MPSC 2024 Prelims Paper-I · Question 11 of 100

Correct — option (4), Lord Minto. The Congress met at Surat in December 1907 and broke apart. The Moderates and the Extremists had been heading for a rupture since the Calcutta session of the previous year, and at Surat the quarrel over who should preside — the Moderates' nominee Rash Behari Ghosh against the Extremists' preference for Lala Lajpat Rai — and over the resolutions on swadeshi, boycott, national education and self-government ended in uproar, chairs thrown and the session abandoned. The Extremists walked out and stayed out of the Congress until the Lucknow session of 1916. The reaction of the Government of India to this was immediate and unembarrassed satisfaction: the Viceroy, Lord Minto, wrote to the Secretary of State for India, John Morley, that the collapse of the Congress at Surat was a great triumph for the government — the sentiment this question prints in the form 'National Congress Collapsed at Surat, this is our victory'. The remark matters because it is evidence of a strategy, not merely a mood. British policy in these years worked on two tracks at once: conciliate the Moderates with a measure of constitutional reform, and prosecute the Extremists. Both followed at once — Tilak was tried and transported to Mandalay in 1908, and the Indian Councils Act of 1909, the Morley-Minto reforms, extended the legislative councils while introducing separate electorates for Muslims. A Congress divided between a wing willing to accept such reforms and a wing outside the organisation altogether was exactly the position that made both moves easier, which is why the Viceroy could call an internal quarrel among Indian politicians a victory for his own side.

• (1)Lord Curzon — Lord Curzon is eliminated by date. He was Viceroy from 1899 to 1905 and had left India more than two years before the Surat session of December 1907; his own great contribution to the situation was the partition of Bengal in 1905, which triggered the Swadeshi movement and, with it, the rise of the Extremist wing whose exclusion from the Congress the government later welcomed. Attributing the Surat remark to him confuses the man who created the conditions for the split with the man who was in office to enjoy its consequences.
• (2)Lokmanya Tilak — Tilak was the central figure on the Extremist side at Surat and the split was a defeat for him, not a victory — he was kept out of the Congress for the next nine years and was prosecuted for sedition within months, receiving six years' transportation to Mandalay in 1908. The phrase 'this is our victory' therefore cannot be his on the plain sense of the words, whatever one knows about the session. This option is a test of whether a candidate is reading the quotation as evidence of the speaker's standpoint rather than simply matching a famous name to a famous event.
• (3)Lord Morley — John Morley was Secretary of State for India from 1905 to 1910 and is inseparable from Minto in the standard narrative because of the Morley-Minto reforms of 1909, which is what makes this the best of the wrong answers. But he sat in London, not in India, and in the episode this question describes he was the recipient rather than the author — the Viceroy wrote to him about the Surat collapse. Choosing Morley usually means remembering the Minto-Morley pairing without remembering which end of the correspondence was in Calcutta and which in Whitehall.

The Surat split of 1907 is the pivot of Congress history between 1905 and 1916. Its causes were both temperamental and programmatic: the Moderates believed in constitutional agitation, petitions and faith in British justice, while the Extremists demanded swaraj, mass boycott and passive resistance and regarded prayer as futile. The Swadeshi movement launched against the partition of Bengal had already given the Extremists a national platform and an argument that agitation worked. After the split the Moderates retained the Congress machinery, the Extremists left it, and the government moved on both wings simultaneously — reform for one, prosecution for the other. Reunion came only at Lucknow in 1916, in the changed conditions of the First World War, and the same session produced the Congress-League pact. Minto's letter is the standard piece of evidence that the government read the split in exactly these terms.

MPSC and other commissions like quotation-attribution questions because they can be answered by reasoning as well as by recall, and this is a good example: the words 'this is our victory' identify the speaker as someone on the government's side, which removes an Indian leader from consideration at once, and the date December 1907 removes a Viceroy who had already gone home. The two names remaining are the Viceroy and the Secretary of State, and only knowledge of who was in India settles it. Preparation for this family of questions should pair each Viceroy with his tenure and the two or three events that fell inside it, because MPSC uses tenure mismatches as its favourite eliminator in colonial-period options. Note also that the Surat split is the hinge for several other examinable facts of 1906 to 1909 — the founding of the Muslim League in 1906 just before it, Tilak's Mandalay sentence in 1908 and the separate electorates of 1909 just after — so a question naming any one of them is usually testing whether the candidate holds the sequence.

• The Indian National Congress split at its Surat session in December 1907 over the choice of president and over the resolutions on swadeshi, boycott, national education and self-government.
• Lord Minto was Viceroy of India from 1905 to 1910 and wrote to the Secretary of State, John Morley, that the collapse of the Congress at Surat was a triumph for the government.
• The Extremists remained outside the Congress from 1907 until the Lucknow session of 1916, which also produced the Congress-League pact.
• Tilak was prosecuted for sedition and transported to Mandalay for six years in 1908, illustrating the repression side of the government's twin-track policy.
• The Indian Councils Act of 1909, the Morley-Minto reforms, enlarged the legislative councils and introduced separate electorates for Muslims.

• Attributing a government-side remark to an Indian leader; the words 'our victory' place the speaker on the British side of the argument
• Confusing Morley, the Secretary of State in London, with Minto, the Viceroy in India, because their names are joined in the 1909 reforms
• Forgetting that Curzon's viceroyalty ended in 1905, two years before the Surat session

Quotation questions in MPSC papers give a remark and four names, usually mixing British officials with Indian leaders so that the standpoint expressed in the quotation itself does part of the elimination. The residual difficulty is normally a pair of British officials whose names are habitually spoken together — Morley and Minto here, Montagu and Chelmsford elsewhere — where the candidate has to know which of the two held office in India. Expect related items asking who described a measure or an event in a particular phrase, and prepare by keeping a short list of the famous remarks of the colonial period against their authors and dates.

No directly related past PYQ was found.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  At the Surat session of 1907, the Moderates' nominee for the presidency of the Congress, whose election the Extremists opposed, was which of the following ?

  • (a)Rash Behari Ghosh
  • (b)Lala Lajpat Rai
  • (c)Dadabhai Naoroji
  • (d)Gopal Krishna Gokhale

  Answer(a) Rash Behari Ghosh — the Moderates put him forward for the presidency at Surat while the Extremists pressed for Lala Lajpat Rai, and the dispute over the chair was one of the immediate causes of the breakdown of the session. Dadabhai Naoroji had presided at Calcutta in 1906, the session at which the two wings had already come close to a rupture.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Extremists, who left the Congress after the Surat split of 1907, returned to it at which session ?

  • (a)Lucknow, 1916
  • (b)Amritsar, 1919
  • (c)Nagpur, 1920
  • (d)Calcutta, 1906

  Answer(a) Lucknow, 1916 — the two wings of the Congress were reunited at the Lucknow session, which is also remembered for the pact concluded there between the Congress and the Muslim League. The Extremists had been outside the organisation for the nine years since Surat.