Who among the following founded the Independence for India League ?

Question

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

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.

Why the other options are wrong — (b) 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.  (c) 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.  (d) 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.

Concept: 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.

State PCS 2021 Q5 — History PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2021 Q5 — History PYQ with Answer