C. P. Ramaswami Iyer

''Dewan Bahadur Sachivottama Sir'' Chetput Pattabhiraman Ramaswami Iyer LL.D. D.Litt. (12 November 1879 – 26 September 1966), popularly known as Sir C. P., was an Indian lawyer, administrator and statesman, acknowledged as the most powerful man in the Madras Presidency in the decades immediately prior to Indian Independence.

Ramaswami Iyer was born in 1879 in Madras city and studied at Wesley College High School and Presidency College, Madras before qualifying as a lawyer from the Madras Law College. He joined the Madras Bar in 1903.

By 1910, he was the undisputed leader of the Madras Bar, head of the Mylapore clique, the most highly remunerated lawyer in India, and president of the All India Lawyers' Conference, famous as counsel and constitutional advisor to the Nizam of Hyderabad and Berar, the Nawab of Bhopal, and the Maharajas of Jammu & Kashmir (for whom he formulated Kashmir's first constitution in 1934), Patiala, Indore, Gwalior, Bikaner, Travancore, and Cochin. C.P's public renown was further magnified by his role as victorious counsel in a string of high-profile cases, including the Ashe murder trial, Besant v. Narayaniah, the incarceration of poet Mahakavi C. Subramania Bharathiyar, the case of shipping magnate V. O. Chidambaram Pillai, and Pandit Motilal Nehru's defamation suit against C.S. Ranga Iyer.

Despite having just deprived Annie Besant of custody of Jiddu Krishnamurti as opposing counsel, he nonetheless awed her such that she recruited him as a central figure in the Indian Home Rule movement; from 1917, he would serve jointly with Jawaharlal Nehru as General Secretary of Indian National Congress, personally superintending the Congress delegation to the British Parliament; later, represented British India twice at the League of Nations in Geneva, at the First, Second, and Third Round Table Conferences, and at the 1933 World Economic Conference in London, additionally drawing attention with his testimony before a Joint Select Committee of Parliament charged with deliberating Indian reforms.

In 1920, after declining elevation to the High Court of Madras as a puisne justice, where he would have joined his brothers-in-law Sir C.V. Kumaraswami and Viswanatha Sastriar, he was appointed by Lord Willingdon as the youngest-ever Advocate-General of Madras, in which capacity he XYZ, before joining Willingdon's Executive Council as Home Minister, overseeing Law, Police, Irrigation and Ports, the judiciary and legislature, labor, companies, elections, and infrastructure. He began the electrification of South India, established the Pallivasal Hydroelectric Project and Pechiparai Hydroelectric Scheme, and built the Mettur and Pykara Dams, while also laying the groundwork for the Tungabhadra Dam and creating the public park reserve today known as Periyar National Park.

Rising to Vice-President of the Executive Council and chief advisor to the Governor, from 1924 onward he was widely seen as the most powerful man in Madras, with the newly arrived British Governor, Viscount Goschen, consulting or deferring to him in most matters, and consequently ridiculed as his stooge, to the extent that the Justice Party sought to have Goschen recalled to London on those grounds in 1926, at which time they alleged that C.P. had personally suppressed their electoral success. Widespread prurient speculation about the true relationship between C.P. and the Vicereine-elect, Lady Willingdon was inescapable at this time; similarly attached to CP in the court of public rumor were Maharani Indira Devi of Cooch Behar, and the Junior Maharani of Travancore.

In 1931, he was elevated to the Viceroy's Executive Council, tasked now with imperial, pan-Indian strategy and policymaking as minister for Law and Commerce, and (from 1942) Information; at the Viceroy's request, he concurrently became legal and constitutional adviser to the monarchy of Travancore. - a relationship which rapidly transmuted into C.P. exercising total autocracy over the kingdom, in the name of the regent Maharani and then her ''roi fainéant'' son, Chithira Thirunal Balarama Varma, who formally appointed C.P. Dewan of Travancore in 1936.

During his tenure as Diwan, he radically and forcefully transformed Travancore wholesale: industrially, economically, culturally, and socially.

His first act was the issuance of the Temple Entry Proclamation, opening all Travancore temples to all worshippers, whatever their caste; he would proceed to institute mandatory universal education for children, extend universal suffrage, and abolish capital punishment, each of which was a first for an Indian princely state. Kerala’s first modern university emerged with his founding the University of Travancore — later the University of Kerala — in 1937, where he would additionally act as Vice-Chancellor.

He created and launched the State Bank of Travancore, the Travancore Titanium Company, FACT, Indian Rare Earths, Travancore Ceramics Ltd. and other multiple other major concerns with state support, aggressively developing industrial enterprises manufacturing and/or processing glass, aluminum, plywood, rayons, sugar, hardwood, lime, cement, salt, cotton textiles, ceramics, rubber, and coir. He inaugurated the Travancore State Transport Department, today the Kerala State Road Transport Corporation, and further introduced scheduled air transport to the realm, as well as instituting a dedicated Travancore State Civil Service, and installing Travancore's first telephone system. In tandem, fiscally, he abolished land revenue taxation, instead instituting a gradated agricultural income tax. His programs of modernization and industrialization in aggregate quadrupled the economic revenue of Travancore in just eleven years, despite tailwinds from the collapse of Marumakkathayam and fragmentation of the tharavads.

He took charge of the matter of the ''devadāya'' offered at Padmanabhaswamy Temple, for the Maharaja merely to safekeep, by instituting the system of autonomous trusts encapsulating the ''devadāya'' committed in the Padmanabhaswamy vaults that even today control assets worth >$20bn US.

C.P.'s American Model contrasted with the heavy-handed Dirigisme of administration,

All was not well, however; World War II disruption of supply lines of rice from Burma to a nation already running a 60% food deficit saw some (estimated) 90,000 Travancorean deaths from starvation, malnutrition, or disease. Wartime exodus in Tranvancore atypically consisted in mass flight from urbanized areas into local forests and wilderness. Public awareness of the situation was carefully titrated by C.P.'s unusually autarchic, repressive press controls, and his enacted Defense of Travancore act, which even exceeded the Rowlatt Act in its invasiveness of civil rights. Dissent within Travancore was ruthlessly suppressed, most infamously in the matter of the Punnapra-Vayalar revolt, where two or three thousand communist-assigned workers rebelled against the throne and regime, to be met by instantaneous military aid to the civil power. At least 1,000 insurrectionists were killed by state forces.

and his controversial stand in favour of an independent Travancore.

Following a failed assassination attempt in 1947, he deliberately chose to resign and withdraw to London, rebuffing a blank cheque to rule Indore as its first Prime Minister. Provided by Wikipedia