The First World War and the Home Rule Movement

The First World War (1914-1919) was a turning point for Indian nationalism. The strain of the war, soaring prices and the hope that loyalty would earn self-government pushed politics into a more assertive phase. Its great expression at home was the Home Rule Movement of Bal Gangadhar Tilak and Annie Besant. Their two leagues demanded self-government for India. They carried the message to ordinary people and bridged the gap between the cautious Congress of old and the mass movement Gandhi would soon lead. This is a high-yield topic.

The constitutional backdrop to this period was the Indian Councils Act of 1909, popularly called the Morley-Minto Reforms after John Morley, the Secretary of State for India, and Lord Minto, the Viceroy. The reforms were Britain's answer to Moderate demands and to the unrest that followed the partition of Bengal. They gave a little and withheld much.

• Enlarged councils: the legislative councils at the centre and in the provinces were expanded, with an elected non-official element chosen indirectly.
• Separate electorates: Muslims were given separate constituencies in which only Muslim voters elected Muslim members. This institutionalised communal representation.
• Indians in the executive: Satyendra Prasad Sinha became the first Indian member of the Viceroy's Executive Council.
• No responsible government: Morley openly declared that the reforms were not meant to lead to a parliamentary system in India.

The 1909 Act proved the most short-lived of all of Britain's constitutional experiments in India. The earlier Indian Councils Act of 1861 (which revived provincial legislatures) and the Indian Councils Act of 1892 (which introduced indirect election) each ran for decades. The 1909 scheme was overtaken within a decade by the Government of India Act of 1919, the Montagu-Chelmsford reforms. Disillusion with the Morley-Minto framework became one of the driving grievances behind the Home Rule demand.

In the war, Britain and its allies fought Germany, Austria-Hungary and Turkey. The fighting was industrial slaughter on a new scale. Both sides used poison gas in the trenches, and mustard gas became the most notorious chemical weapon of the war. The Indian response was threefold:

• The Moderates supported the empire as a matter of duty.
• The Extremists, including Tilak (released in June 1914), supported the war effort in the mistaken belief that Britain would repay India's loyalty with self-government.
• The revolutionaries decided to use the opportunity to wage war on British rule, through the Ghadr in North America, the Berlin Committee in Europe, and mutinies among Indian soldiers.

The supporters of the war failed to see that the imperial powers were fighting to safeguard their own colonies and markets.

The mood among the revolutionaries was inflamed by the Komagata Maru episode. The Komagata Maru was a Japanese steamship chartered in 1914 to carry Indian emigrants, mostly Sikhs from Punjab, to Canada. Canada's discriminatory immigration laws refused the passengers entry, and the ship was forced to sail back. On its return to Budge Budge near Calcutta in September 1914, a clash with the police left many passengers dead. The incident became a rallying grievance for the Ghadr agitation in North America, which urged Indians abroad to return home and rise against British rule.

The Home Rule Movement was India's response to the war "in a less charged but more effective way" than the romantic Ghadr adventure. Several factors drove it. There was disillusion with the Morley-Minto reforms and the burden of wartime taxation and rising prices. The war had also exposed the myth of white superiority. Tilak was ready to lead after his release, and Annie Besant decided to build a movement on the lines of the Irish Home Rule Leagues.

Keep the war-years chronology straight, since it is often tested. The Komagata Maru incident came first, in 1914. Gandhi returned to India from South Africa in January 1915. Tilak founded his Home Rule League in April 1916.

Besant's earlier career explains her methods. In Britain she had been a radical socialist associated with Fabianism, the gradualist socialism of the Fabian Society. She then turned to theosophy and came to India in 1893 as a leader of the Theosophical Society. Note a common trap: she led the Theosophical Society but did not found it. The Society was founded in 1875 by Helena Blavatsky and H.S. Olcott. To carry her political message she ran two journals, New India and Commonweal. Her stature peaked in 1917, when the Calcutta session elected her president of the Congress, the first woman to hold the office.

Because some supporters of each leader were uneasy with the other, two separate leagues were set up, coordinating by dividing the country between them:

• Tilak's Indian Home Rule League: founded April 1916, headquarters at Poona. It worked in Maharashtra (excluding Bombay city), Karnataka, the Central Provinces and Berar. Its demands included swaraj, the formation of linguistic states and education in the vernacular.
• Annie Besant's All-India Home Rule League: founded September 1916 at Madras, covering the rest of India. It had 200 branches and was more loosely organised; George Arundale was the organising secretary, with B.W. Wadia and C.P. Ramaswamy Aiyar.

The programme was to carry the message of home rule as self-government to the common man. The leagues used public meetings, libraries and reading rooms, pamphlets, plays and classes. This drew in even the "politically backward" regions of Gujarat and Sindh. The leagues were later joined by leaders such as Motilal Nehru, Jawaharlal Nehru, C.R. Das, Madan Mohan Malaviya, Tej Bahadur Sapru and Muhammad Ali Jinnah (who led the Bombay division). The Russian Revolution of 1917 gave the campaign an added boost.

