BPSC 70th CCE Re-exam Prelims General Studies · Question 113 of 142

Correct — B, 1920. The founding conference of the All India Trade Union Congress opened on 31 October 1920 at the Empire Theatre in Bombay, with Lala Lajpat Rai as its first president. It was a substantial gathering rather than a declaration of intent: 101 delegates representing 64 unions with a combined membership of 1,40,854 attended, and political leaders of every shade were present, among them Motilal Nehru, M. A. Jinnah, Annie Besant and Vithalbhai Patel. Joseph Baptista chaired the 500-member reception committee that had organised it and presided over the second session at Jharia in 1921; Diwan Chaman Lall was among the founders and served as general secretary in the federation's early years. AITUC is the oldest trade union federation in India, and until 1945 — when unions began to organise on party lines — it was effectively the trade union organisation of the country; later leaders of the freedom movement, including Jawaharlal Nehru, Subhas Chandra Bose, C. R. Das, V. V. Giri and Sarojini Naidu, presided over its sessions. A spur repeatedly cited in accounts of its founding was the need for India to send a genuine workers' delegate to the conferences of the International Labour Organisation, which had been created in 1919. Since a body is founded once, and only one of the three years offered can be that year, option (d) 'More than one of the above' cannot stand.

• (a)1918 — The year of the Madras Labour Union, founded by B. P. Wadia with V. Kalyanasundaram Mudaliar among the workers of the Buckingham and Carnatic Mills and generally described as one of the first organised trade unions in India. 1918 is also the year of Gandhi's Ahmedabad mill-workers' satyagraha. Both are landmarks of the labour movement — neither is the founding of AITUC, which is a federation of unions rather than a single union.
• (c)1919 — The year the International Labour Organisation was created, and therefore the year that made an all-India federation urgent — India had to nominate a workers' representative to an international body and had no organisation entitled to speak for labour. The cause is 1919; the effect, the founding conference at Bombay, is October 1920.
• (d)More than one of the above — An organisation has one founding year, so no two of the three listed years can both be it. The option is only ever correct where the claim in the stem can be true of several items at once, and 'was formed in the year' is not such a claim. Reach for it only when you can name two options that are simultaneously true.

Indian trade unionism grows in three stages, and dates attach to each. The first is philanthropic and pre-union: N. M. Lokhande's Bombay Mill-Hands Association of 1884 and the first Factories Acts of 1881 and 1891, which regulated hours and child labour without recognising any right to combine. The second is the emergence of real unions around the First World War, when wartime inflation and the Russian Revolution combined with the nationalist upsurge — the Madras Labour Union in 1918, the Ahmedabad Textile Labour Association out of Gandhi's 1918 strike, and then the AITUC as an all-India federation in 1920. The third is legal recognition and political division: the Trade Unions Act of 1926 gave registered unions legal status and immunities, the Trade Disputes Act of 1929 set up tribunals and restricted strikes, and the federation itself split repeatedly — at Nagpur in 1929 and again in the 1930s — before the post-independence proliferation produced INTUC in 1947, HMS in 1948 and BMS in 1955.

The examiner's trick on this question is to surround the right year with the years of neighbouring landmarks, so the defence is to hold the sequence rather than the single date: 1881 first Factories Act, 1884 Bombay Mill-Hands Association, 1918 Madras Labour Union and the Ahmedabad strike, 1919 the ILO, 1920 AITUC, 1926 the Trade Unions Act, 1929 the Trade Disputes Act and the Nagpur split, 1947 INTUC. Each option on this page is a real year in that chain, which is why guessing from a vague sense of period fails. A second habit is to distinguish the type of body being asked about — a single factory union, a city federation, an all-India federation, or a legal enactment — because the same decade contains one of each. Note finally that the Congress leadership's involvement runs right through AITUC's early years, which is why its presidents read like a list of nationalist leaders and why the labour question cannot be separated from the freedom struggle in this period.

• The AITUC's founding conference opened on 31 October 1920 at the Empire Theatre, Bombay, with Lala Lajpat Rai as its first president
• 101 delegates from 64 unions, representing a membership of 1,40,854, attended, with Motilal Nehru, M. A. Jinnah, Annie Besant and V. J. Patel present; Joseph Baptista chaired the reception committee
• AITUC is the oldest trade union federation in India and remained the principal one until 1945, after which unions organised along party lines
• Its later session presidents included Jawaharlal Nehru (Jharia, 1928), Subhas Chandra Bose (Nagpur, 1929) and V. V. Giri (Kanpur, 1942)
• The Madras Labour Union, one of India's first organised unions, was founded in 1918 by B. P. Wadia with V. Kalyanasundaram Mudaliar; the International Labour Organisation was created in 1919

• Confusing the founding of a single union (Madras Labour Union, 1918) with the founding of the all-India federation (AITUC, 1920)
• Choosing 1919 because the ILO belongs to that year; the ILO is the reason AITUC was formed, not the year it was formed
• Picking 'More than one of the above' on a question that asks for a single founding year — a superlative or a unique event cannot have two correct answers

BPSC asks the year and offers the years of adjacent landmarks, so a candidate needs the labour-movement chronology as a list rather than as a story. UPSC asks the same block through statements about what a law did or who organised whom — whether the Factories Act of 1881 allowed unions, what the Trade Disputes Act of 1929 provided — so the same decade has to be learnt with the content of each enactment attached.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Who was the first President of the All India Trade Union Congress ?

  • (a)N. M. Joshi
  • (b)Lala Lajpat Rai
  • (c)Diwan Chaman Lall
  • (d)Joseph Baptista

  Answer(b) Lala Lajpat Rai — he presided over the founding conference at Bombay on 31 October 1920; Joseph Baptista chaired the reception committee and presided over the second session at Jharia in 1921.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Trade Unions Act, which gave registered trade unions legal recognition and immunities in India, was passed in

  • (a)1920
  • (b)1926
  • (c)1929
  • (d)1936

  Answer(b) 1926 — six years after the AITUC was founded; the Trade Disputes Act of 1929 came later and moved in the opposite direction, setting up tribunals and restricting strikes.