Spectrum Test: Debates on the Future Strategy after the Civil Disobedience Movement - UPSC MCQ

• He suggested that the vested interests be revised favouring the masses by taking up peasants and workers' economic and class demands, landlords and capitalists, and organizing masses in their class organisations-Kisan sabhas and trade unions. 

• He argued that these class organizations should be allowed to affiliate with the Congress, thus influencing its policies and activities.

• A strong leftist trend within the Congress, represented by Nehru, was critical of both constructive work and council entry in place of the suspended civil disobedience movement. 

• That would sidetrack political mass action and divert attention from the main issue of the struggle against colonialism. 

• Instead, this section favoured resumption and continuation of non-constitutionalist mass struggle because the situation was still revolutionary due to continued economic crisis and the masses' readiness to fight.

• Many Congressmen led by Gandhi believed that a mass phase of the movement (struggle phase) had to be followed by a phase of reprieve (truce phase) before the next stage of mass struggle could be taken up. 

• Criticizing the S-T-S strategy, Nehru argued that the Indian national movement had reached a stage after the Lahore Congress call for a purna swaraj programme. There should be a continuous confrontation conflict with imperialism till it was overthrown. 

• He advocated maintaining a "continuous, direct action" policy by the Congress and without the interposition of a constitutionalist phase.

Real power, he said, cannot be won by two annas and four annas. Against an S-T-S strategy, he suggested a Struggle-Victory (S-V) strategy.

• Gandhi was aware that he was out of tune with the powerful in Congress. A large section of the intelligentsia favoured parliamentary politics with which he was in fundamental disagreement. 

• Another section was estranged from the Congress because of Gandhi's emphasis on the spinning wheel as the "second lung of the nation". 

• The socialists led by Nehru also had differences with Gandhi. In October 1934, Gandhi announced his resignation from the Congress to serve it better in thought, word and deed. 

• Nehru and the socialists thought that the British must first be expelled before the struggle for socialism could be waged. In an anti-imperialist struggle unity around the Congress, still, the only anti-imperialist mass organization was indispensable.

• Numerous 'safeguards and special responsibilities' of the governor-general worked as brakes in the Act's proper functioning. 

• In provinces, the governor still had extensive powers. 

• The Act enfranchised 14 per cent of the British Indian population. 

The extension of the system of communal electorates and representation of various interests promoted separatist tendencies, culminating in India's partition. 

• The Act provided a rigid constitution with no possibility of internal growth. Right of the amendment was reserved with the British Parliament.

• Nearly all sections condemned the 1935 Act and animously rejected by the Congress. 

• However, the Hindu Mahasabha and the National Liberal Foundation declared themselves in favour of the working of the 1935 Act in the central and provincial level.

• The Congress manifesto reaffirmed total rejection of the 1935 Act and promised release of prisoners, removal of disabilities based on gender and caste, a radical transformation of the agrarian system, substantial reduction of rent and revenue, scaling down of rural debts, cheap credit and right to form trade unions and to strike. Gandhi did not attend a single election.

• Reforms would revive the political standing of constitutionalist liberals and moderates who had lost public support during the Civil Disobedience Movement.

• Repression earlier and reforms now would convince a large section of Congressmen of an extra-legal struggle's ineffectiveness. 

• Once Congressmen tasted power; they would be reluctant to go back to politics of sacrifice. 

• Reforms could be used to create dissensions within Congress-right wing to be placated through constitutional concessions and radical leftists to be crushed through police measures. 

• Provincial autonomy would create powerful provincial leaders who would gradually become autonomous centres of political power. Congress would thus be provincialized, and the central leadership would get weakened.