CDS (II) 2021 General Knowledge · Question 60 of 120

Correct — A, Overthrow of alien rule. The Moderates who led the Indian National Congress from its founding in 1885 until the split of 1907 did not seek to end British rule; they sought to reform it and to win for India the self-government that the settler colonies already had. Their working assumption was that British rule contained institutions worth keeping and that the Government could be persuaded by argument, so their methods were constitutional throughout — resolutions at the annual sessions, petitions and memorials, deputations, questions raised through sympathetic members at Westminster, a British Committee of the Congress in London with its journal India, and a steady effort to build informed public opinion at home through the press and the platform. Their most damaging work was intellectual rather than agitational: Dadabhai Naoroji's drain of wealth argument turned poverty into an indictment of the colonial economy. The demand for an end to alien rule came later — from the Extremists after 1905 and formally from the Congress only at Lahore in 1929.

• (b)Constitutional agitation — Constitutional agitation is the defining Moderate method. Everything they did was framed to stay inside the law and inside the constitutional forms the Raj recognised, which is why their opponents called the approach political mendicancy.
• (c)Slow, orderly political progress — Slow, orderly political progress was their stated theory of change. They argued for the gradual widening of the legislative councils and of Indian entry into the services, expecting reform to arrive in stages rather than at once.
• (d)Mobilisation of public opinion — Mobilisation of public opinion was central to their practice, in India through newspapers, associations and public meetings, and in Britain through lecture tours and the Congress committee in London, on the view that British opinion could be brought round.

The Congress's first two decades belong to the Moderates — Dadabhai Naoroji, Surendranath Banerjea, Gopal Krishna Gokhale, Pherozeshah Mehta, W. C. Bonnerjee, Badruddin Tyabji. Their programme was representation, Indianisation of the services, reduction of military spending and relief for the peasantry, pursued through what critics summarised as prayer, petition and protest, and their goal was self-government within the empire.

Not-questions on the Moderates are decided by remembering the goal rather than the tactics, because three of the four options in an item like this will describe method and one will describe an aim the Moderates never held. It is worth being fair to them: the economic critique they built was taken over wholesale by the later, more radical nationalism, and the Extremists' charge that the Congress had been founded as a safety valve for British rule was first pressed by Lala Lajpat Rai in his book Young India of 1916, well after the split. The demand for complete independence became official Congress policy only at the Lahore session of December 1929.

• The Moderates led the Congress from 1885 to the Surat split of 1907; their leaders included Naoroji, Gokhale, Pherozeshah Mehta and Surendranath Banerjea.
• Their goal was self-government within the British empire on the model of the settler colonies, not the end of British rule.
• Their methods were constitutional — resolutions, petitions, deputations, and work through a British Committee of the Congress in London with its journal India.
• Dadabhai Naoroji's drain of wealth theory was the movement's most enduring contribution.
• The Congress adopted purna swaraj, complete independence, as its goal only at the Lahore session of December 1929.

• Assuming every early nationalist wanted independence; the Moderates wanted self-government within the empire.
• Reading the safety-valve charge as a contemporary Moderate position; it was an Extremist attack made later.
• Dating the demand for complete independence to the Moderate phase rather than to Lahore in 1929.

As a not-question separating Moderate methods from a goal they never held, or as a comparison of Moderate and Extremist aims and techniques.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Indian National Congress formally adopted ‘Purna Swaraj’ as its goal at which session?

  • (a)Calcutta, 1906
  • (b)Nagpur, 1920
  • (c)Madras, 1927
  • (d)Lahore, 1929

  Answer(d) Lahore, 1929 — the session presided over by Jawaharlal Nehru, which resolved on complete independence and fixed 26 January 1930 as Independence Day.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The ‘drain of wealth’ theory was elaborated principally by

  • (a)Gopal Krishna Gokhale
  • (b)Dadabhai Naoroji
  • (c)Bal Gangadhar Tilak
  • (d)Bipin Chandra Pal

  Answer(b) Dadabhai Naoroji — set out at length in Poverty and Un-British Rule in India, and taken up by R. C. Dutt and later nationalists.