S. Subramania Iyer - Political Career

Political Career

Subramania Iyer was nominated a member of the Legislative Council of Madras by the Government, in 1884 and left a creditable record as a non-official member of the Council although the rules did not permit non-official members to play a very useful role. Serving as a member of the Malabar Land Tenure Committee (1885), largely due to his initiative, an act was passed providing compensation for tenants' improvement in Malabar. Nominated for a second time, Subramania Iyer made his association with the Council as useful as possible under the system extant then.

One of the founding members of the Indian National Congress, he led the Madras delegation to its first session at Bombay, in December 1885, where he seconded a resolution proposed by K. T. Telang urging the increase of the elected element in the Legislative Councils and for councillors to be given real and effective powers, and where he made the following statement, as published in the annals of the Indian National Congress of 1885:

"All of us have the utmost faith and confidence in the justice and the fairness of the English people, and we only have to solicit an enquiry into the facts, being content to leave the issue in the hands of their great political leaders."

He used to attend sessions of the Congress until he became a Judge of the High Court and contributed in no small measure to the strengthening of the Congress's organisation in the Madras Presidency.

He was close to Sir Arthur Lawley, whom he is held to have substantially influenced and assisted in his administration of the Madras Presidency, in a private capacity.

As Chairman of the Reception Committee, he welcomed the delegates to the 29th session of the Indian National Congress held at Madras in 1914. He presided over a public meeting at Madras in 1915 organised to welcome Mr. M. K. Gandhi just then returned from South Africa. Welcoming Mr. Gandhi, he suggested the lines on which national work in India should proceed:

"We want the soul-force which Mr. Gandhi is trying to work up. Soul-force consists in a man being prepared to undergo any physical or mental suffering, taking the precaution that he will not lay a single finger to inflict physical force upon the other side. It was that soul-force that was manifested by the South African Indians and it is the same force that should be developed in this country."

He agreed to serve as the Honorary President of the All India Home Rule League established in Madras on 1 September 1916, by Mrs. Annie Besant, whose arrest was ordered on 16 June 1917, by Lord Pentland, Governor of Madras. As President of the League, he took up the cause of Mrs. Besant and her colleagues and started a movement for their release, which occasioned his rupture with the Government.

Immediately after Mrs. Besant was interned, Sir Subramania Iyer wrote a letter to Woodrow Wilson, President of the United States of America describing British Rule in India and appealing for the sympathy and support of the American Government and people, in which he stated:

"Officials of an alien nation, speaking a foreign tongue, force their will upon us; they grant themselves exorbitant salaries and large allowances; they refuse us education; they sap us of our wealth; they impose crushing taxes without our consent; they cast thousands of our people into prisons for uttering patriotic sentiments-prisons so filthy that often the inmates die from loathsome diseases."

Subjected to scathing criticism in the House of Commons and the House of Lords, the Secretary of State, Edwin Montagu, and the Viceroy, Lord Chelmsford, rebuked him when he met them in Madras in 1918 to make a representation on the proposed political reforms. A few days later, Sir Subramania Iyer renounced his knighthood and returned the insignia to the Government.