "Simon Go Back" or "Simon, Go Back." Protests turned violent in several cities; in Lahore, in October 1928, a demonstration led by the veteran nationalist Lala Lajpat Rai was baton-charged by police, and Lajpat Rai died some weeks later from injuries attributed to the beating he received, a death that intensified nationalist anger considerably and was cited by young Punjabi revolutionaries, including members of the Hindustan Socialist Republican Association, as a motivation for the subsequent killing of a British police officer in Lahore in December 1928.

Report and aftermath

The commission completed its work and submitted its two-volume report in 1930, recommending an expansion of provincial self-government, the eventual replacement of dyarchy, and steps toward a federal structure linking British India with the princely states, but stopping well short of full responsible government or dominion status of the kind Indian opinion by then demanded. Its findings were substantially overtaken by events on the ground: in response to the boycott and to mounting nationalist pressure, the British government instead convened a series of Round Table Conferences in London beginning in 1930, bringing Indian political and princely representatives directly into constitutional negotiations for the first time, a process that eventually fed into the Government of India Act of 1935. The Simon Commission episode is generally treated by historians as a significant spur to Congress's hardening position, contributing to its formal adoption of the demand for complete independence, or purna swaraj, at its Lahore session in December 1929, rather than the qualified dominion-status demands it had entertained earlier in the decade.