White Paper on Indian States (1950)/Part 1/The Influence of the First World War
The Influence of the First World War
16. The growing impact of modern conditions oi life was breaking down the isolation of States from one another and from the rest of India and the States began to be drawn into the vortex of questions, mainly economic, which concerned India as whole. The influences which were working to increase the range of matters in which there was need for a common policy and common action between the Provinces and States gathered momentum during the first World War. The war necessitated the mobilisation of the resources of the entire country; the organisation of the country's war-effort involved closer co-ordination of administrative activity in States a well as Provinces. During the stress of the War, the emphasis was on unity, unity of the British Empire, as a whole, on the one hand, and unity between British India and Indian States, on the other. The War, therefore, greatly accelerated the imperceptible process of infiltration into the States and brought them nearer to what was then British India.