Test: Class 10 History NCERT Based- 2 - UPSC MCQ

In 1916 he travelled to Champaran in Bihar to inspire the peasants to struggle against the oppressive plantation system.

Then in 1917, he organised a satyagraha to support the peasants of the Kheda district of Gujarat. Affected by crop failure and a plague epidemic, the peasants of Kheda could not pay the revenue, and were demanding that revenue collection be relaxed.

In 1918, Mahatma Gandhi went to Ahmedabad to organise a satyagraha movement amongst cotton mill workers.

The First World War had ended with the defeat of Ottoman Turkey. And there were rumours that a harsh peace treaty was going to be imposed on the Ottoman emperor – the spiritual head of the Islamic world (the Khalifa).

At the Calcutta session of the Congress in September 1920, he convinced other leaders of the need to start a non-cooperation movement in support of Khilafat as well as for swaraj.

Not all social groups were moved by the abstract concept of swaraj. One such group was the nation’s ‘untouchables’, who from around the 1930s had begun to call themselves Dalit or oppressed.

For long the Congress had ignored the Dalits, for fear of offending the sanatanis, the conservative high-caste Hindus. In the north, Swami Dayanand Saraswati, who founded the reform association called Arya Samaj, also supported widow remarriage.

Dr B.R. Ambedkar, who organised the Dalits into the Depressed Classes Association in 1930, clashed with Mahatma Gandhi at the second Round Table Conference by demanding separate electorates for Dalits. When the British government conceded Ambedkar’s demand, Gandhiji began a fast unto death.

In only the Civil Disobedience Movement Mahatma Gandhi asked people to break colonial laws. Mahatma Gandhi relaunched the Civil disobedience Movement in 1932 after the failure of the Second Round Table Conference.

By the Gandhi-Irwin Pact, Gandhiji consented to participate in aRound Table Conference in London and the government agreed to release the political prisoners. In December 1931, Gandhiji went to London for the conference, but the negotiations broke down and he returned disappointed.

Back in India, he discovered that the government had begun a new cycle of repression. So he relaunched the Civil disobedience Movement in 1932.

C. R. Das and Motilal Nehru formed the Swaraj Party within the Congress to argue for a return to council politics. But younger leaders like Jawaharlal Nehru and Subhas Chandra Bose pressed for more radical mass agitation and full independence.

In December 1929, under the presidency of Jawaharlal Nehru, the Lahore Congress formalised the demand of ‘Purna Swaraj’ or full independence for India. It was declared that 26 January 1930, would be celebrated as Independence Day when people were to take a pledge to struggle for complete independence.

European Managing Agencies, which dominated industrial production in India, were interested in certain kinds of products. They established tea and coffee plantations, acquiring land at cheap rates from the colonial government; and they invested in mining, indigo and jute.

Most of these were products required primarily for export trade and not for sale in India. When Indian manufacturers advertised the nationalist message was clear and loud. If you care for the nation then buy products that Indians produce. Advertisements became a vehicle of the nationalist message of Swadeshi.

Oudh Kisan Sabha was set up headed by Jawaharlal Nehru, Baba Ramchandra and a few others. Within a month, over 300 branches had been set up in the villages around the region.

During the Non-Cooperation Movement the council elections were boycotted in most provinces except Madras, where the Justice Party, the party of the non-Brahmins, felt that entering the council was one way of gaining some power – something that usually only Brahmans had access to.

East India Company to establish its monopoly right to trade, it appointed a paid servant called the Gumasta to supervise weavers, collect supplies, and examine the quality of cloth.

Before establishing political power in Bengal and Carnatic in the 1760s and 1770s, the East India Company had found it difficult to ensure a regular supply of goods for export. The French, Dutch, Portuguese, as well as the local traders, competed in the market to secure the woven cloth.