Who became the President of Indian National Congress when Subhash Chandra Bose resigned in 1939 ?

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Correct — B, Rajendra Prasad. Bose held the Congress presidency twice in succession: from 18 January 1938, when he presided at the Haripura session, and again from 29 January 1939, after he won a contested re-election against Pattabhi Sitaramayya, the candidate Gandhi had backed. The second term lasted three months. At Tripuri in March 1939 the Congress old guard forced a confrontation, and all but three of the fifteen members of the Working Committee resigned rather than serve under him — the three exceptions being Bose himself, his brother Sarat Bose, and Jawaharlal Nehru. Left without an executive, Bose resigned the presidency on 29 April 1939, and Dr RAJENDRA PRASAD was chosen to take his place and complete the 1939 term. Bose went on to organise the All India Forward Bloc on 22 June 1939 and was expelled from Congress office. Prasad was no stranger to the chair: he had been Congress President once before, at the Bombay session of October 1934, and would hold it a third time from 17 November 1947, when J. B. Kripalani resigned. He is also the Bihar name on this page — born at Ziradei in what is now Siwan district on 3 December 1884, Gandhi's principal lieutenant in the Champaran satyagraha of 1917, arrested at Sadaqat Ashram in Patna after the Quit India resolution of 8 August 1942 and jailed at Bankipur until 15 June 1945, President of the Constituent Assembly from 11 December 1946, and finally the first President of the Republic of India. Because exactly one of the three named leaders is correct, option (d) cannot stand: an escape option of that kind is available only when at least two of the other options are simultaneously true, and here Nehru and Azad both fail on their dates.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) Wrong year every time. Nehru presided over the Lahore session of 1929, at which the Purna Swaraj resolution was adopted, then over Lucknow in 1936 and Faizpur in 1937, and again in 1946. In 1939 he was one of only three Working Committee members who did not resign in the revolt against Bose — present at the centre of the crisis, but not the man who inherited the office.  (c) The sharpest trap, because it is off by a single year. Azad was elected Congress President at the RAMGARH session in 1940 — then in Bihar province, now in Jharkhand — and held the office continuously through the war years to 1946, the longest presidency of the period. A candidate who remembers 'Azad led the Congress in the early 1940s' will reach for him here, one term too early.  (d) This works only if two or more of (a), (b) and (c) are true at once, and here they are mutually exclusive — one person held the office at any moment, and after 29 April 1939 that person was Rajendra Prasad. Nehru's terms and Azad's term fall on either side of it, which is the arrangement that makes the option look tempting without making it correct.

Concept: The Congress presidency between 1938 and 1940 is the hinge of the party's internal politics on the eve of the Second World War, and it is examined more often than any other stretch of the office. Bose, elected at Haripura in 1938 with Gandhi's approval, stood again in January 1939 against Gandhi's wishes and won. The dispute was substantive as well as personal: Bose wanted an ultimatum to the British and was suspicious that the old guard would compromise on the federation scheme of the Government of India Act 1935, while the leadership objected to his readiness to loosen the commitment to non-violence and to concentrate authority in his own hands. The Tripuri session in March 1939 passed a resolution asking Bose to nominate a Working Committee in accordance with Gandhi's wishes; when he could not, he resigned. The immediate consequences were the Forward Bloc, formed in June 1939, and Azad's long war-time presidency from Ramgarh in 1940 — the presidency under which the Congress rejected the war effort, launched Individual Satyagraha in 1940 and passed the Quit India resolution in 1942.

State PCS 2025 Q41 — History PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2025 Q41 — History PYQ with Answer