Governing a province

Introduced prohibition in the Madras Presidency from 1937, beginning with Salem district and extending it in stages. Liquor shops were closed and sale restricted by law.

Prohibition was long-standing Gandhian policy and Rajaji’s own cause since the 1920s: he held that drink impoverished poor households first, and that revenue raised from it was revenue raised from suffering.

Popular with temperance campaigners, women’s organisations and much of the Congress. Fiercely opposed by excise interests and by critics who called it moral policing. It also blew a hole in provincial finances, which the new sales tax was designed to fill.

Prohibition in Tamil Nadu and elsewhere in India has been imposed, relaxed and reimposed repeatedly since. Illicit distilling, enforcement costs and lost revenue are the standard arguments against; household welfare and public health the standard arguments for. Rajaji’s ministry began that argument in Madras and did not settle it.

His government carried the Madras Temple Entry Authorisation and Indemnity Act in 1939, giving legal protection to the opening of Hindu temples to Dalits, who had been excluded by custom.

Removal of untouchability had been part of his constructive work since the Tiruchengode ashram. His argument was religious as well as civic: exclusion was an accretion, not a requirement of the tradition, and the state could lawfully remove the disability.

Welcomed by reformers and by many Dalit activists as a practical gain; opposed by orthodox temple authorities. Others argued that entry into temples was too small a remedy for a system that also denied land, schooling and wages.

In 1938 his government ordered the teaching of Hindi in secondary schools in the presidency, on a compulsory basis.

The Congress position of the time held that a common language would bind a national movement and, later, a national administration. Rajaji argued that Tamil children should not be shut out of national life for want of it.

A sustained anti-Hindi agitation followed, led by E. V. Ramasamy (Periyar) and the Justice Party, with public protests, picketing of schools and a very large number of arrests. Two protesters died in custody during the agitation. Compulsion was withdrawn in 1940, after the Congress ministry had already resigned.

Enacted a general sales tax in Madras in 1939, one of the earliest such taxes in India, and pursued rural debt relief and land revenue measures.

Prohibition removed a large slice of provincial excise revenue at the same moment the ministry was promising schools, health and relief. A broad-based tax on sales was the replacement.

Traders objected, as traders generally do to a new tax; the ministry pressed it through. It gave the province a revenue instrument that survived every government that followed.

Sales taxation spread across Indian provinces and states and was eventually absorbed into the Goods and Services Tax in 2017. It is a useful check on the caricature of Rajaji as an anti-tax politician: he limited what the state should do, but insisted it pay honestly for what it did.

Resigned as Premier in October 1939, with the other Congress ministries, after the Viceroy declared India a belligerent in the Second World War without consulting Indian legislatures.

The resignation was a constitutional argument made by other means: if provincial autonomy meant anything, a decision of that magnitude could not be taken over the heads of elected ministers.

The provinces reverted to governor’s rule. Rajaji himself soon began arguing that the Congress should return to office and cooperate in the war effort in exchange for a firm commitment on independence — a position his party rejected.

Whether resignation strengthened the Congress’s moral position or simply handed the administration back to the British is still argued. Rajaji, characteristically, supported the resignation on principle and then immediately argued about what to do next.

As Chief Minister, introduced a modified scheme of elementary education in 1953. Children would attend school for part of the day in two shifts, and spend the remainder learning their family’s occupation at home.

His stated reasons were financial and practical: the state could not afford full-day schooling for every child, and a shift system would let existing schools and teachers reach far more children than they then reached.

The scheme was widely attacked as a hereditary occupation policy — opponents named it Kula Kalvi Thittam, the caste-education scheme — on the argument that requiring children to learn the family trade would fix caste occupations in place for another generation. Opposition came from Dravidian parties, from Dalit organisations and from within his own party. He resigned in April 1954 and the scheme was withdrawn by his successor, K. Kamaraj.