What Was the Condition of India before Independence

The movement reached its climax between 1918 and 1922, when the first series of non-violent campaigns of civil disobedience was launched by the Indian National Congress led by Mohandas Gandhi, whose methods were largely inspired by the philosophy and methods of Baba Ram Singh, a Sikh who led the Kuka movement in Punjab in the 1870s. Gandhi`s movement included people from all over India and from all walks of life. These early movements of civil disobedience quickly became the driving force that ultimately shaped the cultural, religious and political unity of a nation that was not yet united at the time. The Congress committed to Purna Swaraj in 1930 and waged mass struggles between 1930 and 1932. However, in the late 1930s, with growing disappointment with the Raj`s delaying tactics and the failure of Congress to win a commitment to self-government and political independence, a faction within the movement turned to more radical ideas of Subhash Chandra Bose. Bose`s actions proved controversial within the Congress party, but popular among the Indian people, when Bose defeated Gandhi`s candidate in the leadership elections at the Tripuri session of the Congress Working Committee. Yet it was the separation of paths between radicals and conservatives. Bose left Congress to form his own party. During the war, the Soviet and then Axis powers sought help to set up a liberation force. The formation of the Indian National Army in 1942 by Subhash Chandra Bose would mean a unique military campaign to end British rule. After the trial of Indian National Army officers at Red Fort, mutinies broke out in the Navy, Air Force and Army. Congress also led a civil disobedience movement in 1942 that called on the British to leave India (a movement called the Quit India movement). After these and the widespread communal unrest in Calcutta, the Raj ended on the night of August 15, 1947, but only at the expense of the division of the country into India and Pakistan.

In 2007, India had its first female president when Pratibha Patil was sworn in. Pratibha Patil, long associated with the Nehru Gandhi family, was a discreet governor of the state of Rajasthan before becoming Sonia Gandhi`s preferred presidential candidate. [76] In February, the infamous Samjhauta Express bombings took place, killing Pakistani civilians in Panipat, Haryana. Until 2011, no one had been charged with the crime, although it was linked to Abhinav Bharat, an obscure Hindu fundamentalist group led by a former Indian army officer. [77] The Indian independence movement gained momentum in the early 20th century, and after World War I, Gandhi organized the first of his many effective passive resistance campaigns to protest Britain`s oppressive regime in India. By the 1930s, the British government made some concessions to Indian nationalists, but by World War II, discontent with British rule had grown to such an extent that Britain feared losing India to the axis. Anti-British terrorist activity began shortly after the war began, triggered by the return to India of hundreds of embittered Sikhs who had attempted to emigrate to Canada from their homes in Punjab but were denied permission to land in that country because of their skin colour. As British subjects, the Sikhs had assumed that they would have access to underpopulated Canada, but after miserable months aboard an old Japanese cargo ship (the Komagata Maru) in cramped and unsanitary conditions with insufficient food supplies, they returned to India as confirmed revolutionaries. The leaders of the Ghadr (« Revolution ») party, founded in 1913 by Punjabi Sikhs, traveled abroad in search of weapons and money to support their revolution, and Lala Har Dayal, the party`s main leader, went to Berlin to ask for help from the Central Powers. The support of the Congress party was offered mainly on the assumption that Britain would repay such loyal aid with significant political concessions – if not immediate independence, or at least the post-war regime, then certainly its promise shortly after the Allied victory. Immediate military support from the Indian government was crucial to strengthen the Western Front, and an expeditionary force, comprising two fully occupied infantry divisions and a cavalry division, left India in late August and early September 1914. They were shipped directly to France and moved to the defeated Belgian line just in time for the First Battle of Ypres.

