On 11th April 1942, a resolution was passed by the Congress Working Committee rejecting ______________.

Question

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — option (1), the Cripps Proposal. Sir Stafford Cripps arrived in India in March 1942 carrying a British War Cabinet draft declaration: Dominion Status for India after the war, a constitution-making body to be elected once the war ended, and — critically — a clause letting any province, and any princely state, opt out of the new union altogether. The Congress Working Committee, meeting through late March and early April 1942, found the offer unacceptable on several counts at once: independence was deferred rather than granted, the princely states' rulers rather than their people would decide those states' future, the opt-out clause opened the door to partition, and above all there was no immediate transfer of real power, especially over defence, while the war was actually being fought. The Committee's considered rejection was drafted and handed to Cripps on 2 April, but it was withheld from publication while last efforts at negotiation continued; when those efforts failed, the resolution was released to the press on 11 April 1942, and that publication date is the one this question asks for. Gandhi's verdict on the whole offer — a 'post-dated cheque on a crashing bank' — became the phrase by which the episode is remembered.

Why the other options are wrong — (b) The Aligarh Scheme is a real but different proposal from a different source and a different moment: published in August 1939 by Professor Syed Zafarul Hasan and Dr Muhammad Afzal Husain Qadri of Aligarh Muslim University, it argued for India's Muslims as a separate nation and proposed carving out independent Muslim-majority states, part of the same cluster of partition schemes that fed into the Muslim League's Lahore Resolution of March 1940. It came from a section of Muslim League-aligned opinion, not from the British government, and the Congress had no occasion to 'reject' it by a formal resolution in April 1942 — it simply is not the Cripps offer.  (c) If this refers to Lord Curzon's most famous intervention, the 1905 Partition of Bengal, it belongs to an entirely different decade and an entirely different kind of decision — an administrative reorganisation of a province carried out by a sitting Viceroy, not a wartime constitutional offer negotiated with Congress by a Cabinet minister. There is a 37-year gap between Curzon's viceroyalty (which ended in 1905) and the Cripps Mission of 1942, and no Congress resolution of April 1942 was rejecting a Curzon-era measure.  (d) Like the Aligarh Scheme, this belongs to the family of rival communal-settlement and partition proposals put forward by individual Muslim leaders in 1939–40 in the run-up to the Lahore Resolution, rather than to the British government's wartime offer of March 1942. It is a proposal from within Indian political opinion, argued and debated among Indians, and not the document the Cripps Mission carried or the one the Working Committee's 11 April resolution addressed.

Concept: The Cripps Mission was Britain's attempt to secure Indian political cooperation for the war effort by offering constitutional change after the war rather than during it. Its central mechanism — Dominion Status deferred to a post-war constituent body, with any province or princely state free to stay out of the new union — was designed to satisfy competing claims (Congress's demand for self-government, the princely states' anxieties, and the Muslim League's demand for safeguards) without actually transferring power while the war was on. That structure is exactly what made it unacceptable to Congress, the Muslim League and almost every other Indian political current, each for its own reasons.

State PCS 2025 Q4 — History PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2025 Q4 — History PYQ with Answer