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The Congress at the 1937 Elections in Madras

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 November 2008

Christopher Baker
Christopher Baker
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
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Extract

In February 1937, the Congress party in the Madras Presidency won 159 of 215 seats in the provincial Legislative Assembly at the first elections under provincial autonomy. It was the most convincing victory for the Congress in any province of British India, and neither the Madras Government nor the Congress leaders had expected it. In the two and a half years Congress rule that followed, their ministers made adept use of their powers. They cut land revenue and dismantled the procedure for revising the land revenue demand, thus appealing to the pocket of every landholder. They re-instated all the village officers who had been dismissed for aiding the Congress during Civil Disobedience, thus instructing the leaders of rural society where the source of power and influence now lay. They passed two measures to alleviate the burden of agricultural debt, and threatened to legislate in favour of the tenants inside the major landed estates. Meanwhile, for the first time, the Cogress established a network of committees throughout the province, and by 1939 this new machine had placed virtually every local government board under a Congress régime. The number of Congerss members in the Tamil and Andhra areas rose from 115,971 on the eve of the 1937 elections to 594,397 in 1938.

Type
Articles
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 10 , Issue 4 , October 1976 , pp. 557 - 589
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1976

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References

1 In elections to the Madras Legislative Council, the upper chamber, on a narrower franchise, Congress won 26 out of the total of 46 seats. This article concentrates on the more important Legislative Assembly.

2 Erskine, to Willingdon, , 6 January and 3 February 1937, Erskine papers [hereafter E.P.], Vol. 8, India Office Library [hereafter I.O.L.].Google Scholar

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4 Average polled by victorious candidate in 1926, 11, 590; in 1937, 23,525; calculated from ‘Returns showing the results of elections in India in 1925 and 1926’, G.B. Parliamentary Papers 1927, Cmd. 2923, and ‘Returns showing the results of elections in India 1937’Google Scholar, G. B. Parliamentary Papers 1937–8, Cmd. 5589.Google Scholar

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8 For more detailed consideration of this theme seeBaker, C. J., The Politics of South India 1920–1937 (Cambridge, 1976), pp. 224–37.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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89 As fn. 86.

90 Collector of Madura, 26 February 1937, G.O. 708 C. (Public) 8 April 1937, T.N.A.Google Scholar

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98 Out of the 92 members of the old Legislative Council, as many as 58 stood for election to the new Legislative Assembly and Council. Only 25 were elected, including all twelve who stood on the Congress ticket. Dyarchy electorates had been only marginally kinder to sitting members: 17 were rejected in 1926 and 12 in 1930.

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102 When a death caused a by-election to one of the four general seats the Congress had lost (emphatically), the Congress candidate was not even opposed.