MPSC 2023 Prelims Paper-I · Question 10 of 100

Correct — option (4). The one thing that is unmistakably particular to the Sabarmati Pact is the two-man committee of Pandit Motilal Nehru and M. R. Jayakar, and option (4) is the only choice that names it. The pact was concluded at the Sabarmati Ashram at Ahmedabad on 21 April 1926 and was signed by Sarojini Naidu, Motilal Nehru, Lala Lajpat Rai, M. R. Jayakar, N. C. Kelkar, B. S. Moonje, M. S. Aney, D. V. Gokhale and G. A. Ogale — a list that shows at once what it was for, since it puts the leaders of the Swaraj Party and the leaders of the responsive-cooperation group on the same sheet of paper. After the death of C. R. Das in 1925 the Swarajists had divided over whether to keep obstructing the reformed councils or to accept office and work them; the pact was the attempt to hold the two wings together before the elections of that year. Its operative clause turned on whether ministers were given 'power, responsibility and initiative necessary for the effective discharge of their duties'; that question was to be settled in the first instance by the Congress members of the provincial legislative council concerned, subject to confirmation by the committee of Motilal Nehru and Jayakar, and that committee was also to decide all disputes in the Congress provinces of Bombay, Maharashtra, Bihar and the Central Provinces. So the decision the pact actually recorded was to constitute the Nehru-Jayakar committee as the arbiter, which is what option (4) is pointing at, even though the option's own wording about the members of the Central Legislature states the committee's remit more loosely than the pact's text does. The arrangement did not survive: the signatories fell out over its interpretation within a fortnight and the pact collapsed on 4 May 1926, after which the responsivists went to the polls separately.

• (1)A competitive co-operative party should be established. — This option is a trap built out of a translation. 'Responsive cooperation', the policy of entering the councils and accepting office in order to work the reforms, is rendered in Marathi and Hindi by a phrase that translated back word for word gives something very like the 'competitive co-operative' of this option, so a candidate who recognises the phrase may take it for the pact's own resolution. The tendency it names is real and is exactly what the pact was about — but the pact's purpose was to reconcile the responsivists with the Swarajists inside one organisation, not to resolve that a separate party be founded. The responsivists organised separately only after the agreement broke down in May 1926, so this option describes the pact's failure rather than its decision.
• (2)Students should not be involved in politics. — Keeping students out of politics is a proposition that belongs to the debates around the non-cooperation and boycott movements, where the withdrawal of students from government schools and colleges was one of the programme's most contested items, and it recurs in the reflections that followed the movement's suspension. It has no place in an agreement about whether Congressmen should accept ministerial office under dyarchy. The option is included because it sounds like the sort of high-minded resolution a Gandhian meeting at Sabarmati might pass, and because the ashram setting invites that association. The subject matter of the pact, however, was council entry and the arbitration of disputes about it.
• (3)There should be no discrimination among lower caste workers and a team of 50 volunteers should be formed and Hindu Muslim unity should be maintained. — The contents of this option — no discrimination among lower-caste workers, the enrolment of a body of volunteers, the maintenance of Hindu-Muslim unity — read like the constructive-programme language of the non-cooperation years, when removal of untouchability, communal unity and volunteer enrolment were standing items of Congress resolutions. That is precisely why it is offered here: it is the most Gandhian-sounding of the four options, and the pact carries the name of Gandhi's own ashram. But the Sabarmati Pact of 1926 was a negotiation between council-entry factions, conducted by legislators, about the conditions under which office might be accepted, and none of these constructive-programme items formed part of it.

The Sabarmati Pact belongs to the internal history of the Swaraj Party. The party had been founded at the end of 1922 by C. R. Das and Motilal Nehru to contest elections to the reformed councils and wreck the dyarchy from within, against the no-changers who wanted to stay with the constructive programme. Once inside, the Swarajists faced the question their own strategy raised: what to do when the government offered ministerial office. One group, led in Maharashtra by N. C. Kelkar, M. R. Jayakar, B. S. Moonje and M. S. Aney, argued for 'responsive cooperation' — accept office and use it, responding to the government's own responsiveness — while the orthodox Swarajists under Motilal Nehru held to obstruction. The death of C. R. Das in June 1925 removed the one leader who could hold both together. The pact of 21 April 1926, mediated in an atmosphere of imminent elections and signed at Gandhi's ashram at Sabarmati, tried to define an objective test for when office might be accepted and to hand the arbitration of that test to a committee of Motilal Nehru and Jayakar. It failed within a fortnight, and the split it was meant to prevent went ahead.

