Constructive Work, Revolutionary Terrorism, and Mass Movements (1922-1930)
Post-withdrawal politics: Swarajists, revolutionaries, regional peasant/labour movements, communalism and the Simon Commission
Swarajists versus No-Changers - Post-Chauri Chaura Split
The Basics
Gandhi withdrew the Non-Cooperation Movement in February 1922. He was arrested on 10 March 1922. The Congress lost its unifying leader and its sense of direction. Disintegration, disorganisation and demoralisation spread through nationalist ranks. Workers who had sacrificed jobs and studies for mass struggle now faced an open question: what should they do while mass civil disobedience was not possible?
The Swarajists entered the November 1923 elections on a strategy called uniform, continuous and consistent obstruction. Their manifesto, released on 14 October 1923, declared that British rule served only British interests and that the 1919 reforms were a sham. They promised to present the national demand for self-government inside the councils, and if it was rejected, to wreck the councils from within by creating deadlocks on every measure.
The Non-Cooperation Movement was withdrawn in 1922. Congress politics then split into two groups: Swarajists, who entered the legislative councils, and No-Changers, who rejected this path. Gandhiji was the effective head of the No-Changers, though he was in jail at the time. They argued that the full programme of boycott and non-cooperation must continue. They wanted quiet, grassroots preparation for a future civil disobedience movement, not council politics.
Rise of Communism - Formation of the Communist Party of India
The Basics
By the mid-1920s, non-cooperation had ended, Swarajists were working the councils, and No-Changers were doing quiet constructive work, but a sense of drift had set in. Into this atmosphere came electrifying news from abroad. On 7 November 1917 the Bolshevik Party, led by V.I. Lenin, had overthrown the Czarist regime in Russia and founded the first socialist state, the Soviet Union. The new regime renounced Czarist imperial rights in Asia and granted self-determination to former colonies, showing that even the mightiest autocracy could be toppled by united, organised common people.
Industrial workers had existed in India since the mid nineteenth century, but for decades their protests were scattered strikes over wages or racial insult, with no all-India organisation behind them. Early reformers like Sasipada Banerjea in Bengal and Narayan Meghajee Lokhande in Bombay tried to help workers through journals and associations; Lokhande set up the Bombay Mill and Millhands' Association in 1890 and is seen as a pioneer of organised labour activity in India, though his efforts remained philanthropic rather than political.
After the annexation of Avadh in 1856, taluqdars tightened their hold over the land. They charged exorbitant rents, illegal cesses and renewal fees called nazrana. They also evicted tenants at will, a practice called bedakhli. Wartime inflation after the First World War made this burden unbearable, so the ground was ready for organised resistance.
Bardoli taluq in Surat district, Gujarat, had been chosen by Gandhiji in 1922 as the place to launch civil disobedience, but the plan was dropped after the Chauri Chaura violence. Even so, local leaders like Kalyanji and Kunverji Mehta and Dayalji Desai had already spread political awareness through schools, boycott of foreign cloth, and capture of the Surat municipality.
By the late 1920s, Swarajists had used legislatures to obstruct government business. Gandhian constructive workers kept Congress organisation alive at the grassroots. Bardoli had just shown peasants could win through disciplined satyagraha. Yet Congress still had no single all-India mass movement running. Under the Government of India Act of 1919, the British government had promised to review its reforms after ten years.
To answer Birkenhead's challenge, an All Parties Conference met in February 1928. It set up a sub-committee under Motilal Nehru to draft a constitution for India. Its members included Tej Bahadur Sapru, Subhas Chandra Bose, Ali Imam, M.S. Aney, Mangal Singh, Shuaib Qureshi and G.R. Pradhan. The committee finished its work by August 1928. The document became known as the Nehru Report. It was the first major Indian attempt to draft a full constitutional framework.
By late 1928, the Nehru Report had satisfied neither the Hindu Mahasabha nor the Muslim League. The Mahasabha opposed reserved Muslim majorities in Punjab and Bengal. It wanted a strictly unitary structure. M.R. Jayakar was a leading Mahasabha figure who opposed compromise. The League wanted the opposite. Motilal Nehru's committee was caught between the two.