MPSC 2021 Prelims Paper-I · Question 5 of 100

Correct — option (1), Jawaharlal Nehru and Subhash Chandra Bose. The Independence for India League was formed in 1928 by the younger and more impatient section of the Congress, with Nehru and Bose as its secretaries and S. Srinivasa Iyengar as its president. Its occasion was the Nehru Report. An All Parties Conference had asked a committee under Motilal Nehru to draft a constitution for India, in answer to Lord Birkenhead's taunt that Indians could never agree among themselves on one, and the report that committee produced in August 1928 took Dominion Status as its goal. To the men who had come of age politically in the Non-Cooperation years that was a retreat. Dominion Status meant remaining inside the Empire under the Crown; what they wanted was purna swaraj, complete independence, and they were unwilling to see the demand written down as anything less by the generation that had drafted the report. The League was the organised form of that dissent, and it is the reason Nehru and Bose appear together in it despite the divergence that would set them against each other a decade later — in 1928 both were young leaders in the same position relative to the same seniors, one of whom was Nehru's own father. The League did not survive long as a separate body, but the pressure it represented did its work. The Calcutta session of the Congress in December 1928 adopted the Nehru Report with a deadline attached, giving the government a year to concede Dominion Status; when the year expired the Lahore session of December 1929, presided over by Jawaharlal Nehru, resolved on complete independence, and 26 January 1930 was observed as the first Independence Day. The League is therefore best remembered not as an organisation with a record of its own but as the hinge between the Nehru Report and the purna swaraj resolution.

• (2)V.D. Savarkar — Vinayak Damodar Savarkar was not in a position to found any all-India political body in 1928. He had been moved off the Andamans to mainland jails years earlier and was released in January 1924 under conditions that confined him to Ratnagiri district and barred him from political activity, and those restrictions were not lifted until 1937, when he immediately became president of the Hindu Mahasabha. His politics were also of a different kind from the League's: the argument the League was pressing concerned the wording of the national demand, Dominion Status against complete independence, whereas Savarkar's project after 1937 was the Hindutva definition of the nation and the building of the Mahasabha as a rival to the Congress. He is offered here because he is the Maharashtra name a candidate reaches for by reflex when a Marathi paper asks who founded something.
• (3)B.S. Moonje and M.R. Jaykar — This pairs two real leaders of the period who were on the other side of the argument. B. S. Moonje of Nagpur was a Hindu Mahasabha leader who later founded the Bhonsala Military School at Nashik in 1937, and M. R. Jayakar was a Bombay lawyer who had been one of the Responsivists working with N. C. Kelkar for cooperation with the reformed councils, and who went on to the Federal Court. Both were of the senior generation, and both were associated with acceptance of, rather than revolt against, the constitutional path the Nehru Report represented; Jayakar in particular was among the men who worked to bring the Congress and the government together. Neither belongs to a body founded to reject Dominion Status as too little.
• (4)B.S. Moonje and Shamaprasad Mukherjee — This choice fails on chronology as well as on politics. Shyama Prasad Mookerjee was born in 1901, was still building an academic career in Calcutta in the late 1920s and became Vice-Chancellor of Calcutta University in the 1930s; his national political career belongs to the 1940s and after, and the party he founded, the Bharatiya Jana Sangh, dates from 1951. He could not have been a founder of an organisation of 1928 alongside Moonje, whose own politics ran through the Hindu Mahasabha rather than through the Congress left. Testing a name against the calendar is the fastest single filter on questions of this kind, and it disposes of this choice before any judgement about ideology is needed.

The years 1927 to 1930 are the years in which the Congress changed its stated goal. The trigger was the Simon Commission, appointed in November 1927 with no Indian member, which united Indian opinion in boycott and forced Indians to produce a constitution of their own. The All Parties Conference set up the Motilal Nehru committee, whose report of August 1928 proposed Dominion Status, a federation with residuary powers at the centre, joint electorates with reservation for minorities in specified circumstances, and a declaration of fundamental rights. The report split the Congress along a line of age and temperament rather than of ideology: the seniors regarded Dominion Status as the achievable demand, the juniors regarded it as a surrender of the objective. The Independence for India League was the institutional expression of the junior view. At Calcutta in December 1928 the two sides compromised on a one-year ultimatum; when it lapsed, Lahore in December 1929 declared purna swaraj, the tricolour was hoisted on the banks of the Ravi, and the Congress moved within months into the Civil Disobedience Movement launched by the Dandi March.

