MPSC 2024 Prelims Paper-I · Question 14 of 100

Correct — option (1), Achieving Dominion Status. The Nehru Report of August 1928 was drawn up by a committee of the All Parties Conference under the chairmanship of Motilal Nehru, with Jawaharlal Nehru as its secretary, and it was India's first serious attempt to write its own constitution. The provocation was direct: the Simon Commission appointed in 1927 contained no Indian member, and the Secretary of State, Lord Birkenhead, had taunted Indian politicians with their inability to produce an agreed constitutional scheme of their own. The report answered that taunt. Its central recommendation on the form of government was dominion status — self-government of the kind Canada and Australia already enjoyed, within the British Empire — and not independence outside it. Around that core it proposed full responsible government, a federal structure with residuary powers at the centre, universal adult suffrage, linguistic provinces, and a declaration of fundamental rights; and on the communal question it rejected separate electorates in favour of joint electorates with reservation of seats for minorities where they were in a minority. The dominion-status recommendation is the one that made history inside the Congress. The younger leaders, Jawaharlal Nehru and Subhas Chandra Bose among them, refused to settle for it and formed the Independence for India League, and the Calcutta session of December 1928 papered over the split with a deadline: if the government did not accept the report by the end of 1929, the Congress would adopt complete independence as its goal. The government did not, and the Lahore session of December 1929 adopted Purna Swaraj. That sequence is why 'dominion status' is the Nehru Report's marker and 'complete independence' belongs to the session that followed it.

• (2)Creation of Two Nations — The Nehru Report moved in the opposite direction. Its most contested chapter was the one that rejected separate electorates and proposed joint electorates with reserved seats, a recommendation intended to reduce communal separation in the constitutional structure rather than to entrench it; the Muslim League's dissatisfaction with these provisions produced Jinnah's Fourteen Points in 1929. The two-nation formulation belongs to a different decade altogether, to the Muslim League's Lahore resolution of 1940. Dating this option correctly is enough to eliminate it without knowing anything else about the report.
• (3)Achieving Home Rule — Home Rule was the slogan of an earlier phase: the Home Rule Leagues founded in 1916 by Bal Gangadhar Tilak and by Annie Besant, agitating during the First World War for self-government within the Empire on the Irish model. By 1928 the vocabulary of Indian constitutional politics had moved on to dominion status and independence, and the Nehru Report is a drafted constitution rather than the programme of an agitation. The option tests whether a candidate can place a slogan in its decade, since 'home rule' and 'dominion status' both describe self-government within the Empire and are easy to blur together.
• (4)To gain complete Independence — This is the most attractive wrong answer, because complete independence is what the Congress did demand — but at Lahore in December 1929, more than a year after the Nehru Report, and precisely because the report's dominion-status formula had proved unacceptable to the younger leadership and had gone unanswered by the government. Reading Purna Swaraj back into the Nehru Report erases the very disagreement that makes the document historically interesting: Jawaharlal Nehru and Subhas Chandra Bose set up the Independence for India League because the report their own committee produced did not ask for independence.

Between 1927 and 1930 Indian constitutional politics moved from asking for self-government inside the Empire to demanding independence outside it, and the Nehru Report is the hinge. The report matters for three reasons. It is the first Indian-drafted constitution, so its contents — fundamental rights, adult suffrage, a federation, linguistic provinces — show what Indian opinion of the day thought a constitution should contain, and much of it reappears in the Constitution of 1950. It is the document on which the Congress and the Muslim League failed to agree, and that failure, followed by Jinnah's Fourteen Points, marks a decisive stage in the communal divergence. And its dominion-status recommendation split the Congress generationally, producing the Independence for India League, the Calcutta ultimatum of 1928, and finally the Purna Swaraj resolution at Lahore, the Independence Day pledge of 26 January 1930 and the Civil Disobedience Movement.

MPSC tests the constitutional-development chapter through documents and their single defining feature: the Nehru Report and dominion status, the Fourteen Points and separate electorates, the Lahore session and Purna Swaraj, the Government of India Act of 1935 and provincial autonomy, the Cripps proposals and the promise of dominion status after the war. The commission's usual trap is to offer the goal adopted immediately before or immediately after the document in question, as here with complete independence, so a candidate who has the chronology in order rather than merely the vocabulary will not be caught. Attaching a year to every document and a document to every year is what makes this section quick and safe. Because the Nehru Report is also the first Indian draft in which a declaration of fundamental rights appears, questions about it turn up in the polity section as well as in modern history, and the same document can therefore be asked either as a constitutional milestone or as an episode in the freedom struggle.

• The Nehru Report of August 1928 was prepared by a committee of the All Parties Conference chaired by Motilal Nehru, with Jawaharlal Nehru as secretary, in response to the all-British Simon Commission and Lord Birkenhead's challenge.
• Its central recommendation on the form of government was dominion status within the British Empire, not complete independence.
• It also proposed a declaration of fundamental rights, universal adult suffrage, linguistic provinces, a federal structure with residuary powers at the centre, and joint electorates with reserved seats in place of separate electorates.
• Jawaharlal Nehru and Subhas Chandra Bose rejected the dominion-status goal and formed the Independence for India League; the Calcutta session of 1928 set a deadline of the end of 1929 for the government to accept the report.
• The Lahore session of December 1929 adopted Purna Swaraj as the Congress goal, and 26 January 1930 was observed as Independence Day.

• Reading the Purna Swaraj demand of Lahore 1929 back into the Nehru Report of 1928, when the difference between them is the point of the episode
• Confusing dominion status with home rule; both mean self-government within the Empire but belong to different decades and different documents
• Assuming a communal settlement question must involve separate electorates in favour, when the Nehru Report proposed joint electorates with reserved seats

Constitutional-development questions in MPSC papers name a document and ask for its distinguishing recommendation, or name a recommendation and ask which document contained it. The options are drawn from adjacent milestones so that only chronology separates them, and the commission is fond of the Nehru Report in particular because its dominion-status recommendation sits one year before the Purna Swaraj resolution. Expect companion items on who chaired the committee, in which year it reported, and what it proposed on electorates, all of which are single facts that reward a documents-and-dates table.

No directly related past PYQ was found.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The committee of the All Parties Conference that produced the Nehru Report in 1928 was chaired by which leader ?

  • (a)Jawaharlal Nehru
  • (b)Motilal Nehru
  • (c)Tej Bahadur Sapru
  • (d)M. A. Jinnah

  Answer(b) Motilal Nehru — he chaired the committee, with his son Jawaharlal Nehru serving as its secretary. The report was the Indian answer to Lord Birkenhead's challenge that Indians could not produce an agreed constitution, and it recommended dominion status rather than complete independence.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Congress session that adopted Purna Swaraj, or complete independence, as the goal of the national movement was held at which place and in which year ?

  • (a)Calcutta, 1928
  • (b)Lahore, 1929
  • (c)Karachi, 1931
  • (d)Faizpur, 1936

  Answer(b) Lahore, 1929 — the session presided over by Jawaharlal Nehru adopted Purna Swaraj after the government failed to accept the Nehru Report by the deadline set at Calcutta in 1928, and 26 January 1930 was observed as Independence Day. The Karachi session of 1931 is remembered instead for the resolution on fundamental rights and economic policy.