The Nehru Report (1928)

The Nehru Report was an eye-opening episode for the Muslims of India as it totally bypassed them and the later could well imagine their future in case of the approval of these recommendations. The report denied the separate electorate for the Muslims which the Congress had agreed with earlier. It ignored even the Delhi Proposals while formulating the report. Nehru showed two Muslims participating in the Report (to justify the Muslim presence); one was Syed Ali Imam who could attend only one meeting out of four because of his illness while Shoaib Qureshi, the other member could not approve the Congress views. Therefore, Nehru Report stayed only a Hindu report ignoring other parties especially the Muslim League, the biggest Muslim entity. Consequently, the Muslim leaders rejected the Report.

“Any sensible person cannot Muslims will accept these insulting conditions, said Sir Agha Khan about the Nehru Report. Jinnah responded to the Nehru Report by saying that “From now the paths of Hindus and Muslims are separate.”

Jinnah suggested four amendments in the Report:

“There should be no less than one/third representation in the Central Legislature.

In event of the adult suffrage not being established, Punjab and Bengal should have seats reserved on population basis for the Musalmans.

The form of the constitution should be federal with residuary powers vested in the provinces. This question is by far the most important from the constitutional point of view.

With regard to the separation of Sindh and NWFP, we cannot wait until the Nehru Report is established…The Musalmans feel that it is shelving the issue and postponing their insistent demand till doomsday and they cannot agree to it.”

Write a note on the Non-Cooperation movement.

Non-Cooperation movement, (September 1920–February 1922), unsuccessful attempt, organized by Mohandas Gandhi, to induce the British government of India to grant self-government, or swaraj, to India. It arose from the outcry over the massacre at Amritsar in April 1919, when the British killed several hundred Indians, and from later indignation at the government’s alleged failure to take adequate action against those responsible. Gandhi strengthened the movement by supporting (on nonviolent terms) the contemporaneous Muslim campaign against the dismemberment of Turkey after World War I.

The movement was to be nonviolent and to consist of the resignations of titles; the boycott of government educational institutions, the courts, government service, foreign goods, and elections; and the eventual refusal to pay taxes. Noncooperation was agreed to by the Indian

National Congress at Calcutta (now Kolkata) in September 1920 and launched that December. In 1921 the government, confronted with a united Indian front for the first time, was visibly shaken, but a revolt by the Muslim Moplahs of Kerala (southwestern India) in August 1921 and a number of violent outbreaks alarmed moderate opinion. After an angry mob murdered police officers at Chauri Chaura (February 1922), Gandhi himself called off the movement; the next month he was arrested without incident. The movement marks the transition of Indian nationalism from a middle-class to a mass basis.

Write a note on the Indian National Army.

Indian National Army, also known as the Azad Hind Fauj, was formed for the liberation of India from the British rule. It was formed in South-East Asia in the year 1942 by pioneering Indian Nationalists and prisoners who wanted to throw off the yoke of foreign domination and liberate the country. The INA was initially formed under Mohan Singh, after the fall of Singapore, the captain in the 1/14th Punjab Regiment in the British Army. However, the first INA under Mohan Singh collapsed and finally it was revived under the leadership of Subash Chandra Bose in 1943. Bose`s army was declared as the Azri Hukumat e Azad Hind. Indian National Army emerged along with Mahatma Gandhi`s peaceful resistance movement within

India. In contrast to Mahatma Gandhi, Bose advocated a more aggressive confrontation with the British authorities.

Origin of Indian National Army

INA was formed during the first world war when the Ghadar Party and the emergence form of the Indian Independence League planned to rebel in the British Indian Army from the Punjab through Bengal to Hong Kong. However, this plan met with failure after the information was leaked to British Intelligence. During the Second World War, the plan to fight the British found revival and a number of leaders and movements were initiated. These included the various "liberation armies" which were formed in as well as with the help of Italy, Germany as well as in South-east Asia. Thus in South East Asia the concept of the Indian National Army emerged. It was supported by the Japanese 15th army and led by Bose.

Composition of the Indian National Army

Indian National Army had many valued freedom fighters that helped in the battles. They all had a brilliant background and fought for a similar cause, freedom of India. The INA freedom fighters were from every sphere ranging from barristers to plantation workers. The revival of the Indian National Army was done by Subhash Chandra Bose

Discuss the factors that led to the partition of India.

Causes for Partition of India mainly rests around three vital causes which include the British policy of divide and rule on the basis of religion, races, caste and creed, the relationship of Muslim League and Indian National Congress; and the demand of Muslim league for a separate country for the Muslims living in India. The partition of India not only changed the geography of the subcontinent; it at the same time left a deep rooted impact on the hearts of people who had struggled for years to see the dawn of peace with a new India.

The Partition of India was based on number of factors. With the passage of time number of issues developed within Indian politics. The newly rising factors which occupied the political scenario in India included factors like rise of Communalism, creation of new political parties and their rising political awareness, the question of security of the minority groups living in India and the inherent conflict within the existing parties. As a foreign rule the British government made all efforts to understand these variations which helped them to great a strong base in India .It was only during and after the Second World War that the British Government was forced internally as well as externally to grant freedom to India. Among these factors the rise of communalism was the most alarming one which sowed the seeds of partition in the long run. The major group affected by this was the newly created All India Muslim League under the leadership of Muhammad Ali Jinnah.

