Now, he made a point that this guarantee should not have been given. What was he doing all this while? To those people who think on those lines, I say, this was not done in secret. No arrangement that was made with the British Government was done in secrecy, not done by an individual, but by the representives, by all the duly recognised representatives of the Nation. When Mr. Henderson came here to settle this question of the Services, he had long discussions with me. He said that before the transference of power arrangements should be made to the satisfaction of the Parliament, that transference of power will take place only when guarantees are given to the members of the Secretary of States’ services, each individual member of which has a Covenant with the Secretary of State for permanency and for certain other guarantees. More than fifty per cent of the Secretary of State’s services were Europeans. Britishers,and the rest were Indians. It was then suggested by him that there should be a treaty between England and India on this question. The suggestion was also made that they should be given due compensation if they have to leave the Services because they would not like to serve in the Indian administration, and that they should be given proportionate pension. Their status, their time-scale of pay, everything was to be settled before any question of transfer of power could be considered. Now, I had long negotiations and it was then a joint Government of the Muslims and the Non-Muslims. It was an all-India Government at that time and these negotiations resulted in certain conclusions which were placed before the Cabinet–it was a joint Cabinet at the time–and they were accepted by them. Then those conclusions were sent to Parliament and it was accepted there. Many of the Europeans who were in the services here have left now, but when the negotiations were going on, I told them to leave the case of Indians to us, that we shall deal with them as we deemed just, that they will trust us and we will trust them; and finally they agreed on certain conditions.
