Dinshaw Wancha wrote a letter to Dadabhai Naoroji on 18th Nov. 1899 to convey the failure of Congress.
(a) Lay-off consistently in the work by Congress.
(b) Attitude of leaders towards politics as a l

Question

Dinshaw Wancha wrote a letter to Dadabhai Naoroji on 18th Nov. 1899 to convey the failure of Congress.
(a) Lay-off consistently in the work by Congress.
(b) Attitude of leaders towards politics as a leisure activity.
(c) We only bark do not bite.
(d) The only way to follow is revolutionary way.

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Correct — option (3), which takes statements (c), (b) and (a) together and leaves out statement (d). The writer is Dinshaw Edulji Wacha, whose name the paper prints as Dinshaw Wancha; he lived from 1844 to 1936, was one of the founding members of the Indian National Congress, served for years as its secretary, presided over it in 1901, and belonged with Pherozeshah Mehta and Dadabhai Naoroji to the Bombay group that ran the Moderate Congress. The man he is writing to, Dadabhai Naoroji, was the grand old man of the movement and by 1899 was in London running the British end of it. What passes between them is private, candid and deeply pessimistic, and the three complaints the paper reproduces are the standard content of Moderate self-criticism in that decade. Statement (a), that the work of the Congress was consistently laid off, points at the organisational hollowness of the body: it met for three days in December and effectively ceased to exist for the other three hundred and sixty-two, having no permanent machinery, no paid workers and no continuous programme between sessions. Statement (b), the attitude of leaders towards politics as a leisure activity, is the charge Wacha is recorded as making in his correspondence — that the movement lacked leaders willing to give themselves to it wholly, and that men of the stature of Pherozeshah Mehta held back from full commitment for fear of damage to their private careers. Statement (c), the bitter phrase that the Congress only barks and does not bite, is the summary of the other two: resolutions passed unanimously each December, forwarded to a government that ignored them, and nothing whatever done to compel attention. Statement (d), that the only way to follow is the revolutionary way, is the one that does not belong. Wacha was a constitutionalist to the end of a very long life. He sat in the Bombay Legislative Council, in the Imperial Legislative Council and in the Council of State, was knighted in 1917, presided over the Indian Merchants' Chamber in 1915, and headed the Western India Liberal Association from 1919 to 1927 — that is, when the Congress moved to mass non-cooperation he left it for the Liberals rather than move in the opposite direction. The whole point of his complaint was that constitutional agitation was being conducted feebly, not that it should be abandoned.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) This choice takes two of the three genuine complaints and drops statement (b), the charge that the leaders treated politics as a leisure pursuit. That is the one a candidate is most likely to hesitate over, because it reads as an accusation against Wacha's own colleagues and friends, and it feels too harsh for a letter from one founder-member to another. It was in fact exactly the sort of thing the Bombay Moderates said to each other in private, and Wacha is on record lamenting the absence of leaders prepared to devote themselves to the movement and observing that men held back to protect their professional careers. Statement (b) is also the load-bearing complaint of the three, since the laying-off of work and the barking without biting are both consequences of it.  (b) This choice pairs one true complaint with the one false one. Statement (d) puts a call for revolution in the mouth of the most thoroughly constitutionalist figure the early Congress produced — a man who sat in three successive official councils, was knighted in 1917, led the Indian Merchants' Chamber and ended his political life at the head of the Western India Liberal Association. The revolutionary current in Indian politics did exist by 1899 and grew considerably after 1905, but it grew among a different generation and in a different tradition, and its appearance here is a deliberate anachronism of temperament. Reading the writer's politics before reading the statements is the fastest way to see it.  (d) This is the inverse of the truth: it keeps the single statement that does not belong and discards the three that do. It is aimed at a candidate who has never heard of Wacha and assumes that a letter conveying the failure of the Congress must be a letter recommending something more drastic. The assumption is natural and wrong. Criticism from within the Moderate camp in the 1890s was almost always a demand for better constitutional work — more permanent organisation, more full-time workers, more pressure applied in London — rather than a demand to abandon constitutional methods. That distinction, between disappointment with the method's execution and rejection of the method, is what the question is really testing.

Concept: The 1890s were the flat years of the early Congress, and its own leaders knew it. The body had been founded in 1885 on the assumption that reasoned representation would win concessions from a government that shared British constitutional values; by the end of the decade, after the disappointment of the Indian Councils Act of 1892, the assumption looked thin. The structural problem was that the Congress was an annual event rather than an organisation. It assembled in December, passed resolutions, elected a president for the occasion and dispersed; there were no branches worth the name, no permanent staff and no programme of continuous work, and much of the money that was raised went to the British Committee in London and its journal India. Its leaders were successful barristers, editors and businessmen who gave the movement their spare hours. The critique voiced privately by men like Wacha in the 1890s is therefore the direct ancestor of two later developments: the Extremist demand after 1905 for methods that could apply real pressure, and the Gandhian transformation after 1919 of the Congress into a mass organisation with a permanent structure and full-time workers.

State PCS 2021 Q15 — History PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2021 Q15 — History PYQ with Answer