Consider the following statements with reference to the Justice Party :
1. The Justice Party opposed Congress by calling it a Brahmin dominated organisation.
2. It claimed the same communal representa

Question

Consider the following statements with reference to the Justice Party :
1. The Justice Party opposed Congress by calling it a Brahmin dominated organisation.
2. It claimed the same communal representation for non-Brahmins as the Morley-Minto reforms had given to Muslims.
Which of the above statements is/are correct ?

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — A, both statements 1 and 2 are correct. The Justice Party — formally the South Indian Liberal Federation, founded on 20 November 1916 at Victoria Public Hall, Madras by C. Natesa Mudaliar, T. M. Nair and P. Theagaraya Chetty — was built precisely on the charge in statement 1: that the Indian National Congress in the Madras Presidency was a Brahmin-run body, with Brahmins holding most of the elected council seats and controlling the leading newspapers, even though they were a small minority of the population. Statement 2 is equally accurate. The party's founding document, the Non-Brahmin Manifesto of December 1916, called on non-Brahmins to press their claims against 'the virtual domination of the Brahmin caste', and the demand it framed was for exactly the kind of communal representation — separate electorates and reserved seats — that the Minto–Morley Reforms (Indian Councils Act, 1909) had conceded to Muslims. Since both statements stand, the answer is (a).

Why the other options are wrong — (b) Both statements are true. Anti-Brahmin criticism of the Congress was the party's founding plank, and the Non-Brahmin Manifesto's demand was explicitly modelled on the communal representation granted to Muslims in 1909.  (c) This concedes the anti-Brahmin critique but rejects the Morley–Minto parallel, which is in fact the better-documented half of the question: the non-Brahmin demand for separate electorates and reserved seats was consciously argued on the precedent of the 1909 Muslim concession, and reserved non-Brahmin seats duly appeared in the Madras arrangements under the Government of India Act, 1919.  (d) It rejects the more obvious of the two statements. Opposition to what it saw as Brahmin domination of the Congress was not incidental to the Justice Party — it was the reason the party existed and the theme of its newspaper Justice, from which its popular name comes.

Concept: The Justice Party grew out of the non-Brahmin movement of the Madras Presidency, where a numerically tiny Brahmin community held a hugely disproportionate share of education, government service and nationalist politics. Rather than fight the British, the party's strategy was to work the constitutional machinery: demand group representation, cooperate with the Montagu–Chelmsford reforms that the Congress was boycotting, and use office to redistribute posts. It swept the first elections held under dyarchy in November 1920, winning 63 of 98 elected seats, and its ministry is best remembered for the Communal Government Order reserving appointments in government service for non-Brahmin communities.

State PCS 2024 Q13 — History PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2024 Q13 — History PYQ with Answer