The Government of India Act, 1935 opened a new era in the Indian constitutional progress. It was born of long gestation and heavy travail, beginning with the Simon Commission of 1927 continuing through the Round Table Conferences of 1930-32 and a Joint Select Committee which had all the weight of a Royal Commission, and concluding with a hard-fought passage through Parliament against the opposition of 'Mr. Winston Churchill and his right-wing friends. Politically and constitutionally the new Act was a remarkable feat, even though its highest intention was never fulfilled. Under it, India had her first taste and practice of parliamentary self-government, in the eleven provinces; although the all-India federation embodied in it was never created, the bones of a federal system, including a detailed separation of powers, were formed and exercised; under the Act, including its fall-back provisions for the Centre pending federation, an interim Government of a wholly popular-political kind eventually came into office; under it, with relatively few amendments, power was transferred entirely from British to Indian hands; and, as thus amended, it served as the working constitution of independent India for three years and of independent Pakistan for nine years while they were debating and adopting their own new constitutions. In the history of Indo- British relations it is an edifice deserving admiration.

The core of the Act was the establishment of autonomy, with a representative parliamentary system of government, for eleven British-Indian provinces, within their defined provincial powers; it intended these provinces to become, willy-nilly, components of an all-India federation including Princely States. The federation itself was also to have a representative parliamentary system, and a large degree of autonomy in the federal sphere, but the Viceroy would retain supreme powers, including the appointment of his own Executive Council or Government and the whole control of defence and foreign affairs and the ultimate responsibility for law and order.