The political strategy Struggle -Truce - Struggle or S-T-S came into prominence with a call for

Question

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — C, Khilafat issue. Struggle–Truce–Struggle is Bipan Chandra's name for the Gandhian strategy of the national movement, and in India's Struggle for Independence he defines it as a strategy in which 'a phase of vigorous extra-legal mass movement and open confrontation with colonial authority was followed by a phase during which direct confrontation was withdrawn, and political concessions, if any, wrested from the colonial regime were worked and shown to be inadequate' — the quieter phase being used for ideological work among the masses so that forces could be gathered 'for another mass movement at a higher level.' For that alternation to come into prominence there must be a first extra-legal mass movement, and that is Non-Cooperation, which was called not by the Congress but over the Khilafat wrong. The chain of dates is well documented. Gandhi attended the Khilafat Conference of November 1919 as a special invitee; in February 1920 he suggested to the Khilafat Committee that it adopt a programme of non-violent non-cooperation; on 9 June 1920 the Khilafat Committee, meeting at Allahabad, unanimously accepted that suggestion and asked Gandhi to lead the movement; he gave the Viceroy notice in his letter of 22 June 1920, asserting the right 'from time immemorial of the subject to refuse to assist a ruler who misrules'; and the movement was launched formally on 1 August 1920, the day Tilak died. The Congress followed rather than led — its special session at Calcutta in September 1920 adopted non-cooperation as its own, and the annual session at Nagpur that December closed the argument. The rest of the cycle then ran exactly as the model predicts: the struggle phase ended when Gandhi withdrew the movement on 12 February 1922, after the violence at Chauri Chaura on 5 February; the truce phase filled the years 1922–29 with Swarajist council entry, the Simon boycott and the Nehru Report; and the second struggle phase opened with Civil Disobedience in 1930. One honest caveat: 'came into prominence' is the setter's phrase and not a historian's, so what is really being asked is which call opened the first S-T-S cycle, and on the reading both derivations took that is the Khilafat–Non-Cooperation call of 1920. Be aware that Chandra never writes 'came into prominence', and the one place he sets S-T-S beside a 'call' is his discussion of Quit India — so option (a) is a live alternative rather than a simple trap, and this answer is ours rather than his.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) The strongest trap, because Quit India genuinely belongs to this story — but at the far end of it. Chandra writes that 'the culmination of this strategy of S-T-S came with a call for Quit India and the achievement of independence.' Culmination is the opposite of coming into prominence: August 1942 is twenty-two years after the alternation began, and the 'Do or Die' pledge contemplated no truce phase at all.  (b) The Swadeshi and Boycott movement of 1905–08, against Curzon's partition of Bengal, was a mass movement but a pre-Gandhian one — Gandhi returned to India only in 1915 and led no all-India campaign before 1920. It has no planned withdrawal and no truce phase to alternate with; it ebbed under repression and the Surat split of 1907, which is a collapse, not a strategy.  (d) The 1927–28 Simon boycott sits inside the first truce phase rather than at the strategy's origin. By then the alternation was already five years old: Non-Cooperation had been withdrawn in February 1922 and Congressmen were working the councils through the Swaraj Party. The boycott is an illustration of the intense agitational work Chandra says fills a truce phase — the strategy in operation, not the call that established it.

Concept: Struggle–Truce–Struggle is a piece of historians' vocabulary rather than a slogan any leader used, and it belongs to the Marxist-nationalist school associated with Bipan Chandra. Its claim is that the Gandhian national movement was not one continuous agitation but a deliberate alternation: an extra-legal mass phase in which laws are broken, followed by a 'passive' phase in which confrontation is suspended, whatever reforms the Raj has conceded are worked and exposed as inadequate, and cadres are recruited and trained inside the legal framework — then a fresh mass phase at a higher level. Chandra insists the process was 'an upward spiralling one', with each stage an advance on the last, and that the passive phases were political phases too, not surrender: as Gandhi put it, 'suspension of civil disobedience does not mean suspension of war.' The model exists partly because it was contested. Jawaharlal Nehru rejected it in the mid-1930s and counterposed what Chandra abbreviates as S-V — struggle until victory — arguing that freedom could not be won 'bit by bit' and that any withdrawal meant 'some form of compromise with imperialism.'

State PCS 2024 Q101 — History PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2024 Q101 — History PYQ with Answer