UPPSC 2019 Prelims GS Paper-I · Question 61 of 150

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.

• (a)Jawaharlal Nehru — 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)Chittaranjan Das — 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 — 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.

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.

The trap here is purely the initials. 'C.R.' points a careless reader straight at C.R. Das (Chittaranjan Das), and the option is deliberately printed by his full name to make the connection feel like a discovery. The date is the way out: C.R. Das died in 1925, so he could not have addressed a deadlock that only became acute after the Lahore Resolution of 1940. Fix in your mind that the formula belongs to 1944 and the year alone eliminates both Das and, in practice, V.P. Menon, whose moment came in 1947.

• C.R. Formula (Rajaji Formula), 1944 — authored by C. Rajagopalachari and published in his pamphlet 'The Way Out'.
• Its core proposal: a commission to demarcate contiguous Muslim-majority districts in the north-west and north-east, followed by a plebiscite of all adult inhabitants of those areas on separation.
• It formed the basis of the Gandhi–Jinnah talks held at Bombay in September 1944; Jinnah rejected it because he wanted only Muslims to vote in the plebiscite and a sovereign Pakistan conceded in advance.
• The Hindu Mahasabha under V.D. Savarkar attacked it from the opposite direction, as a surrender of the unity of India.
• Rajagopalachari (1878–1972) went on to become the first and only Indian Governor-General of India (1948–50), was among the first recipients of the Bharat Ratna in 1954, and founded the Swatantra Party in 1959.

• Reading 'C.R.' as C.R. Das (Chittaranjan Das). He died in 1925; the formula is from 1944.
• Assuming the C.R. Formula conceded Pakistan. It conceded only a post-independence plebiscite in demarcated Muslim-majority districts, with conditions attached — which is precisely why Jinnah turned it down.
• Confusing the C.R. Formula (1944, a Congress initiative) with the Desai–Liaqat Pact (1945, on parity in the Viceroy's Executive Council) or the Cabinet Mission Plan (1946, a British proposal).

UPPSC asks this as flat authorship recall — 'who prepared the C.R. Formula' — and leans on the C.R. Das confusion; UPSC prefers the contents, having asked in 2010 what 'The Way Out' actually proposed and in 2002 which rejected plan was the last chance to avoid partition.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The Gandhi–Jinnah talks of September 1944 were held on the basis of which proposal?

  • (a)The August Offer
  • (b)The C.R. Formula
  • (c)The Wavell Plan
  • (d)The Cabinet Mission Plan

  Answer(b) The C.R. Formula — Gandhi accepted Rajagopalachari's 1944 formula as a basis for negotiation and it became the agenda of his talks with Jinnah in Bombay. The August Offer was 1940, the Wavell Plan 1945 and the Cabinet Mission Plan 1946.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Under the C.R. Formula of 1944, the question of separation of the Muslim-majority areas was to be settled by

  • (a)a plebiscite of all the adult inhabitants of the demarcated areas
  • (b)a vote in the Central Legislative Assembly
  • (c)a decision of the British Parliament
  • (d)a referendum among the Muslims of British India as a whole

  Answer(a) a plebiscite of all the adult inhabitants of the demarcated areas — the formula proposed a commission to demarcate contiguous Muslim-majority districts and then a plebiscite of everyone living there. Jinnah's central objection was exactly this: he insisted that only Muslims should vote.