Who prepared "C.R. Formula" to remove the political deadlock between Muslim League and Indian National Congress ?

Question

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Correct — B, Rajgopalachari. The "C.R. Formula" (also called the Rajaji Formula) was drawn up in 1944 by Chakravarti Rajagopalachari — the 'C.R.' is his own initials. He set it out in a pamphlet titled 'The Way Out', and it was the first serious attempt from the Congress side to buy the Muslim League's cooperation by conceding the principle of separation under strict conditions: the League would endorse the demand for independence and join a provisional interim government; after the war a commission would demarcate the contiguous districts of the north-west and north-east where Muslims were in an absolute majority; a plebiscite of all the adult inhabitants of those areas would then decide the question of separation; in the event of separation there would be mutual agreements on defence, commerce and communications; any transfer of population would be strictly voluntary; and the whole scheme would take effect only if Britain transferred full power to India. Gandhi accepted it as a basis for discussion, and it became the agenda of the Gandhi–Jinnah talks at Bombay in September 1944 — which collapsed, because Jinnah wanted the plebiscite confined to Muslims alone and a sovereign Pakistan conceded outright, not a conditional one.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) No Congress–League settlement formula carries Jawaharlal Nehru's name. The document students confuse this with is the Nehru Report of 1928, and even that was the work of a committee chaired by his father, Motilal Nehru. Jawaharlal was in fact in jail for much of 1942–45 and was not a party to the 1944 initiative.  (c) This is the trap the question is built on: Chittaranjan Das is himself known as 'C.R. Das', so the initials look like a perfect fit. But Deshbandhu C.R. Das died in June 1925, nineteen years before the formula was written. His contribution to Hindu–Muslim settlement was the Bengal Pact of 1923, and his best-known political act was founding the Swaraj Party with Motilal Nehru in the same year.  (d) V.P. Menon was a civil servant, not a Congress negotiator — Reforms Commissioner and Constitutional Adviser to the last Viceroys. His famous plan is the one he drafted in 1947 that became the Mountbatten Plan of 3 June 1947; he later served as Secretary of the States Department under Sardar Patel and wrote 'The Story of the Integration of the Indian States'. He had no hand in the 1944 formula.

Concept: By 1944 the freedom movement was stuck in a two-sided deadlock: the British would not transfer power without a Congress–League agreement, and the League would not agree without Pakistan. Rajagopalachari — who had already broken with the Congress over the Quit India line and argued that the League's demand had to be engaged with rather than dismissed — tried to convert an absolute demand into a conditional, procedural one. His formula never conceded 'Pakistan' as a principle; it conceded a plebiscite in Muslim-majority districts, to be held only after independence was won and only after the League had first helped win it. The distinction between conceding a principle and conceding a procedure is the heart of the topic.

State PCS 2019 Q61 — History PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2019 Q61 — History PYQ with Answer