Date: 17 October 1928
Location: Newmarket
Speaker: Aga Khan III
Source: Speeches of Aga Khan III – K K Aziz
Full Text
Response to Sir Valentine Chirol’s comments on his articles in The Times – Bavaria as an analogy – the future Muslim Free States and the Indian principalities would want to control their armed forces.
The objection raised by Sir Valentine Chirol to my scheme for a federation of Free States in India that there would be no strong central Government overlooks the consideration mentioned in your own comments that full details could not be given within the limits of a newspaper article. I made it dear that I selected as a constitutional model, not the pre-War German Empire, but the white Dominions of the British Crown. The analogy I drew with Bavaria (not, it should be noted, with other States of the German Union) was based in part on the consideration that under the thorough rearrangement of provinces I advocated there could be no parallel in India to the conditions which secured Prussian dominance in the German Empire. I chose Bavaria, rather than the United States of America, as an illus tration because that kingdom had control of its own army in time of peace as well as of its own railways. In this connexion I had the present independent States of India and the coming Moslem Free States specially in mind. I cannot conceive that the great Indian principalities or Moslem States of the North-West and East would come into the proposed Federation on any other terms than they should control their armed forces in time of peace, as the Indian States do to-day, instead of handing them over to a distant authority.
In referring to the views of Mr. Lionel Curtis I had in mind not the joint address presented by a number of European and Indian co-signatories in November, 1917, but some of the earlier writings of Mr. Curtis. I am glad to see that his position is nearer mine than I thought.
Source: The Times, London, 19 October 1928.
Sir Valentine Chirol, to whom the Aga Khan replies, had published his letter of 13 October in The Times of 15 October, which reads as follows: “Sir, – The Aga Khan is singularly unfortunate in his selection of the pre War German Empire as a constitutional model for the Federated India he contemplates, because India, he writes, ‘when freed from any outside control cannot have a unitary non-federal Government.’ When a Constitution was framed for the new German Empire Bismarck took care that it should be so framed as to secure for Prussia a political preponderance which no combination of the minor federated States could shake, and even to-day, after the knock-out blow dealt to Prussian militarism by the Great War, Prussia remains, in virtue of her much greater population, let alone the peculiar qualities of the Prussian people, the dominant State in the Reich. Where is a Prussia to be found in India? “Moreover, it is generally admitted that communal differences and Hindu Mahomedan rivalry have never been more bitter than to-day and are kept under restraint only by the existence of a strong unitary central Government.
Indian political unity has been one of the greatest achievements of the British Raj, to whose educational work, by the way, the very conception of Indian Nationalism owes its birth. The lines upon which the Aga Khan would split up India into a large number of small federated States without any strong central Government to weld them together are enough to show into what a welter of confusion and strife his Highness’s Federated India would quickly and inevitably be plunged.”