MPSC's modern-history questions frequently test whether a candidate can attach the right pair of names to a short-lived organisation, and the Independence for India League is a favourite because it is short-lived, because its name sounds like several other bodies, and because the pair of names it needs is a pair a candidate would not otherwise put together. The habit the question rewards is holding the sequence of 1927 to 1930 as a causal chain rather than as loose dates: Simon Commission, All Parties Conference, Nehru Report, the League as the protest against it, Calcutta's ultimatum, Lahore's purna swaraj resolution, the first Independence Day. Once that chain is in place, the League's founders follow from its purpose, since only the young leaders who objected to Dominion Status could have set it up. The commission also uses the Maharashtra reflex against candidates here — putting Savarkar, Moonje and Jayakar among the choices so that a Marathi-medium candidate scanning for a familiar regional name has three to fall into.

• The Independence for India League was formed in 1928 with Jawaharlal Nehru and Subhas Chandra Bose as secretaries and S. Srinivasa Iyengar as president, in protest at the Nehru Report's acceptance of Dominion Status.
• The Nehru Report was drafted by a committee under Motilal Nehru appointed by the All Parties Conference and submitted in August 1928; it proposed Dominion Status rather than complete independence.
• The Congress session at Calcutta in December 1928 accepted the Nehru Report but attached a one-year deadline for the government to concede Dominion Status.
• The Lahore session of December 1929, presided over by Jawaharlal Nehru, adopted purna swaraj as the goal, and 26 January 1930 was observed as the first Independence Day.
• Savarkar was under restriction at Ratnagiri from 1924 until 1937, when he became president of the Hindu Mahasabha; Shyama Prasad Mookerjee, born in 1901, founded the Bharatiya Jana Sangh only in 1951.

• Confusing the Independence for India League of 1928 with the Indian Independence League of the Second World War, the body Subhas Chandra Bose took over at Singapore in 1943
• Reaching for a Maharashtra name because the paper is a Maharashtra paper; three of the four choices here are built on that reflex
• Assuming Nehru and Bose were always opposed to each other; in 1928 they were allies against the same senior generation, and the split belongs to Tripuri in 1939
• Forgetting that the League had a president as well as its two secretaries, so that a question asking who presided over it needs S. Srinivasa Iyengar rather than either of the two better-known names

The commission asks about this cluster in three shapes. The first is direct attribution — who founded, who presided over, who drafted. The second is chronological ordering, where four events of the years between 1927 and 1930 must be put in sequence, and the League sits between the Nehru Report and the Calcutta session. The third is the consequence question, which asks what the Lahore session resolved or what date was observed as the first Independence Day. All three are answerable from a single well-drilled chain of events with the names attached at each link, which is why this stretch of the freedom struggle repays being learnt as a narrative rather than as a list.

No directly related past PYQ was found.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Independence for India League was formed in 1928 chiefly as a protest against which feature of the Nehru Report ?

  • (a)Its provision of joint electorates with reservation for minorities
  • (b)Its acceptance of Dominion Status as the goal instead of complete independence
  • (c)Its proposal for a federation with residuary powers at the centre
  • (d)Its declaration of fundamental rights

  Answer(b) Its acceptance of Dominion Status as the goal instead of complete independence — this was the point on which the younger leaders broke with the drafters. The other three features were all genuinely in the report and were contested by other groups, but the League's specific objection was to the wording of the national demand, and the objection carried the Congress to the purna swaraj resolution at Lahore the following year.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Who presided over the Independence for India League formed in 1928, with Jawaharlal Nehru and Subhas Chandra Bose serving as its secretaries ?

  • (a)Motilal Nehru
  • (b)S. Srinivasa Iyengar
  • (c)Madan Mohan Malaviya
  • (d)Tej Bahadur Sapru

  Answer(b) S. Srinivasa Iyengar — he was president of the League while Nehru and Bose were its secretaries. Motilal Nehru chaired the committee whose report the League was formed to protest against, and Tej Bahadur Sapru belonged to the Liberal tradition, which makes both of them natural but wrong answers for a body created to reject Dominion Status.