CDS (II) 2020 General Knowledge · Question 43 of 120

Correct — A, Universal adult franchise. The Moderates who led the Congress from 1885 to about 1905 never asked for it. Their programme was reform inside the colonial system: more elected Indians on the legislative councils, a wider but still property-based franchise, and greater Indian control over the budget. Adult suffrage regardless of property, literacy or sex was a demand of the next century, written into the Karachi resolution of 1931 and finally delivered by the Constitution in 1950. The other three options are all standard Moderate demands, listed in every account of the period.

• (b)Repeal of the Arms Act — A real Moderate demand. The Arms Act of 1878 disarmed Indians while exempting Europeans, and the Congress attacked it as racially discriminatory from its earliest sessions.
• (c)Extension of Permanent Settlement — Also a Moderate demand. They wanted the fixed revenue assessment of Bengal extended to other provinces, expecting it to protect cultivators from ever-rising demands and encourage investment in land.
• (d)Higher jobs for Indians in the army — A recurring Moderate complaint. Indians were barred from commissioned rank, and the Congress pressed for Indianisation of the officer corps alongside Indianisation of the civil service.

The early Congress worked by what its critics called the three Ps — petition, prayer and protest. Its leaders, among them Dadabhai Naoroji, Gopal Krishna Gokhale, Pherozeshah Mehta, Surendranath Banerjea and W. C. Bonnerjee, believed British rule could be reformed from within by patient constitutional agitation, resolutions and appeals to British public opinion. Their most lasting contribution was economic: the drain of wealth argument, which turned a moral case for self-rule into an economic one.

Look at the three surviving options and they share a shape — each asks for a specific administrative or fiscal concession from the government of the day. Universal adult franchise does not fit that shape at all; it asks for a transfer of sovereignty to the whole population, which the Moderates, mostly professional men working within a narrow property franchise, never demanded. That mismatch of scale is the fastest way to spot the odd one out. It is also fair to the Moderates to note that they were arguing in a Britain that did not yet have universal adult suffrage itself.

• The Moderate phase of the Congress runs from its founding in 1885 to roughly 1905.
• Moderate demands included expansion of legislative councils, simultaneous ICS examinations in India and England, separation of the judiciary from the executive, and reduction of military expenditure.
• They sought repeal of the Arms Act of 1878, which disarmed Indians while exempting Europeans.
• They pressed for extension of the Permanent Settlement to provinces beyond Bengal.
• Universal adult franchise entered the national programme only later, with the Karachi resolution of 1931, and became law with the Constitution in 1950.

• Reading a later Congress demand back into the Moderate period.
• Assuming the Moderates achieved nothing — the councils were expanded and the drain argument shaped every later movement.
• Confusing extension of the Permanent Settlement with abolition of zamindari, which is a post-independence policy.

As a not-a-demand item like this one, as a methods question distinguishing Moderates from Extremists, or through a named leader and the body they founded.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The economic critique of British rule known as the 'drain of wealth' theory is most closely associated with

  • (a)Dadabhai Naoroji
  • (b)Bal Gangadhar Tilak
  • (c)Aurobindo Ghosh
  • (d)Bipin Chandra Pal

  Answer(a) Dadabhai Naoroji — set out in Poverty and Un-British Rule in India, and the central economic argument of the Moderate phase.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Arms Act, which the early Congress repeatedly demanded be repealed, was enacted in

  • (a)1857
  • (b)1878
  • (c)1892
  • (d)1909

  Answer(b) 1878 — passed under Lytton in the same year as the Vernacular Press Act, and resented for exempting Europeans.