After the split in the Indian National Congress in 1907, who made the statement 'National Congress Collapsed at Surat, this is our victory' ?

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Correct — option (4), Lord Minto. The Congress met at Surat in December 1907 and broke apart. The Moderates and the Extremists had been heading for a rupture since the Calcutta session of the previous year, and at Surat the quarrel over who should preside — the Moderates' nominee Rash Behari Ghosh against the Extremists' preference for Lala Lajpat Rai — and over the resolutions on swadeshi, boycott, national education and self-government ended in uproar, chairs thrown and the session abandoned. The Extremists walked out and stayed out of the Congress until the Lucknow session of 1916. The reaction of the Government of India to this was immediate and unembarrassed satisfaction: the Viceroy, Lord Minto, wrote to the Secretary of State for India, John Morley, that the collapse of the Congress at Surat was a great triumph for the government — the sentiment this question prints in the form 'National Congress Collapsed at Surat, this is our victory'. The remark matters because it is evidence of a strategy, not merely a mood. British policy in these years worked on two tracks at once: conciliate the Moderates with a measure of constitutional reform, and prosecute the Extremists. Both followed at once — Tilak was tried and transported to Mandalay in 1908, and the Indian Councils Act of 1909, the Morley-Minto reforms, extended the legislative councils while introducing separate electorates for Muslims. A Congress divided between a wing willing to accept such reforms and a wing outside the organisation altogether was exactly the position that made both moves easier, which is why the Viceroy could call an internal quarrel among Indian politicians a victory for his own side.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) Lord Curzon is eliminated by date. He was Viceroy from 1899 to 1905 and had left India more than two years before the Surat session of December 1907; his own great contribution to the situation was the partition of Bengal in 1905, which triggered the Swadeshi movement and, with it, the rise of the Extremist wing whose exclusion from the Congress the government later welcomed. Attributing the Surat remark to him confuses the man who created the conditions for the split with the man who was in office to enjoy its consequences.  (b) Tilak was the central figure on the Extremist side at Surat and the split was a defeat for him, not a victory — he was kept out of the Congress for the next nine years and was prosecuted for sedition within months, receiving six years' transportation to Mandalay in 1908. The phrase 'this is our victory' therefore cannot be his on the plain sense of the words, whatever one knows about the session. This option is a test of whether a candidate is reading the quotation as evidence of the speaker's standpoint rather than simply matching a famous name to a famous event.  (c) John Morley was Secretary of State for India from 1905 to 1910 and is inseparable from Minto in the standard narrative because of the Morley-Minto reforms of 1909, which is what makes this the best of the wrong answers. But he sat in London, not in India, and in the episode this question describes he was the recipient rather than the author — the Viceroy wrote to him about the Surat collapse. Choosing Morley usually means remembering the Minto-Morley pairing without remembering which end of the correspondence was in Calcutta and which in Whitehall.

Concept: The Surat split of 1907 is the pivot of Congress history between 1905 and 1916. Its causes were both temperamental and programmatic: the Moderates believed in constitutional agitation, petitions and faith in British justice, while the Extremists demanded swaraj, mass boycott and passive resistance and regarded prayer as futile. The Swadeshi movement launched against the partition of Bengal had already given the Extremists a national platform and an argument that agitation worked. After the split the Moderates retained the Congress machinery, the Extremists left it, and the government moved on both wings simultaneously — reform for one, prosecution for the other. Reunion came only at Lucknow in 1916, in the changed conditions of the First World War, and the same session produced the Congress-League pact. Minto's letter is the standard piece of evidence that the government read the split in exactly these terms.

State PCS 2024 Q11 — History PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2024 Q11 — History PYQ with Answer