Much to his annoyance, Keyes was refused
permission to be present at Simla although on the eve of the conference he was able to persuade the Nizam to
telegraph instructions to his delegation that he was prepared to enter an all-India federation under due
17* Keyes wrote to Irwin of the Nizam: ”... the queer little creature - h e ’s so pathetically anxious to be liked; he never seems to tear malice; takes every setback with good humour and, within his limitations, I believe, really means to do well.” Keyes to Irwin, 4 May 1930, Keyes Collection, No.28.
18. Keyes to Cunningham, 5 July 1930, Keyes Collection, No.28.
197.
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safeguards. y The telegram, however, arrived too late to influence the conference proceedings. On hearing of this, Keyes was furious. He subsequently attributed the fact that he had not been allowed to attend to an attempt by the Political Department to sabotage the idea of a federation before it got off the ground. Of an equally serious nature, he also accused the department of deliberately misrepresenting Irwin's views. In a letter to Sir Denys Bray, Foreign Secretary to the
Government of India, Keyes declared that the department was so obsessed by the picture of an Indian India and a British India portayed in the report of the Indian States Committee that they were working in a way that would make an all-India federation impossible:
"To me this is the madness that the gods send before destruction... What Butler calls British
India is Just that part of India that is trying to repudiate all that is British.•• What he calls Indian India is that part that wants to retain the British connection. Swaraj India and Maharaja's India are mixed up like the bits
of a jigsaw puzzle, and everywhere they touch there will be continued friction.”
In the same letter, Keyes restated his belief in
federation as the only means to avoid such friction and expressed his disquiet that Irwin was being unwittingly "manoeuvred” into accepting the Political Department's
PO point of view.
The idea that an attempt had been made to sabotage the federal idea in the summer of 1950 re-
19* Nizam to Hyderabad delegation, 9 July 1950, Keyes Collection, No.20.
appeared six years later in the India Office. In April 1936 the Political Department of the India Office was astonished to read the following extract from the
appendix to an Administration Report from Hyderabad for the year October 1932 to October 1933:
"Rightly anticipating in the light of the discussions with certain Princes and repre
sentatives of other States that took place in Simla in July 1930 that Federation was likely to become an immediate issue, Sir Akbar Hydari, in consultation with his colleagues, drew on the voyage to England a federal scheme in broad outline.
Paul J. Patrick, the Political Secretary at the India Office, commented that this was the first time his department had heard of any reference to federation at
22
the Simla Conference. Sir Findlater Stewart, a member of the Secretary of State’s India Council, remarked that it was the first time any department in London had heard
23
mention of it. y The Under-Secretary of State, R.A. Butler, summed up the general impression in the
India Office: "Presumably there were persons in official circles in India at the time who hoped to see the idea overlaid at birth. Evidently the Government of India had not seen fit to inform the India Office in July 1930 that the Nizam was prepared to contemplate federation.
21. PIC, 1931-50, Coll.11, File 57(2), NO.PY564/1936, Appendix to Hyderabad Administration Report, 6 October 1932 -5 October 1933* "Note on the Round Table Conference."
22. ibid., Patrick's note, 9 April 1936.
23* ibid., Findlater Stewart's note, 20 April 1936. 24. ibid., Butler's note, 19 April 1936.
However, the accusations made by Keyes cannot be accepted at face-value. His claim that the Political Department was "manoeuvering" Irwin was certainly false. The Viceroy was just as much impressed by the notion of "two Indias" as was the Political Department. He was quite content with the recommendation for a Council of Greater India because this accorded with the conclusions reached by the sub-committee of his council in 1926. In the meantime Irwin wanted to deal with the more pressing problem of the British Indian centre. Hence the recommen dation in the Government of India's Reforms Despatch to make the government "responsive" to the central legislature except on matters such as defence, foreign relations,
internal security, finance, protection of minorities and the protection of services recruited by the Secretary of
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State. ^ As for the Political Department itself, Watson had already recorded his views on federation at the time of Holland's warning about the paramountcy strategy of the Standing Committee. Although the Political Secretary realized that the princes would welcome, and indeed press, for "any federation with British India which would leave the internal administration of the states unchanged and intact", he doubted if any, with the possible exceptions of the Maharajas of Mysore and Travancore, would agree to a federation which involved the grant of constitutional government to their subjects. Moreover, according to