Which of the following statements about Home Rule Movement is/are correct ? 1. The advocates of the Home Rule Movement believed in constitutional methods and were opposed to violence and revolutionary action. 2. In 1917, the two Home Rule Leagues of Lokmanya Tilak and Annie Besant worked in cooperation with each other. 3. Annie Besant confined her activities to the Bombay Presidency and the Central Provinces and the rest of India was left to Lokmanya Tilak. Select the answer using the codes given below :

Correct — A, (a) 1 and 2.

Statement 1 is correct. The Home Rule Leagues were constitutionalist bodies. Their programme was self-government for India within the British Empire, and their methods were propaganda methods - public meetings, lectures, pamphlets, newspapers, reading rooms, the enrolment of members and the collection of signatures. Tilak's own formula, that Home Rule was his birthright and he would have it, was a claim of entitlement pressed through agitation and not a call to arms; and Annie Besant, who came to the movement from the Theosophical Society, argued the case in New India and Commonweal. Neither League organised or endorsed violence, and both were emphatic that they were not revolutionary organisations - a distinction that mattered to them because the revolutionary movement was active in the same years and both Leagues were under official suspicion.

Statement 2 is correct. There were two Leagues, not one, and they were kept formally separate so that the followers of two very different leaders would not quarrel over control; but they worked in concert. They divided the field between them by agreement rather than competing in it, and 1917 was the year in which that cooperation was most visible. Besant was interned in June 1917 by the Madras Government, and the protest that followed was national: Tilak's League joined it, Congress leaders who had held aloof from Home Rule agitation came in behind the demand for her release, and the campaign was strong enough that she was released in September. In December of the same year Besant was elected president of the Congress. A statement that the two Leagues worked in cooperation with each other in 1917 describes what happened.

Statement 3 is correct in its structure and reversed in its content, which is why the answer is (a) and not a combination containing it. The division of the field ran the other way. Tilak's Indian Home Rule League, founded at the Bombay provincial conference at Belgaum in April 1916, worked Maharashtra excluding Bombay city, Karnataka, the Central Provinces and Berar. Besant's All India Home Rule League, founded in September 1916, took the rest of India, including Bombay city, and it was in Besant's half that the bulk of the branches lay. So it was Tilak whose activities were confined to a compact western and central bloc, and Besant who had everywhere else.

Why the others are wrong

• (b)2 and 3 — This option keeps the correct statement 2 and adds the reversed statement 3. The territorial division between the two Leagues is well documented and runs the opposite way: Tilak's League took Maharashtra outside Bombay city, Karnataka, and the Central Provinces and Berar, and Besant's League took the whole of the rest of India. The reversal is a favourite construction in questions on this movement precisely because candidates remember that there was a demarcation without remembering which leader had which share. The test to apply is that Besant's was the All India Home Rule League in name and in reach, with several hundred branches spread across the country, while Tilak's was a regional body based on his existing following in the west.
• (c)1 only — This option accepts only the constitutionalism of the movement and rejects the claim that the two Leagues cooperated. The rejection is usually founded on the true fact that the Leagues were deliberately kept as two separate organisations. But separateness was an arrangement to prevent friction between two sets of followers, not a refusal to work together, and in 1917 the two campaigned as allies: the agitation over Besant's internment in June of that year drew in Tilak's League and much of the Congress, and her release in September was its result. An option that treats organisational separation as evidence of non-cooperation reads the arrangement backwards.
• (d)3 only — This option rests the answer entirely on the one statement that is factually inverted, and in doing so it rejects the two that are sound. It would have the Home Rule Movement be neither constitutionalist nor cooperative while getting the territorial division wrong as well, which leaves no accurate proposition about the movement standing. It is worth noticing how such an option is built: an examiner takes the single statement that has been altered and offers it alone, so that a candidate who has spotted the alteration but not checked the others may still be drawn to a tidy-looking single-statement answer.

