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(Sample Material) IAS Mains History (Optional) Study Kit "Towards Freedom"

Sample Material of Our IAS Mains History Study Kit

Subject: History (Optional)

Topic: Towards Freedom

Muslim League

The factors that the helped the growth of Muslim separatism, were— the surfacing of Hindu revivalist tendencies during the Swadeshi movement, The British propaganda that the partition of Bengal would benefit the Muslims and the spurt in communal violence. Later, Muslim League came to be dominated by Young Turks who nursed anti-British feelings. Britain had refused to aid Turkey in the Balkan Wars (191 1 - 1 2) and had rejected University Status to the Aligarh College. In 1928, the Muslim League rejected the Nehru Report, as it did not incorporate all their demands. This led to the estrangement of Jinnah, who called it a ‘Parting of the Ways ‘with the Congress and formulated his infamous fourteen points (including separate-electorates, reservation of seats in the center and provinces, reservation of jobs for Muslims, creation of new Muslim majority provinces, etc.) which became the text of the communal demands. A parliamentary board was nominated by Jinnah in 1936 to contest elections to the provincial assemblies as well as the Central Legislative Assembly. In the Punjab, Jinnah could not get any support, for Fazl-i-Hussain, having retired from the Governor General’s Executive Council, returned to his home state to revive the Unionist Party. The Lucknow Session (1937) reaffirmed the League’s two-nation theory, but only the Lahore session (1940) passed a resolution demanding partition of the country. The Lahore Resolution was termed by the Indian nationalist press as the ‘Pakistan resolution’, although the word itself was not mentioned either in the speeches made or in the text of the resolution.

The League became really strong during the World War II partly due to the political wilderness in the Congress and partly due to the government’s covert support. By 1946 the League had a membership of some three million and its organisation had penetrated the countryside. 1939, Dec 22—The Muslim League observes the resignation of the Congress ministries as Deliverance Day. 1940, March—Lahore session of the Muslim League passes the Pakistan Resolution. On Dec 1 943 the Karachi session of the Muslim League adopts the slogan ‘ Divide and Quit’.

Subhas Chandra Bose

Bose’s acceptance of Chittaranjan Das as his political guru during the Non-cooperation and Khilafat Movements was a surrender to a man similarly dedicated to the cause of India’s freedom based n Hindu-Muslim unity. His demand at the Calcutta Congress of 1928 that “complete independence” instead of “dominion status” should be the goal of Indian nationalists was a sign that he was a step ahead of his contemporaries. A greater part of his years of enforced exile was spent as an unofficial ambassador of India’s freedom. Back home as president of the Indian National Congress, Subhas provided an incisive analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of the worldwide structure of British imperialism and an egalitarian vision of the socio-economic reconstruction of free India.

In 1939, he defeated Gandhi’s nominee Pattabhi Sitaramayya to be re-elected Congress president. Faced with a campaign of non-cooperation against him launched by the Mahatma, he resigned months later. Throughout this political crisis he received strong support, as ever, from his brother Sarat Chandra Bose and from Rabindranath Tagore. The poet who regarded subhas as “Deshnayak” was confident that his apparent defeat would turn into a permanent victory. Netaji assumed leadership of the Indian National Army (INA) as its supreme commander. More than two million Indian civilians living in South-east Asia responded to his call for “total mobilization”. In his army of liberation Punjabi, Muslim, Sikh and Pathan professional soldiers fought side by side with Tamil and Malayalee rubber plantation workers.

He proclaimed the Provisional government of Free India in Sigapore and with “Chalo Delhi” on their lips the INA crossed the Indo-Burma frontier. The promised march to Delhi was halted at Imphal and Netaji was forced to retreat on foot with men and women to Malaya. Outside the Congress, the socialist tendency led to the foundation of the Congress Socialist Party (1934) under the leadership of Acharya Narendra Dev and Jai Prakash Narayan, and the growth of the Communist Party. The founders of the Congress Socialist Party (CSP) consisted of mainly those congressmen who broke away from the National Congress in order to establish a socialist order by non-violent means. Between the Revolt of 1942 and the end of the war in 1945, there was scarcely any political activity in India. The Indian nationalist movement, however, found a new expression outside the country’s frontiers in the form of the Indian National Army or Azad Hind Fauz.

Communist Movemen

Communist movement in India sprang from roots within the national movement itself, as disillusioned revolutionaries, non-cooperators, khilafatists, and labour and peasant activists sought new roads to political nd social emancipation. Its founder was Naren Bhattacharji (later known as M.N. Roy), who went to Russia in 1920 to attend the second Congress of the Comintern. In 1920, M.N. Roy, Abani Mukherji and some Muhajirs founded a Communist Party of India in Tashkent, but came off it. Left nationalist journals had started publishing eulogistic articles on Lenin and Russia. From 1922 S.A. Dange was bringing out the weekly Socialist from Bombay, the first communist journal to be published in India.

Muhajirs trying to re-enter India were tried in a series of five Peshawar Conspiracy Cases between 1922 and 1927. In May 1924 Muzaffar Ahmed, S.A. Dange, and Nalini Gupta were jailed in the Kanpur Conspiracy Case. An open Indian Communist Conference was held in Kanpur in December 1925. The skeleton organisation set up by this conference was soon taken over by the determined Communists, and the united CPI in 1959 acknowledged the 1925 meeting to have marked the formal foundation of the party. The only success of the CPI during this period was the capture of the leadership of the AITUC. The party gave a call for a general strike. The strike succeeded but the government took its revenge.