Government repression followed, especially in Madras. In June 1917 Annie Besant and her associates were arrested, inviting nationwide protest. Sir S. Subramania Aiyar renounced his knighthood, and Tilak advocated passive resistance. The repression only hardened the agitators, and Besant was released in September 1917.

The All-India Muslim League was founded in December 1906 at Dacca under the lead of Nawab Salimullah, with the Agha Khan as its permanent president. Its early creed was loyalty to the British and the protection of Muslim political interests, and its lobbying helped win separate electorates in 1909. In 1908 the League opened a London branch under the presidency of Syed Ameer Ali, a distinguished jurist who pressed Muslim claims before British opinion. Note the distinction for the exam: the Agha Khan headed the parent League, while Ameer Ali presided over the London branch.

The League's loyalism soon wore thin. The annulment of the partition of Bengal in 1911 and Britain's war against Turkey, the seat of the Caliphate, alienated younger Muslims. Britain's earlier wars against Turkey, in the Balkans and with Italy, had already angered Indian Muslims, since the Khalifa claimed religio-political leadership of all Muslims. Other grievances deepened the shift:

• Aligarh university refused: the British declined to grant a university at Aligarh with powers to affiliate colleges, alienating some Muslims.
• A younger generation: younger League members were outgrowing the limited, loyalist outlook of the Aligarh school. The Calcutta session of the League (1912) committed it to working with other groups for self-government.
• Wartime repression: Maulana Azad's Al Hilal and Mohammad Ali's Comrade, both nationalist Muslim journals, were suppressed. Leaders such as the Ali brothers were interned.

Leaders such as Muhammad Ali Jinnah drew the League closer to the Congress.

The convergence peaked at the Lucknow Pact of December 1916, signed when the Congress and the League held their sessions jointly at Lucknow. The Congress accepted separate electorates for Muslims, and the two bodies put forward a joint scheme of constitutional reforms demanding self-government. The same Lucknow session reunited the Moderates and the Extremists, readmitting Tilak's wing after the Surat split. Jinnah, an architect of the Pact, was hailed as the "ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity". This united front raised the pressure that produced Montagu's August 1917 declaration.

The Lucknow session of December 1916 was presided over by the Moderate Ambika Charan Majumdar. It finally readmitted the Extremists led by Tilak, who had been outside the Congress since the Surat split of 1907. Several things made the reunion possible:

• Old quarrels faded: the controversies that had divided the two wings had become meaningless.
• The cost of the split: both sides saw that the division had led to political inactivity.
• Active peacemakers: Annie Besant and Tilak worked vigorously for reunion. Tilak reassured the Moderates that he sought reform of the administration, not the overthrow of government, and he denounced acts of violence.
• Death of Pherozeshah Mehta: Mehta had led the Moderate opposition to the Extremists. His death removed a major obstacle.

A reunited Congress was once again an effective instrument of Indian nationalism.

The joint demands of the Congress and the League were:

• Self-government: the government should declare that it would confer self-government on India at an early date.
• Elected majority: the central and provincial legislatures should be expanded, with an elected majority and more powers.
• Five-year term: the term of the legislative council should be five years.
• Secretary of State's salary: it should be paid by the British treasury, not from Indian funds.
• Indians in the executive: half the members of the viceroy's and governors' executive councils should be Indians.

In return, the Congress accepted separate electorates and a fixed proportion of seats for Muslims in the legislatures.

The demands amounted to a significantly expanded version of the Morley-Minto reforms. But the executive was still not made responsible to the legislature, which made constitutional deadlock likely. The united front was far-sighted and generated huge enthusiasm. Yet by accepting separate electorates the Congress in effect recognised the Congress and the League as separate political entities. This was a major step in the evolution of the two-nation theory. The leaders came together, but no effort was made to unite the masses of the two communities. As Majumdar put it, both wings of the nationalist movement had come to realise that "united they stand, but divided they fall."

The agitation was short-lived and had petered out by 1919. The reasons:

• lack of effective organisation, and communal riots in 1917-18;
• the Moderates were pacified by Montagu's August 1917 statement (which made self-government the long-term goal) and by Besant's release;
• talk of passive resistance by the Extremists kept the Moderates away;
• the Montagu-Chelmsford reforms (1918) divided the ranks. Tilak went abroad in 1918 over a libel case, leaving the movement leaderless.
• Gandhi's fresh approach was capturing the popular imagination and pushed the home rule movement to the sidelines. In 1920 Gandhi accepted the presidency of the All-India Home Rule League and renamed it Swarajya Sabha. Within a year it merged with the Congress.

But its gains were lasting and far-sighted:

• it shifted the emphasis from the educated elite to the masses, permanently deflecting the movement from the path of the Moderates;
• it built an organisational link between town and country, crucial when the movement later went truly mass;
• it created a generation of ardent nationalists and prepared people for Gandhian-style politics;
• it influenced the August 1917 declaration and the Montford reforms; and
• the efforts of Tilak and Besant towards the Moderate-Extremist reunion at Lucknow (1916) revived the Congress as an effective instrument.