6.20 — The Freedom Movement: Moderates, Extremists, Revolutionaries

The Indian National Congress was founded in December 1885 by seventy-two delegates meeting in Bombay. One of the organisers was a retired British civil servant named Allan Octavian Hume, and the first session was attended with the knowledge and mild approval of the Viceroy.

Its first demands were not independence. They were: more Indians in the civil service, examinations to be held in India as well as London, expansion of the legislative councils, reduction of military spending, and the separation of judicial from executive functions.

Within forty years the same organisation was running a mass campaign to end British rule. This chapter is about how it got from one to the other, and about the other streams — revolutionary, communal, and social-reformist — that ran alongside it.

The Moderates, and what they actually did

The first phase, roughly 1885–1905, is called the Moderate period, and its leaders were Dadabhai Naoroji, Gopal Krishna Gokhale, Pherozeshah Mehta, Surendranath Banerjee and Badruddin Tyabji.

Their method was constitutional agitation: petitions, resolutions, speeches, evidence to commissions, journalism, and lobbying in Britain. Their theory was that the British were a fundamentally decent people governed by liberal principles, who would concede Indian claims once those claims were properly documented and put before them.

It is easy to mock this and it is a mistake to do so, because they produced two things of lasting value.

The economic critique. Naoroji's drain theory (Chapter 6.17), and R. C. Dutt's economic history, were built out of the government's own statistics and they demolished the claim that British rule was economically beneficial to India. This was not sentiment; it was arithmetic, and it became the intellectual foundation of everything that followed. Naoroji was also elected to the British House of Commons in 1892 as a Liberal, the first Indian MP.

The habit of nationwide organisation. The annual sessions, moving between cities, brought together lawyers, journalists and professionals from every province who had never previously acted together. They created the physical and social network that a mass movement later ran on.

What they achieved formally was small. The Indian Councils Act of 1892 slightly expanded the legislative councils and introduced an indirect and heavily limited element of election. Simultaneous ICS examinations in India were promised repeatedly and delivered in 1922.

And their failure was that the method stopped working. Twenty years of petitions produced very little, and a younger generation drew the obvious conclusion.

The Extremists

Bal Gangadhar Tilak, Bipin Chandra Pal and Lala Lajpat Rai — "Lal, Bal, Pal" — argued that petitions were begging and that Indians should demand rather than request.

Tilak's slogan was direct: Swaraj is my birthright and I shall have it.

Their method was mass mobilisation using existing cultural forms. Tilak turned the Ganesh festival in Maharashtra into a public event with processions and speeches, and revived a Shivaji festival, because a religious festival was a legal way to assemble large crowds and address them politically.

This was effective and it had a cost, and both should be stated. It brought ordinary people into politics for the first time, beyond the English-educated professional class. And it drew on Hindu symbolism, which made the movement harder for Muslims to identify with, and Tilak's opposition to the Age of Consent Act (Chapter 6.19) placed him against social reform in the name of resisting foreign interference.

Tilak was tried for sedition three times and imprisoned in Mandalay for six years, where he wrote a commentary on the Bhagavad Gita arguing that it teaches action rather than renunciation — a reading that became enormously influential and that Gandhi, who read the same text quite differently, had to contend with.

The partition of Bengal, 1905

This is the event that changed the movement's scale.

Curzon partitioned Bengal in 1905, dividing it into a western half with a Hindu majority and an eastern half with a Muslim majority. The stated reason was administrative — Bengal was very large and hard to govern.

The real reason is not seriously in doubt, because British officials said so in internal correspondence: Bengal was the centre of nationalist agitation, and dividing it would split the Bengali-speaking political class and set Hindu and Muslim interests against each other. One official memorandum described the aim as dividing and weakening a solid body of opponents.

The response was the Swadeshi movement — the boycott of British goods and the promotion of Indian ones.

It was the first mass campaign. Bonfires of imported cloth. Students refusing to attend government schools. The founding of Indian-owned enterprises, including textile mills, banks, and the National Council of Education. Rabindranath Tagore wrote songs for it, including Amar Sonar Bangla, which is now Bangladesh's national anthem.

And it worked. The partition was annulled in 1911, which is the first time British policy in India was reversed by Indian agitation. The capital was simultaneously moved from Calcutta to Delhi, partly to escape the Bengali political scene.

The lesson learned by the movement was that mass action produced results where petitions had not. The lesson learned by the government was that Bengal's Hindu political class was the problem and that Muslim political organisation should be encouraged as a counterweight.

The Muslim League

Founded in 1906 at Dhaka, in the immediate aftermath of the partition of Bengal and with official encouragement.

Its founding purpose was to protect Muslim political interests and to assure the government of Muslim loyalty. Its early leadership was aristocratic and its politics conservative.

The background to it is Sir Syed Ahmad Khan, who founded the Aligarh college in 1875 to bring modern education to Muslims, and who argued from the 1880s that Muslims should stay out of the Congress. His reasoning was demographic and blunt: representative government by majority vote in a country where Muslims were roughly a quarter of the population would mean permanent Hindu majority rule.

That argument is the seed of everything in Chapter 6.23, and it is worth noting that it was made in the 1880s, sixty years before Partition, and that it was a prediction about how democracy would work rather than a religious claim.

Separate electorates were granted in 1909 by the Morley-Minto reforms: Muslims would vote in separate constituencies for reserved seats. This was what the League had asked for and what Congress opposed.

