CDS (I) 2023 General Knowledge · Question 70 of 120

Correct — C, M. K. Gandhi. On 29 January 1948, the day before he was killed, Gandhi wrote a draft constitution for the Congress. Its argument was that the organisation had done the work it was made for: 'the Congress in its present shape and form... has outlived its use', and so 'the A.I.C.C. resolves to disband the existing Congress organisation and flower into a Lok Sevak Sangh'. What he wanted in its place was a body of servants of the people working at village level on social, moral and economic independence rather than on winning elections. It appeared in Harijan on 15 February 1948 under a title the editors gave it, 'His Last Will and Testament' — a phrase Gandhi never used, and one that lent the note more finality than he intended, since he had written it as a working draft.

• (a)Vallabhbhai Patel — Patel spent the last years of his life integrating the princely states and building the machinery of the new government from inside it. He was Deputy Prime Minister and Home Minister, and had no interest in dissolving the party that held power.
• (b)Dr. B. R. Ambedkar — Ambedkar was a critic of the Congress rather than a member seeking to remake it, and his own path led towards founding parties, not dissolving one. He chaired the Drafting Committee of the Constitution and later formed the Scheduled Castes Federation's successor, the Republican Party of India.
• (d)Jawaharlal Nehru — Nehru led the Congress as a governing party for seventeen years as Prime Minister. The proposal in question runs directly against everything he did after 1947.

Gandhi's note belongs to a strand of thinking that separates political power from social work. In his reading the Congress had been an instrument for ending foreign rule, and once that was achieved, a body of workers competing for office would be a different thing from a body of workers serving villages. The Lok Sevak Sangh he sketched was to be built from the village upward, with workers pledged to constructive work. The idea outlived him: it runs into the Sarvodaya movement and the Bhoodan campaign carried on by Vinoba Bhave and later by Jayaprakash Narayan.

The item is answered by asking which of the four had reason to want the Congress dissolved, and only one of them stood outside the machinery of government in January 1948. Patel and Nehru were building the new state through the Congress; Ambedkar was working on the Constitution and was never a Congressman. Gandhi held no office at all after independence and had been saying for years that the movement's methods should now turn to constructive work. Two cautions are worth carrying. The proposal was never adopted, so nothing followed from it institutionally. And the famous title is not Gandhi's own — the editors of Harijan added it after his death, which is why the note is sometimes read as a testament rather than as the draft constitution it was.

• Gandhi's draft constitution for the Congress is dated 29 January 1948, the day before his assassination.
• It proposed that the All India Congress Committee disband the existing organisation and let it 'flower into a Lok Sevak Sangh'.
• It was published in Harijan on 15 February 1948 under the editors' title 'His Last Will and Testament'.
• The Sangh was to work at village level on social, moral and economic independence rather than contest for power.
• The proposal was never carried out; its lineage runs instead into the Sarvodaya and Bhoodan movements of Vinoba Bhave and Jayaprakash Narayan.

• Assuming a proposal so widely quoted must have been implemented. It was not.
• Treating the title 'His Last Will and Testament' as Gandhi's own words. The editors of Harijan supplied it.
• Attributing the idea to Nehru or Patel, both of whom were building the state through the Congress at the time.

As a who-said-it attribution, as a question on the date and publication of Gandhi's last writings, or inside a broader item on the Congress after independence.

No directly related past PYQ was found.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Gandhi's draft constitution proposing that the Congress be disbanded was published in which journal?

  • (a)Young India
  • (b)Harijan
  • (c)The Indian Opinion
  • (d)Navajivan

  Answer(b) Harijan — it appeared there on 15 February 1948, after his death, under the title 'His Last Will and Testament'.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Bhoodan movement, which carried forward Gandhi's constructive programme after his death, was led by

  • (a)Vinoba Bhave
  • (b)C. Rajagopalachari
  • (c)Acharya Narendra Deva
  • (d)Ram Manohar Lohia

  Answer(a) Vinoba Bhave — the Sarvodaya and Bhoodan campaigns are where the Lok Sevak Sangh idea found its practical successors.