MPSC's modern-history section regularly asks about pacts, and the reason they make good questions is that each pact is defined by one specific provision that no other pact shares — the Lucknow pact by separate electorates and weightage, the Gandhi-Irwin pact by the withdrawal of ordinances and the release of prisoners, the Poona pact by reserved seats inside joint electorates, and the Sabarmati pact by the Nehru-Jayakar committee. The productive method with a question of this shape is therefore to look for the option carrying a name or a number that could belong to nothing else, rather than to weigh the options for general plausibility, because the Commission's distractors are usually built from true material borrowed from a neighbouring episode. Here three of the four options describe positions that were genuinely argued somewhere in the nationalist movement, and only the personnel of the committee ties an option to this particular agreement. It is also worth noting that the English stem of this question is ungrammatical as printed, and that the fourth option is a noun phrase with no verb; neither affects the sense.

• The Sabarmati Pact was concluded at the Sabarmati Ashram, Ahmedabad, on 21 April 1926, and signed by Sarojini Naidu, Motilal Nehru, Lala Lajpat Rai, M. R. Jayakar, N. C. Kelkar, B. S. Moonje, M. S. Aney, D. V. Gokhale and G. A. Ogale.
• Its test of a satisfactory government response was whether ministers received the 'power, responsibility and initiative necessary for the effective discharge of their duties', decided first by the Congress members of the provincial legislative council concerned.
• That finding was subject to confirmation by a committee of Pandit Motilal Nehru and M. R. Jayakar, which was also to decide all disputes in the Congress provinces of Bombay, Maharashtra, Bihar and the Central Provinces.
• The pact was an attempt to reconcile the orthodox Swarajists with the responsive-cooperation group after the death of C. R. Das in 1925 had removed the leader who held both together.
• It collapsed on 4 May 1926, within a fortnight of signature, over irreconcilable differences of interpretation, and the responsivists thereafter organised separately.

• Choosing the option that sounds most Gandhian because the pact carries the name of Gandhi's ashram; the agreement was about council entry, not about the constructive programme
• Reading 'competitive co-operative' as a garbled form of responsive cooperation and concluding that the pact resolved to found such a party, when it was trying to prevent a split
• Dating the pact to the Civil Disobedience years; it belongs to April 1926, between the death of C. R. Das and the elections of that year
• Learning pacts as general reconciliations rather than by the one clause unique to each, which is what the options are usually built to test

Pacts, agreements and party splits are staple MPSC material, and the Commission's preferred format is a single-line stem naming the agreement with four possible provisions beneath it. Because the distractors are drawn from other episodes of the same movement, recognition of a plausible-sounding nationalist policy is worthless; what decides the question is the unique marker — a named committee, a number of reserved seats, a specific electorate arrangement. Maharashtra's leaders figure heavily in this particular corner of the syllabus, since Kelkar, Jayakar, Moonje and Aney were all central to the responsive-cooperation group, so MPSC returns to it more often than an all-India paper would. Expect the same episode to be asked from other angles as well: who founded the Swaraj Party and when, what the no-changers wanted, and which leader's death in 1925 precipitated the split.

No directly related past PYQ was found.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Sabarmati Pact of April 1926 provided that disputes arising under it were to be decided by a committee consisting of which two leaders ?

  • (a)Motilal Nehru and M. R. Jayakar
  • (b)Lala Lajpat Rai and N. C. Kelkar
  • (c)Sarojini Naidu and B. S. Moonje
  • (d)M. S. Aney and Tej Bahadur Sapru

  Answer(a) Motilal Nehru and M. R. Jayakar — the pact made their two-man committee the arbiter of whether ministers had been given adequate power and responsibility, and of disputes in the Congress provinces of Bombay, Maharashtra, Bihar and the Central Provinces. Lajpat Rai, Naidu, Kelkar, Moonje and Aney were among the signatories but did not sit on that committee.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The split in the Swaraj Party between the orthodox Swarajists and the advocates of responsive cooperation followed the death in 1925 of which leader ?

  • (a)Gopal Krishna Gokhale
  • (b)C. R. Das
  • (c)Lala Lajpat Rai
  • (d)Motilal Nehru

  Answer(b) C. R. Das — he had founded the Swaraj Party with Motilal Nehru at the end of 1922, and his death in June 1925 removed the one leader able to hold the obstructionists and the responsive-cooperation group together. The Sabarmati Pact of April 1926 was an attempt to repair that division, and it collapsed within a fortnight of being signed.