The consequence is structural and it deserves emphasis. A politician elected only by Muslim voters has no incentive to appeal to anyone else, and vice versa. Separate electorates removed the electoral reason for cross-community coalition and created a permanent incentive to emphasise communal difference. Chapter 13.6 explains why electoral systems shape political behaviour, and this is one of the clearest examples anywhere.

The revolutionaries

A parallel stream turned to armed action, and it deserves treatment on its own terms rather than as a footnote.

Bengal. The Anushilan Samiti and Jugantar organised from the Swadeshi period. Khudiram Bose, aged eighteen, and Prafulla Chaki attempted to kill a magistrate in 1908 and killed two British women by mistake; Chaki shot himself and Bose was hanged, becoming one of the first martyrs of the movement.

Punjab and abroad. The Ghadar Party, founded in 1913 among Indian emigrants on the American Pacific coast — mostly Punjabi Sikhs — planned an armed rising in India during the First World War. Several hundred returned to India to organise it; the plan was penetrated by informers, and the participants were tried and many executed or transported. The Ghadar movement failed completely and it left a political tradition in Punjab that mattered later.

V. D. Savarkar was involved in revolutionary organisation in London, wrote The Indian War of Independence on 1857 (Chapter 6.18), was arrested, escaped briefly through a porthole at Marseilles, and was sentenced to two life terms in the Andaman cellular jail. He submitted several petitions for clemency during his imprisonment, was released to internment in 1924, and afterwards developed the ideology of Hindutva — a definition of Indian nationhood in terms of those for whom India is both fatherland and holy land. He is one of the most contested figures in Indian history and both the imprisonment and the petitions are documented facts.

The Komagata Maru, in 1914, is a case worth naming: a ship carrying 376 Indian passengers, mostly Sikhs, was refused entry to Canada under exclusion laws, held in Vancouver harbour for two months, and forced to return. On arrival at Calcutta the passengers were fired on and nineteen were killed. The incident radicalised Punjabi politics considerably.

The First World War and the turn

India contributed enormously to the British war effort — around 1.3 million men served overseas, in France, Mesopotamia, Egypt and East Africa, and roughly 74,000 died. India also contributed very large sums of money and materials.

The political expectation was explicit: substantial self-government afterwards. The Montagu Declaration of 1917 promised "the progressive realisation of responsible government in India as an integral part of the British Empire" — deliberately vague, and the first official statement of self-government as the goal.

Two things happened instead.

The Montagu-Chelmsford reforms of 1919 introduced dyarchy in the provinces: some departments — education, health, agriculture, local government — transferred to Indian ministers responsible to elected legislatures, while the important ones — finance, police, land revenue — stayed with the Governor. Responsibility without power, in the areas Indians were given, and no power at all elsewhere. The franchise was extended to about 10 percent of adult males.

And the Rowlatt Act, in the same year, extended wartime emergency powers into peacetime: detention without trial, trial without jury, and restrictions on the press. It was passed over the unanimous opposition of every elected Indian member of the legislative council.

The response was Gandhi's first all-India campaign, and then Jallianwala Bagh, which Chapter 6.21 covers in full.

What else was moving

Three currents outside the nationalist mainstream matter for what happens later.

The anti-caste movement. Jyotirao Phule in Maharashtra from the 1870s attacked Brahmin dominance and founded schools for girls and for lower-caste children. Periyar E. V. Ramasamy in Tamil Nadu built the Self-Respect Movement from the 1920s, a radical rejection of caste and of Brahmin religious authority that reshaped Tamil politics permanently. B. R. Ambedkar, born into a Mahar family, took doctorates at Columbia and the London School of Economics and became the most formidable intellectual opponent of the caste system.

The critical point for the nationalist story: these leaders argued that independence without social transformation would simply transfer power to upper-caste Indians. Ambedkar's position was that for the untouchables, British rule and Brahmin rule were both oppression, and that political freedom without social freedom was worthless. Chapter 6.21 covers his confrontation with Gandhi on exactly this.

The labour and peasant movements. Trade unions from 1918, the All India Trade Union Congress in 1920, peasant movements in Awadh and Bihar, and the Communist Party of India from 1925. These brought economic demands into a movement that had been led by lawyers.

And Hindu and Muslim political organisation outside Congress. The Hindu Mahasabha from 1915 and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh from 1925 on one side; the Muslim League's transformation under Jinnah on the other. Chapter 6.23 traces both.

Where this shows up in your life

The Congress became independent India's governing party for most of its first fifty years, and its internal structure — a national body with provincial committees — became the template for Indian political organisation generally.

Swadeshi as an idea recurs constantly in Indian economic policy, from Nehru's import substitution to the "Make in India" campaign.

Separate electorates were abolished at independence — a deliberate decision by the Constituent Assembly, and Ambedkar's reservation of seats for Scheduled Castes was designed specifically to avoid recreating the problem, using reserved seats within a common electorate rather than separate rolls. Chapter 13.6 explains why that difference matters enormously.

What the next page covers

In 1915 a 45-year-old lawyer returned to India from South Africa, where he had spent twenty years developing a method of political action he called satyagraha. Within five years he had transformed the Congress from a debating society into a mass movement. Chapter 6.21 is Gandhi on the complete documented record — what satyagraha actually was as a technique, what he achieved, the campaigns and their results, and the full set of serious criticisms: his handling of Bhagat Singh, his position on caste and his confrontation with Ambedkar, his statements on race in South Africa, his sexual experiments, his economic ideas, and the argument about whether his method actually won independence or whether other forces did.