The rise of communalism which turned out to be the most important cause for the Partition of India rested mainly on three factors. Firstly, a belief which prevailed was that people of the same community who follow the same religion will have common secular interest i.e. common political, social and cultural interest; in a multi cultural society like India the secular interests of each community differs with the other; and finally communalism arises when the interests of different religions are seen as antagonistic, incompatible and hostile to each other. As these principles formed the base of the newly created parties this forced them to remain away from each other. On the other side the British rule which lasted in India for last 200 years gave full encouragement to this growing in difference. This was further encouraged by the announcement of Communal awards. The encouragement provided by the British Government could be traced back to the period of Partition of Bengal. With this the British government for the first time raised the issue of difference within the communities of Muslim and Hindus to begin with which was though vehemently protested yet led to partition of India as a whole.

With the roots of communalism already sworn by the British rulers it in the long run formed the base of the new party namely All India Muslim League. Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the pioneer of the party, was initially member of Indian National Congress but due to his differences with Mahatma Gandhi he chose to form a new party. The struggle for Pakistan continued to remain as the bone of contention till the end of the struggle till it achieved its mission.

Along with the existing dissatisfaction with the Muslim League the Indian politics faced some more changes within Indian politics. 1940s witnessed the strengthening of some of the existing parties and their new generation politicians like the Akalis of Punjab and Hindu Mahasabha who added to the existing communal drift. The major concern of the present day politics was to look after one`s own security and the existence of their own community highlighting vehemently the issue of Communalism in Indian politics.

What is communalism? Discuss the process of its emergence in Indian society.

Communism," for its part, once referred to a cooperative society that would be based morally on mutual respect and on an economy in which each contributed to the social labor fund according to his or her ability and received the means of life according to his or her needs. Today, "communism" is associated with the Stalinist gulag and wholly rejected as totalitarian. Its cousin, "socialism" -- which once denoted a politically free society based on various forms of collectivism and equitable material returns for labor -- is currently interchangeable with a somewhat humanistic bourgeois liberalism.

During the 1980s and 1990s, as the entire social and political spectrum has shifted ideologically to the right, "anarchism" itself has not been immune to redefinition. In the Anglo-American sphere, anarchism is being divested of its social ideal by an emphasis on personal autonomy, an emphasis that is draining it of its historic vitality. A Stirnerite individualism -- marked by an advocacy of lifestyle changes, the cultivation of behavioral idiosyncrasies and even an embrace of outright mysticism -- has become increasingly prominent. This personalistic "lifestyle anarchism" is steadily eroding the socialistic core of anarchist concepts of freedom.

Let me stress that in the British and American social tradition, autonomy and freedom are not equivalent terms. By insisting the need to eliminate personal domination, autonomy focuses on the individual as the formative component and locus of society. By contrast, freedom, despite its looser usages, denotes the absence of domination in society, of which the individual is part. This contrast becomes very important when individualist anarchists equate collectivism as such with the tyranny of the community over its members

Today, if an anarchist theorist like L. Susan Brown can assert that "a group is a collection of individuals, no more and no less," rooting anarchism in the abstract individual, we have reason to be concerned. Not that this view is entirely new to anarchism; various anarchist historians have described it as implicit in the libertarian outlook. Thus the individual appears ab novo, endowed with natural rights and bereft of roots in society or historical development.1

But whence does this "autonomous" individual derive? What is the basis for its "natural rights," beyond a priori premises and hazy intuitions? What role does historical development play in its formation? What social premises give birth to it, sustain it, indeed nourish it? How can a "collection of individuals" institutionalize itself such as to give rise to something more than an autonomy that consists merely in refusing to impair the "liberties" of others -- or "negative liberty," as Isaiah Berlin called it in contradistinction to "positive liberty," which is substantive freedom, in our case constructed along socialistic lines?

In the history of ideas, "autonomy," referring to strictly personal "self-rule," found its ancient apogee in the imperial Roman cult of libertas. During the rule of the Julian-Claudian Caesars, the Roman citizen enjoyed a great deal of autonomy to indulge his own desires -- and lusts -- without reproval from any authority, provided that he did not interfere with the business and the needs of the state. In the more theoretically developed liberal tradition of John Locke and John Stuart Mill, autonomy acquired a more expansive sense that was opposed ideologically to excessive state authority. During the nineteenth century, if there was any single subject that gained the interest of classical liberals, it was political economy, which they often conceived not only as the study of goods and services, but also as a system of morality. Indeed, liberal thought generally reduced the social to the economic. Excessive state authority was opposed in favor of a presumed economic autonomy. Ironically, liberals often invoked the word freedom, in the sense of "autonomy," as they do to the present day.2

Despite their assertions of autonomy and distrust of state authority, however, these classical liberal thinkers did not in the last instance hold to the notion that the individual is completely free from lawful guidance. Indeed, their interpretation of autonomy actually presupposed quite definite arrangements beyond the individual -- notably, the laws of the marketplace. Individual autonomy to the contrary, these laws constitute a social organizing system in which all "collections of individuals" are held under the sway of the famous "invisible hand" of competition. Paradoxically, the laws of the marketplace override the exercise of "free will" by the same sovereign individuals who otherwise constitute the "collection of individuals."

