Which of the following objectives was outlined in the Nehru Report ?

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Correct — option (1), Achieving Dominion Status. The Nehru Report of August 1928 was drawn up by a committee of the All Parties Conference under the chairmanship of Motilal Nehru, with Jawaharlal Nehru as its secretary, and it was India's first serious attempt to write its own constitution. The provocation was direct: the Simon Commission appointed in 1927 contained no Indian member, and the Secretary of State, Lord Birkenhead, had taunted Indian politicians with their inability to produce an agreed constitutional scheme of their own. The report answered that taunt. Its central recommendation on the form of government was dominion status — self-government of the kind Canada and Australia already enjoyed, within the British Empire — and not independence outside it. Around that core it proposed full responsible government, a federal structure with residuary powers at the centre, universal adult suffrage, linguistic provinces, and a declaration of fundamental rights; and on the communal question it rejected separate electorates in favour of joint electorates with reservation of seats for minorities where they were in a minority. The dominion-status recommendation is the one that made history inside the Congress. The younger leaders, Jawaharlal Nehru and Subhas Chandra Bose among them, refused to settle for it and formed the Independence for India League, and the Calcutta session of December 1928 papered over the split with a deadline: if the government did not accept the report by the end of 1929, the Congress would adopt complete independence as its goal. The government did not, and the Lahore session of December 1929 adopted Purna Swaraj. That sequence is why 'dominion status' is the Nehru Report's marker and 'complete independence' belongs to the session that followed it.

Why the other options are wrong — (b) The Nehru Report moved in the opposite direction. Its most contested chapter was the one that rejected separate electorates and proposed joint electorates with reserved seats, a recommendation intended to reduce communal separation in the constitutional structure rather than to entrench it; the Muslim League's dissatisfaction with these provisions produced Jinnah's Fourteen Points in 1929. The two-nation formulation belongs to a different decade altogether, to the Muslim League's Lahore resolution of 1940. Dating this option correctly is enough to eliminate it without knowing anything else about the report.  (c) Home Rule was the slogan of an earlier phase: the Home Rule Leagues founded in 1916 by Bal Gangadhar Tilak and by Annie Besant, agitating during the First World War for self-government within the Empire on the Irish model. By 1928 the vocabulary of Indian constitutional politics had moved on to dominion status and independence, and the Nehru Report is a drafted constitution rather than the programme of an agitation. The option tests whether a candidate can place a slogan in its decade, since 'home rule' and 'dominion status' both describe self-government within the Empire and are easy to blur together.  (d) This is the most attractive wrong answer, because complete independence is what the Congress did demand — but at Lahore in December 1929, more than a year after the Nehru Report, and precisely because the report's dominion-status formula had proved unacceptable to the younger leadership and had gone unanswered by the government. Reading Purna Swaraj back into the Nehru Report erases the very disagreement that makes the document historically interesting: Jawaharlal Nehru and Subhas Chandra Bose set up the Independence for India League because the report their own committee produced did not ask for independence.

Concept: Between 1927 and 1930 Indian constitutional politics moved from asking for self-government inside the Empire to demanding independence outside it, and the Nehru Report is the hinge. The report matters for three reasons. It is the first Indian-drafted constitution, so its contents — fundamental rights, adult suffrage, a federation, linguistic provinces — show what Indian opinion of the day thought a constitution should contain, and much of it reappears in the Constitution of 1950. It is the document on which the Congress and the Muslim League failed to agree, and that failure, followed by Jinnah's Fourteen Points, marks a decisive stage in the communal divergence. And its dominion-status recommendation split the Congress generationally, producing the Independence for India League, the Calcutta ultimatum of 1928, and finally the Purna Swaraj resolution at Lahore, the Independence Day pledge of 26 January 1930 and the Civil Disobedience Movement.

State PCS 2024 Q14 — History PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2024 Q14 — History PYQ with Answer