Gandhian Mass Movements

Sir Stafford Cripps arrived in March 1942 with an offer of Dominion status after the war, a constitution making body elected after it, and the right of any province to stay out of the proposed Union, while the immediate demand for a transfer of defence and of substantive power in the interim was refused. Gandhi's judgment on the offer, that it was a post dated cheque, and the Congress rejection of it, led directly to the Working Committee resolution at Wardha in July 1942 and the All India Congress Committee resolution at Bombay on 8 August 1942, with the call to do or die.

• Option (b) is correct.
• Option (a) is incorrect on chronology by four years, the Cabinet Mission arriving in March 1946, after the war, and being the beginning of the transfer of power rather than a trigger for agitation.
• Option (c) is incorrect: the Simon Commission report of 1930 belongs to the sequence that produced the Civil Disobedience Movement and the Round Table Conferences, not Quit India.
• Option (d) is incorrect, the Wavell Plan and the Simla Conference falling in June and July 1945, again after the movement. The elimination route is purely chronological. Quit India is August 1942, and three of the four options are dated after it, so a candidate holding only the year of the movement can answer the question without knowing anything about the Cripps Mission at all.

• Option (b) is correct. The Lahore session of December 1929, held on the banks of the Ravi and presided over by Jawaharlal Nehru, adopted the resolution declaring Purna Swaraj, complete independence, as the goal of the Congress, in place of the dominion status that had been the working objective. The session authorised a programme of civil disobedience and directed that 26 January 1930 be observed as Independence Day, which is the reason that date was later chosen for the commencement of the Constitution.
• Option (a) is incorrect: self-government or swaraj within the empire was declared the Congress goal at the Calcutta session of 1906 under Dadabhai Naoroji.
• Option (c) is incorrect: the Non-Cooperation Movement was approved at the Calcutta special session of September 1920 and confirmed at Nagpur in December 1920.
• Option (d) is incorrect: the Congress decided to participate in the second Round Table Conference at the Karachi session of March 1931, following the Gandhi-Irwin Pact. The item is a chronology test and is settled by holding the sequence Lahore 1929, Dandi and Civil Disobedience 1930, Gandhi-Irwin and Karachi 1931.

• Statement 1 is correct. The Anarchical and Revolutionary Crimes Act of 1919, universally called the Rowlatt Act, gave effect to the report of the Sedition Committee chaired by Justice Sidney Rowlatt, which recommended detention without trial and trial without jury for political offences.
• Statement 2 is correct. Gandhi built the satyagraha through the Satyagraha Sabha founded in February 1919 and drew on existing organisational networks, principally the Home Rule Leagues along with pan-Islamist and Punjab based groupings, this being his first attempt at a nationwide agitation before the Congress machinery was his to command.
• Statement 3 is incorrect and is settled by chronology alone: the Simon Commission landed at Bombay in February 1928 to the greeting of black flags, nine years after the Rowlatt Satyagraha of 1919. The official answer (b) follows. Elimination route: the date of the Simon Commission removes options (c) and (d) at once, and statement 1 is standard, which removes (a).

• Option (b) is correct. C. Rajagopalachari led the Vedaranyam salt satyagraha, marching about 150 miles from Tiruchirappalli to Vedaranyam on the Tanjore coast in April 1930 and breaking the salt law there, the southern counterpart of Gandhi's march to Dandi and the principal Civil Disobedience action in the Madras Presidency. Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel's Dharasana and K. Kelappan's Payyannur actions belong to the same pattern of regional salt marches.
• Option (a) is wrong: V. O. Chidambaram Pillai belongs to the Swadeshi phase of 1905 to 1908, when he founded the Swadeshi Steam Navigation Company against the British India Steam Navigation monopoly, and he was imprisoned and broken well before 1930.
• Option (c) is wrong on chronology of leadership: K. Kamaraj participated in the Civil Disobedience Movement but was a younger worker who rose to prominence in the Congress organisation later, and he did not lead this march.
• Option (d) is wrong: Annie Besant led the Home Rule agitation of 1916, had by 1930 moved away from the Congress mainstream over the Nehru Report and the Commonwealth of India Bill, and took no part in salt satyagraha. The elimination route is chronological, since two of the four names are firmly attached to earlier phases.