No rationally formed society can exist without institutions and if a society as a "collection of individuals, no more and no less" were ever to emerge, it would simply dissolve. Such a dissolution, to be sure, would never happen in reality. The liberals, nonetheless, can cling to the notion of a "free market" and "free competition" guided by the "inexorable laws" of political economy.

Alternatively, freedom, a word that shares etymological roots with the German Freiheit (for which there is no equivalent in Romance languages), takes its point of departure not from the individual but from the community or, more broadly, from society. In the last century and early in the present one, as the great socialist theorists further sophisticated ideas of freedom, the individual and his or her development were consciously intertwined with social evolution -- specifically, the institutions that distinguish society from mere animal aggregations.

What made their focus uniquely ethical was the fact that as social revolutionaries they asked the key question -- What constitutes a rational society? -- a question that abolishes the centrality of economics in a free society. Where liberal thought generally reduced the social to the economic, various socialisms (apart from Marxism), among which Kropotkin denoted anarchism the "left wing," dissolved the economic into the social.3

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as Enlightenment thought and its derivatives brought the idea of the mutability of institutions to the foreground of social thought, the individual, too, came to be seen as mutable. To the socialistic thinkers of the period, a "collection" was a totally alien way of denoting society; they properly considered individual freedom to be congruent with social freedom and, very significantly, they defined freedom as such as an evolving, as well as a unifying, concept.

In short, both society and the individual were historicized in the best sense of this term: as an ever-developing, self-generative and creative process in which each existed within and through the other. Hopefully, this historicization would be accompanied by ever-expanding new rights and duties. The slogan of the First International, in fact, was the demand, "No rights without duties, no duties without rights" -- a demand that later appeared on the mastheads of anarchosyndicalist periodicals in Spain and elsewhere well into the present century.

Thus, for classical socialist thinkers, to conceive of the individual without society was as meaningless as to conceive of society without individuals. They sought to realize both in rational institutional frameworks that fostered the greatest degree of free expression in every aspect of social life.

Write a note on the Quit India Movement.

In August 1942, Gandhiji launched the Quit India Movement (“Bharat Chhodo Andolan”). A resolution was passed on 8 August 1942 in Bombay by the All India Congress Committee, declaring its demand for an immediate end of British rule. The Congress decided to organize a mass struggle on non-violent lines on the widest possible scale. Gandhiji’s slogan of ‘Do or Die’ (‘Karo ya Maro’) inspired the nation. Every man, women and child began dreaming of a free India. The government’s response to the movement was quick. The Congress was banned and most of its leaders were arrested before they could start mobilizing the people. The people, however, were unstoppable. There were hartals and demonstrations all over the country. The people attacked all symbols of the British government such as railway stations, law courts and police stations. Railway lines were damaged and telegraph lines were cut. In some places, people even set up their independent government. The movement was most widespread in Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Bengal, Bombay, Odisha and Andhra Pradesh. Places such as Ballia, Tamluk, Satara, Dharwar, Balasore and Talcher were freed from British rule and the people there formed their own governments.

The British responded with terrible brutality. The army was called out to assist the police. There were lathi-charges and firing at the unarmed demonstrators. Even old men and children were shot dead while taking part in processions. Protestors were arrested and tortured and their homes raided and destroyed. By December 1942, over sixty thousand people had been jailed.The few leaders who had escaped arrest went into hiding and tried to guide the mass movement. Among them were Jai Prakash Narayan, S M Joshi, Aruna Asaf Ali, Ram Manohar Lohis, Achyut Patwardhan and Smt Sucheta Kripalani.

The Indians suffered greatly throughout the Second World War. There was a terrible famine in Bengal in AD 1943 in which over thirty lakh people died. The government did little to save the starving people. The Congress had little success in rallying other political forces under a single flag and program. Smaller parties like the Hindu Mahasabha opposed the call. The Communist Party of India strongly opposed the Quit India movement and supported the war effort because of the need to assist the Soviet Union, despite support for Quit India by many industrial workers. In response the British lifted the ban on the party.[5] The movement had less support in the princely states, as the princes were strongly opposed and funded the opposition.[6]

Muslim leaders opposed Quit India. Muhammad Ali Jinnah's opposition to the call led to large numbers of Muslims cooperating with the British, and enlisting in the army.[7] The Muslim League gained large numbers of new members. Congress members resigned from provincial legislatures, enabling the League to take control in Sindh, Bengal and Northwest Frontier.[8][9]

The nationalists had very little international support. They knew that the United States strongly supported Indian independence, in principle, and believed the U.S. was an ally. However, after Churchill threatened to resign if pushed too hard, the U.S. quietly supported him while bombarding Indians with propaganda designed to strengthen public support of the war effort. The poorly run American operation annoyed both the British and the Indians