Who led the Champaran Satyagraha in 1917 ?

Question

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Correct — B, Mahatma Gandhi. The Champaran Satyagraha of 1917, in what is now the West and East Champaran districts of north Bihar, was Gandhi's first satyagraha on Indian soil, and it is the event that turns him from a returned South African lawyer into a national leader. He was brought there by Raj Kumar Shukla, a cultivator of Champaran who had pursued him since the Lucknow session of the Congress in 1916 with an account of the tinkathia system — under which tenants of the indigo planters were obliged to plant three kathas in every twenty of their holding with indigo for the factory, and were then charged a lump sum called tawan when the planters wanted to be released from the obligation as synthetic dye destroyed the market. Gandhi reached the district in April 1917, was served with an order to leave under the district magistrate's powers, refused, and offered to accept the penalty — the act that made the case famous, since the government withdrew the prosecution rather than jail him. He then took evidence from thousands of tenants. The government's response was to negotiate: Gandhi held interviews with the Lieutenant-Governor of Bihar and Orissa and his Executive Council at Ranchi from 4 to 6 June 1917, a resolution was passed on 10 June and published on 12 June appointing a Champaran Agrarian Enquiry Committee, and Gandhi joined it as a member — on his own three conditions, one of which was the government's acknowledgement that by sitting on it he did not cease to be the ryots' advocate. The Committee sat under F. G. Sly, held its first public sitting at Bettiah on 17 July 1917, heard Raj Kumar Shukla for the tenants on 19 July, and produced a settlement under which the planters refunded a quarter of the tawan they had taken. It was given legal effect by the Champaran Agrarian Act, 1918. No other name on this list is connected with any of it.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) The strongest distractor, because Patel did lead peasant satyagrahas — just not this one, and not in this province. He led the Kheda satyagraha in Gujarat in 1918, when the administration refused to suspend land revenue in a year of crop failure, and the Bardoli satyagraha of 1928 against a steep revenue enhancement, which earned him the title Sardar. Both are Gujarat, both are revenue disputes with the government, and neither is Champaran, which was a dispute with private European planters.  (c) Chronologically impossible. In 1917 Bose was a student; he went to Cambridge, passed the Indian Civil Service examination in 1920 and resigned it, and entered politics under C. R. Das in Calcutta only from 1921. His leadership belongs to the 1930s and 1940s — Congress President in 1938 and 1939, the Forward Bloc, and the Indian National Army.  (d) In 1917 Nehru was a young barrister recently returned from England and active in the Home Rule League, not a leader of any agrarian movement. His own association with peasant agitation begins in 1920, when he toured the Awadh countryside during the Kisan Sabha movement of Rae Bareli and Pratapgarh — three years later and several hundred kilometres to the west.

Concept: Champaran matters for three reasons beyond Gandhi's personal biography. First, it was the moment peasant grievance was joined to the national movement — until then the Congress had been a body of professionals passing resolutions about councils and services, and Champaran showed that a mass constituency existed in the villages. Second, it established the method: go to the place, gather evidence in detail, refuse to leave when ordered out, accept the legal penalty rather than resist, and negotiate from the moral position that creates. Third, it built the Bihar leadership of the next thirty years. Rajendra Prasad, Brajkishore Prasad, Anugrah Narayan Sinha, Ramnavmi Prasad and Mazharul Haque worked with Gandhi in Champaran, as did J. B. Kripalani and Mahadev Desai; every one of them became a figure of the freedom struggle, and two of them — Rajendra Prasad as India's first President and Sri Krishna Sinha as Bihar's first Chief Minister — went on to run the country and the State.

State PCS 2025 Q12 — History PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2025 Q12 — History PYQ with Answer