• Option (c) is correct. Champaran in 1917 was Gandhi's first satyagraha in India and its historical significance lies in what it joined together. The grievance was that of the indigo ryots of north Bihar, held under the tinkathia system to cultivate indigo on a fixed portion of their holding for the European planters, and burdened with illegal cesses after synthetic dye had destroyed the market for the crop. By taking up that agrarian grievance, defying the order to leave the district, and securing the Champaran Agrarian Enquiry Committee on which he sat and the Champaran Agrarian Act of 1918, Gandhi brought a local peasant struggle inside the national movement and demonstrated that the Congress could be an organisation of the countryside rather than of the professional urban classes alone. That linkage is the answer.
• Option (a) is wrong on scale and on timing: participation was local, drawing in Bihari lawyers such as Rajendra Prasad, Brajkishore Prasad and Anugrah Narayan Sinha, and the all India participation of students and women belongs to the Non Cooperation and Civil Disobedience movements of the 1920s and 1930s.
• Option (b) is wrong because Champaran was not a Dalit or tribal mobilisation; the cultivators were tenants of the indigo estates.
• Option (d) is wrong on fact and on framing, since the decline of indigo cultivation followed from the collapse of the market for natural dye rather than from the satyagraha, and a change in cropping pattern would in any case be an economic outcome rather than a significant aspect of a political movement.

Hence (c).

• Statement 1 is correct. Gandhi's campaign against the export of Indian indentured labour, carried on from his South African years and pressed in India after 1915, was central to the abolition of the system, which the Government of India ended in 1917.
• Statement 2 is incorrect and reverses what happened. At the Delhi War Conference convened by Lord Chelmsford in April 1918 Gandhi supported the recruitment resolution, speaking briefly in its favour, and he then went on to campaign actively as a recruiting agent in Kheda, conduct that puzzled many of his followers and that he defended on the ground that Indians should earn the rights of citizenship of the Empire.
• Statement 3 is correct. Following the breach of the salt law at Dandi in April 1930 and the mass Civil Disobedience that followed, the colonial government declared the Congress an unlawful organisation and carried out mass arrests, including of Gandhi himself. Since statements 1 and 3 hold and statement 2 fails, the official answer (b) follows.
• Statement 2 is the whole question, and the elimination route is the recollection that Gandhi was a recruiting sergeant in 1918, an uncomfortable fact that is precisely why the examiner chose it.

On the substance, statement 1 is correct, since the Congress agreed to attend the Second Round Table Conference.

• Statement 2 is correct as printed in English, the ordinances issued to suppress the Civil Disobedience Movement being withdrawn.
• Statement 3 is incorrect, and is the well known trap; Gandhi pressed for a public enquiry into police excesses and Irwin refused, Gandhi accepting the refusal in the interest of a settlement.
• Statement 4 is correct, since the amnesty extended only to prisoners not convicted of or charged with violence. The intended answer would therefore be 1, 2 and 4, that is (b). The item was nevertheless dropped by the Commission, one of two dropped items in this paper.

The All India Congress Committee passed the Quit India Resolution at Gowalia Tank Maidan in Bombay on 8 August 1942, and Gandhi delivered the Do or Die address the same evening, with the entire leadership arrested in the early hours of 9 August.

• Option (a) is therefore correct.
• Option (b) refers to the expansion of the Viceroy's Executive Council under the August Offer of 1940 and its later enlargement in 1941.
• Option (c) refers to the Congress ministries' resignation in October and November 1939 over the declaration of war without consultation.
• Option (d) refers to the Cripps Mission of March and April 1942, which preceded Quit India and whose failure was a direct cause of it. Hence (a). All four options are real events within a three year window, so the question is purely one of date discipline.

Item I was part of the programme: boycott of law courts by lawyers and litigants, and boycott of foreign cloth accompanied by the promotion of khadi, were among the central planks. Item II was part of the programme: strict non-violence was the non-negotiable condition of the movement, and Gandhi's withdrawal of it after the Chauri Chaura violence in February 1922 demonstrates how binding he considered it. Item III is incorrect and is the intended distractor. The programme called for the surrender of titles and honorary offices conferred by the government, not their retention with private use only. Retention of any kind would have defeated the symbolic purpose of the renunciation. Item IV was part of the programme: the constructive side of non-cooperation included the establishment of panchayats to settle disputes, as the counterpart to boycotting the colonial courts, since litigants withdrawing from the courts needed an alternative forum. Three items therefore qualify, giving (c).