The Home Rule Movement of 1916-18 filled the space left by the Congress's inactivity after the split at Surat in 1907 and by the lull that followed the outbreak of war in 1914.

Two Leagues carried it. Tilak founded the Indian Home Rule League at the Bombay provincial conference at Belgaum in April 1916, after his release from Mandalay and his return to public life. Annie Besant, who had been campaigning for Home Rule through New India and Commonweal, founded the All India Home Rule League in September 1916 at Madras. They were kept separate to avoid friction between their followings and divided the country between them by agreement - Tilak taking Maharashtra outside Bombay city, Karnataka, and the Central Provinces and Berar, Besant taking the rest.

The demand was self-government within the Empire, on the model of the self-governing dominions, and the method was sustained propaganda directed at an audience wider than the Congress had ever reached: students, small-town professionals, traders. The Leagues built local branches, sold literature and held meetings on a scale the Congress's annual session model had never attempted, and in doing so they created the organisational habits that the Non-Cooperation Movement would use four years later.

The movement's peak was 1917. Besant's internment in June produced a national agitation, her release followed in September, and on 20 August 1917 the Secretary of State, Montagu, made the declaration in the Commons that the policy of His Majesty's Government was the gradual development of self-governing institutions with a view to the progressive realisation of responsible government in India. That declaration, and the reforms that followed it, drew much of the energy out of the Leagues, and both had faded by 1919-20.

Key facts

• Tilak founded the Indian Home Rule League at the Bombay provincial conference at Belgaum in April 1916; Annie Besant founded the All India Home Rule League at Madras in September 1916.
• The two Leagues were kept separate to avoid friction between their followings and divided the field by agreement: Tilak took Maharashtra excluding Bombay city, Karnataka, and the Central Provinces and Berar, and Besant took the rest of India.
• The demand was self-government within the Empire on the dominion model, pursued by constitutional propaganda - meetings, pamphlets, newspapers, reading rooms and the enrolment of members.
• Besant was interned by the Madras Government in June 1917; the national agitation that followed secured her release in September, and in December 1917 she was elected president of the Congress.
• On 20 August 1917 Montagu, the Secretary of State, declared in the House of Commons the policy of increasing association of Indians in administration and the progressive realisation of responsible government in India.

Common traps

• Remembering that the two Leagues divided the country without remembering which leader took which share; the division is regularly printed in reverse.
• Treating the two Leagues' formal separateness as proof that they did not cooperate, when the separation was designed to prevent friction between followers.
• Reading Tilak's militancy of language as evidence that his League endorsed violence; the Home Rule programme was constitutional throughout.
• Confusing the All India Home Rule League with the All India Kisan Sabha or with the later Congress organisation, all of which have similar-sounding names.
• Dating Besant's internment or her Congress presidency loosely; both fall in 1917, which is the year this item's second statement turns on.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Consider the following statements about the Home Rule Leagues : 1. Tilak's League was founded at Belgaum in April 1916 and worked in Maharashtra outside Bombay city, Karnataka, and the Central Provinces and Berar. 2. Annie Besant's League was founded at Madras in September 1916 and took the rest of India as its field. Which of the statements given above is/are correct ?

  • (a)1 only
  • (b)2 only
  • (c)Both 1 and 2
  • (d)Neither 1 nor 2

  Answer(c) Both 1 and 2 - the two Leagues were founded in April and September 1916 respectively and divided the country between them on exactly those lines, Tilak taking the western and central bloc and Besant the remainder.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The internment of Annie Besant by the Madras Government took place in which year, and with what immediate result ?

  • (a)1915; she left India
  • (b)1917; a national agitation secured her release the same year
  • (c)1918; the Home Rule Leagues were dissolved
  • (d)1919; she was deported under the Rowlatt Act

  Answer(b) 1917; a national agitation secured her release the same year - she was interned in June 1917 and released in September, and was elected president of the Congress in December of that year.