The Indian Corps suffered extraordinarily heavy losses on the Western Front during the winter campaigns of 1914/15. The myth of Indian racial inferiority, especially in terms of courage in battle, thus dissolved in Sepoy`s blood on the Flemish fields. In 1917, Indians were finally admitted to the last bastion of Anglo-Indian racial discrimination – the ranks of royal non-commissioned officers. By 1930, a number of Indian Muslims had begun to think in terms of a separate state for their minority community, whose populations dominated the northwestern provinces of British India and the eastern half of Bengal, as well as large pockets of the United Provinces and the great princely state of Kashmir. (The princely state of Hyderabad in the south was ruled by a Muslim dynasty, but was largely Hindu.) One of Punjab`s greatest Urdu poets, Sir Muḥammad Iqbāl (1877-1938), as chairman of the muslim league`s annual meeting in Allahabad in 1930, proposed that « the final destiny » of Indian Muslims be to consolidate a « Muslim state of northwest India. » Although he did not call it Pakistan, his proposal included the main provinces of modern Pakistan – Punjab, Sindh, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (until 2010 the North-West Frontier Province) and Balochistan. Jinnah, the Aga Khan and other prominent Muslim leaders attended the roundtable in London at the time, which still envisioned a single federation of all Indian provinces and princely states as the best possible constitutional solution for India after a future British withdrawal. Separate constituency seats, as well as special guarantees of Muslim « autonomy » or « veto power » in dealing with sensitive religious issues, should be enough to avoid civil war or real division. As long as the British Raj remained in command, such formulas and plans seemed sufficient, for the British army could always be thrown into communal combat on the brink of extreme danger, and the army had remained apolitical and – since its reorganization after the mutiny – immaculate by communal religious passions. In what the British saw as an additional gesture of goodwill, King George V visited him. 1911 India for a durbar (a traditional dish held for subjects to express their allegiance to their ruler), during which he announced the overthrow of the partition of Bengal and the relocation of the capital of Calcutta to a newly planned city to be built immediately south of Delhi. which later became New Delhi.

Gandhi and other nationalist leaders dismissed British promises of Indian self-government after the war as empty and organized the nonviolent « Quit India » campaign to accelerate British withdrawal. The British colonial authorities responded by imprisoning Gandhi and hundreds of others. Anti-British protests accelerated after the war, and in 1947 the Indian National Congress reluctantly accepted the creation of Pakistan to appease the Muslim League and conclude independence negotiations. On the 15th. In August 1947, the Indian Independence Act came into force, ushering in a period of religious unrest in India and Pakistan that would result in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, including Gandhi, who was murdered by a Hindu fanatic in January 1948 at a prayer vigil in an area of Hindu-Islamic violence. In Britain, the Liberal Party`s electoral victory in 1906 marked the beginning of a new era of reform for British India. Although he was embarrassed by Viceroy Lord Minto, the new Secretary of State for India, John Morley, was able to introduce some important innovations into the legislative and administrative apparatus of the British Indian government. First, he acted to implement Queen Victoria`s promise of racial equality, which since 1858 has only served to convince Indian nationalists of British hypocrisy. He appointed two Indian members to his Whitehall council: a Muslim, Sayyid Husayn Bilgrami, who had played an active role in the founding of the Muslim League; and the other a Hindu, Krishna G. Gupta, the oldest Indian in the ICS. Morley also persuaded a reluctant Lord Minto to appoint the first Indian member, Satyendra P. Sinha (1864-1928), to the Viceroy`s Executive Council in 1909.

Sinha (later Lord Sinha) had been called to the bar of Lincoln`s Inn in 1886 and was Advocate General of Bengal before being appointed a member of the Viceroy, a post he had to relinquish in 1910. He was elected Chairman of the Congress Party in 1915 and became Parliamentary Secretary of State for India in 1919 and Governor of Bihar and Orissa (now Odisha) in 1920. British Raj, period of direct British rule over the Indian subcontinent from 1858 until the independence of India and Pakistan in 1947. The Raj took over the administration of the subcontinent by the British East India Company after general distrust and dissatisfaction with the management of the company led to a widespread mutiny by Sepoy`s troops in 1857, prompting the British to reconsider the structure of government in India. .

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