• Option (d) requires the surrender of titles to be read as retention.
• Options (a) and (b) understate, and would require rejecting either the non-violence condition or the panchayat provision, both of which are well attested.

• Statement I is correct. At the Nagpur session in December 1920 the Congress amended its constitution and redefined its goal as the attainment of Swaraj by all legitimate and peaceful means, replacing the earlier formulation of self-government within the Empire through constitutional means. The change of wording is significant because it left the term Swaraj deliberately open, allowing both moderates and those seeking complete independence to remain within the fold.
• Statement II is correct. The programme was conceived in phases, beginning with the surrender of titles and the boycott of legislatures, courts and schools, and moving to the more confrontational measures of mass civil disobedience and non-payment of taxes only at a later stage, contingent on Swaraj not being achieved within a year and on the government resorting to repression. This staged design reflected Gandhi's insistence that the movement build discipline before escalating. Both statements hold, giving (c).
• Options (a) and (b) each reject one accurate statement, and option (d) rejects both.

The statement belongs to the Dandi march of 1930, made as Gandhi prepared to break the salt law publicly on the sixth of April after the twenty four day march from Sabarmati, giving (b). The remark is characteristic of his method at that moment: the deliberate and announced breach of a law, accompanied by an open declaration of the intention to breach it, so that the act carried no concealment and invited the legal consequence. Making sedition a matter of religion asserted that obedience to conscience overrode obedience to an unjust statute, while the accompanying insistence that the battle remained non-violent kept the challenge within the satyagraha frame.

• Option (a) is wrong because Champaran in 1917 was a localised agrarian inquiry into indigo cultivation conducted largely through negotiation and evidence gathering, not open law breaking of this kind.
• Option (c) is wrong because the Second Round Table Conference in 1931 was a negotiation in London where Gandhi attended as sole Congress representative, an entirely different register.
• Option (d) is wrong because the Quit India launch in 1942 is associated with the call to do or die. This is a pure recall question with no elimination route, since all four options are plausible occasions for a defiant statement.

Madan Mohan Malaviya led the legal defence of those arrested after the Chauri Chaura incident of February 1922, in which a crowd set fire to a police station in Gorakhpur district killing policemen inside, prompting Gandhi to suspend the Non-Cooperation Movement. The sessions court sentenced a very large number of the accused to death, and the appellate intervention, in which Malaviya was central, secured acquittals for many and reduced the death sentences to a small fraction of the original number. The key names Krishna Kant alongside him, giving (b).

• Option (a), C. R. Das, was a leading barrister who had defended Aurobindo Ghose in the Alipore Bomb Case and was at this time opposed to the suspension of the movement, but he is not associated with this defence.
• Option (c) pairs Saifuddin Kitchlew, associated with the Rowlatt agitation in Punjab and the events preceding Jallianwala Bagh, with Khwaja Hasan Nizami, a Sufi writer, neither being connected to Chauri Chaura.
• Option (d), Jinnah, had resigned from the Congress in 1920 in opposition to the non-cooperation programme itself, so his appearance for its participants would be incongruous.

The Poona Pact of September 1932 is the correct antecedent, giving (a). Its background was the Communal Award of August 1932, which granted separate electorates to the Depressed Classes. Gandhi, then imprisoned in Yerwada, began a fast unto death against the provision, holding that separate electorates would permanently divide Hindu society, while Ambedkar defended them as the only guarantee of genuine political representation. The compromise reached replaced separate electorates with reserved seats within joint electorates, and the number of reserved seats was substantially increased over what the Award had provided. Its consequence for Gandhi's own programme was immediate and is what the question tests: he made the removal of untouchability a central plank of constructive work, founding the Harijan Sevak Sangh in 1932 and launching the weekly Harijan in 1933, and undertaking an extensive Harijan tour.

• Option (b), the Gandhi-Irwin Agreement of March 1931, concerned the suspension of Civil Disobedience and participation in the Round Table Conference.
• Option (c) relates to 1942, a decade later.
• Option (d), the Government of India Act of 1935, gave legislative form to some of these arrangements but followed rather than prompted the shift.