State briefly the salient features of the Government of India Act, 1935. What were its main defects?

Federal Structure

The Act sought to transform India from a unitary system into a federation consisting of the Governor's Provinces and the Indian States ruled by native princes, a marked departure from every earlier Government of India Act which had treated British India as a single administrative whole. This federal scheme, however, never became fully operative because the princely rulers, whose accession was purely voluntary, chose not to join the Federation, so what actually came into force from April 1, 1937 was only the provincial half of the scheme, leaving the federal centre still functioning under the older 1919 Act. This single fact, that federation was contemplated but never born, must be regarded as the Act's most fundamental defect, for a constitution that speaks of a federal centre while operating a unitary one at the very same time inevitably breeds confusion and dysfunction.

Provincial Autonomy and Dyarchy

At the provincial level, the Act introduced a genuine, though qualified, form of responsible government, doing away with the earlier system of dyarchy under which subjects had been artificially split into "reserved" and "transferred" categories. The provincial Governor was now required ordinarily to act on the advice of Ministers responsible to an elected Provincial Legislature, itself chosen on a still-limited franchise, and this alone gave Indians their first real taste of ministerial government at the provincial level. Yet the word "ordinarily" concealed the real defect, for the Governor retained wide discretionary and individual-judgment powers over such matters as law and order, minority protection, and the interests of the princely states, and whenever he chose to invoke these reserved powers he was answerable not to the provincial legislature but to the Governor-General, and through him to the Secretary of State in London. Provincial autonomy, therefore, was autonomy on sufferance, always liable to be overridden the moment the Governor decided that the "safety and tranquility" of the province required it.

Central Executive and the Governor-General's Powers

At the centre, the picture was starker still. The Governor-General, though nominally advised by an Executive Council, could overrule that Council on any matter if, in his own opinion, the safety, tranquility, or vital interests of British India were materially affected, and defence, external affairs, and matters concerning the princely states remained squarely within his own discretion, exercised subject only to control from the Secretary of State in the British Cabinet. This meant that, in practice, effective power at the centre never genuinely passed from British hands, and Indian participation in central governance remained minimal, a fact that naturally left Indians deeply unreconciled to the whole scheme and fed directly into the demand for full independence.

Distribution of Legislative Powers

The Act pioneered, for the first time, a systematic three-fold division of legislative subjects into a Federal List, a Provincial List, and a Concurrent List, a structure so serviceable that the framers of the Indian Constitution retained its basic architecture almost unchanged in the Seventh Schedule, even though the precise content of the entries differs considerably. Even here, though, the pattern of central predominance already visible in 1935 has carried forward, so that Indian federalism was born already tilted toward the centre rather than toward the constituent units, a bias many commentators trace directly to this colonial inheritance.

Ordinance-Making Power and Judicial Restraint

Section 72 of the Act conferred on the Governor-General the power to promulgate ordinances for the peace and good government of British India whenever he was satisfied that an emergency existed, and the judicial treatment of this provision is itself instructive of how toothless the safeguards against executive excess really were. In Bhagat Singh v. King-Emperor, Lord Dunedin held that it was the Governor-General alone who could judge whether an emergency existed, since any other view would render the whole provision "utterly inept". The Federal Court, in Lakhi Narayan v. State of Bihar, went further still, ruling that the existence of circumstances justifying an ordinance was simply not a matter courts were competent to investigate at all. The Privy Council, in King-Emperor v. Benoari Lal Sarma, added that the Governor-General was not even obliged to state that an emergency existed or explain its nature, so long as he acted in good faith. Read together, these decisions reveal an executive power almost entirely insulated from judicial scrutiny, and it is telling that this very jurisprudence on subjective satisfaction was carried forward almost verbatim into later interpretations of the President's ordinance-making power under Article 123 of the Constitution.

Principal Defects Summarised