A CRITIQUE OF THE CHANGE 305
responsibilities of the two parts of the government and of union, in order to get association in aims and policy between those parts. For to have equipped each part of the Executive with a separate paraphernalia would have been nothing short of a calamity. But because there is an understanding that when ministers will act in matters of transferred subjects the councillors will advise them, and that when councillors will act in matters of reserved subjects the ministers will advise them, it does not alter the fact that dyarchy is a system of divided responsibility. It is not a system which ensures the work of government being conducted in harmony and in accordance with a common policy. On the other hand, it is a system fraught with organized quarrel. The dividing line between dyarchy and anarchy is very narrow. If such a system is not rent in practice it is because of two transient circumstances. One such circumstance consists in the Provincial Legislature being a weakling sapped of its vitality by political dissensions. The other consists in the tenure of the Ministers not being at the will of the Legislature, but for the duration of the Legislature’s existence, and are to hold office during the pleasure of the governor. To allow a governor to choose ministers from among the elected members of the Legislature instead of requiring him to accept ministers who are elected by the Legislature is a grave derogation from the principle of responsible government which was avowedly the object of the Reforms Act. A minister who has the confidence of the governor, and a minister who has the confidence of the Legislature, are two entirely different things. How great is the difference between the two in so far as good government is concerned is writ large in the pages of English political history of the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. That such a system should have been adopted against which the whole English constitutional history is a grand protest cannot of course be without some reason. The ostensible reason advanced [1] is that the Legislature
“had had no experience of the power of dismissing Ministers, or the results attending the exercise of such power. Nobody in India is yet familiar with the obligations imposed by tenure of office at the will of a representative assembly. It is only by actual experience that these lessons can be
1 Joint Report, p. 181.