Talk:Government of India Act 1935

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Untitled

I wrote a stub to replace the copyrighted text-- it's not much.

It is an important legislation, and depending on my time, I shall surely contribute. --Bhadani 16:14, 23 August 2005 (UTC)

POV

This act needs some pretty serious NPOV work. The idea that the Constitution was bad because of its length is particularly dubious. More cites needed for the particularly odd claims. Also it would be better to compare it against the other Dominion constitutions, which also lacked things like Bills of Rights.

Morwen - Talk 19:34, 13 December 2005 (UTC)

How to improve this article

I don't think the article is really that bad, but it is a bit unbalanced. I'd suggest:

• Less detail on the actual legal contents, more on the intentions
• more on the political background to the writing of it
• far less emphasis on Linlithgow (though I think the assessment of his role is accurate) - more on Zetland, on why he couldn't get Cabinet to concentrate on India, and the role of Congress in deliberately trying to sink the Act (and Congress' view of itself - it saw itself not as a poltical party among other parties, but as the one and only legitimate voice of the Indian people - not very conducive to launching a democratic reform)

PiCo 17:50, 18 February 2006 (UTC)

I'm quite impressed by the attention to detail and numerous citations myself: it is much more solidly based on fact than most articles dealing with the Indian Independence Movement. Perhaps a little dry, but bear in mind that much of the political background is dealt with in other articles and links can be provided to these. Sikandarji 17:40, 27 April 2006 (UTC) have you checked the citations? most lead to a site run by the person who wrote most of the article and in some cases are no more then quotations from his own 'essays' i e self referential and in other cases (Eg "Smith") could mean one of several references, none of them appear to be standard works on the subject.

The Act as the first constitution of India and Pakistan

According to other articles, this act was used as the Constitution of the dominions of India and Pakistan in the years immediately after independence. How did that work, exactly? I'm assuming that it needed extensive amendment in both cases? It would be useful to discuss here, but the narrative stops abruptly in 1939. --Jfruh (talk) 03:14, 16 August 2007 (UTC)

Rab Butler certainly made that or a similar claim, that it helped to set India on the path of being a western-style Parliamentary democracy, and said in his memoirs that Nehru had admitted as much to him privately when he visited India in 1954. He also said that Nehru later mellowed a bit from his blood-curdling rhetoric of the 1930s. I read elsewhere that Nehru and even Gandhi himself had to keep up the anti-British rhetoric to placate the extremists in their own ranks.Paulturtle (talk) 10:47, 1 June 2018 (UTC)

die-hard Tories

Sir Robert Horne was, according to what appears to be a quote from some identified source, terrified during the debates in 1935 at the prospect of a viceroy appointed by a Labour government. But, um, in 1935 the then-current viceroy, Lord Willingdon, had been appointed by MacDonald's Labour government in the spring of 1931. So, um, I'm confused. john k (talk) 23:45, 8 September 2016 (UTC)

Labour seem to have been committed to dominion status for India by the mid 1930s. Maybe that was the reason.Paulturtle (talk) 03:18, 21 June 2018 (UTC)

I agree with the need for NPOV work. An important source is MULDOON, ANDREW. "‘The Cow is Still the most Important Figure in Indian Politics!’: Religion, Imperial Culture and the Shaping of Indian Political Reform in the 1930s." Parliamentary History 27, no. 1 (2008): 67-81. doi:10.1111/j.1750-0206.2007.00011.x

Frankem51 (talk) 08:00, 7 September 2020 (UTC)