The Swarajists and No-Changers

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The Swaraj Party — formally established as the Congress-Khilafat Swarajya Party — was a political party formed in India in December 1922 to secure greater self-government and political freedoms for Indians from the British Raj. Its emergence marked a turning point in nationalist strategy: rather than continuing an unbroken boycott of British institutions, one wing of the Congress chose to carry the struggle directly into the legislative councils. The resulting debate between the Swarajists (Pro-changers) and the No-changers shaped the direction of the national movement through much of the 1920s, and the contrasting fortunes of council politics and grassroots constructive work offer valuable insight into how the Congress adapted during the lull between the Non-Cooperation Movement and the Civil Disobedience Movement.

After Gandhi’s arrest in March 1922, nationalist ranks fell into disintegration, disorganisation, and demoralisation. This triggered a debate among Congressmen over what course to take during this transitional, passive phase of the movement.
One section — led by C.R. Das, Motilal Nehru, and Ajmal Khan — wanted to end the boycott of legislative councils, arguing that nationalists should enter them to expose the assemblies’ basic weaknesses and use them as an arena of political struggle to arouse popular enthusiasm.
- Their strategy was to “end or mend” these councils: if the government failed to respond to nationalist demands, they would obstruct the councils’ working from within.
Those who advocated council entry came to be known as the Pro-changers or Swarajists, while the opposing school of thought — led by Vallabhbhai Patel, Rajendra Prasad, C. Rajagopalachari, and M.A. Ansari — came to be known as the No-changers.
- The No-changers opposed council entry altogether, favouring concentration on constructive work, continued boycott and non-cooperation, and quiet preparation for the resumption of the suspended civil disobedience programme.
The disagreement over council entry came to a head at the Gaya session of the Congress (December 1922), where the Swarajists’ proposal of “ending or mending” the councils was defeated.
In response, C.R. Das and Motilal Nehru resigned from the presidentship and secretaryship of the Congress respectively, and announced the formation of the Congress-Khilafat Swarajya Party (or Swarajya Party), with C.R. Das as president and Motilal Nehru as one of its secretaries.

The Swarajists’ Arguments

Entering the councils would not negate the non-cooperation programme; rather, it amounted to carrying the movement forward through other means — effectively opening a new front.
In a period of political vacuum, council work would keep the masses enthused and their morale high; the entry of nationalists would also deter the government from packing the councils with undesirable elements who might otherwise be used to lend legitimacy to government measures.
Their intention, they insisted, was purely to use the councils as an arena of political struggle — not as organs for the gradual transformation of colonial rule from within.

The No-Changers’ Arguments

Parliamentary work, the No-changers argued, would lead to neglect of constructive work, a loss of revolutionary zeal, and eventual political corruption.
Constructive work, by contrast, would prepare the ground and the people for the next phase of civil disobedience.

Reaching a Compromise (Delhi, September 1923)

Despite their differences, both sides wished to avoid a split like that of 1907, and both stayed in close touch with Gandhi, who was still in jail. Both also recognised the importance of presenting a united front to build a mass movement capable of forcing government reform, and both accepted the necessity of Gandhi’s continued leadership of a unified nationalist movement.
With these considerations in mind, a compromise was reached at a meeting in Delhi in September 1923: the Swarajists were permitted to contest elections as a group within the Congress, accepting the Congress programme in full except for one difference — that they would enter the legislative councils.
Elections to the newly constituted Central Legislative Assembly and to the provincial assemblies were scheduled for November 1923.

The Swarajist Election Manifesto (Released October 1923)

The guiding motive of the British in governing India was to secure the selfish interests of their own country.

The so-called reforms were merely a blind to further those interests under the pretence of granting responsible government, the real objective being to continue exploiting the country’s unlimited resources by keeping Indians permanently subservient to Britain.

The Swarajists would present the nationalist demand for self-government within the councils.

If this demand were rejected, they would adopt a policy of uniform, continuous, and consistent obstruction within the councils to make governance through them impossible.

The councils would thus be wrecked from within by creating deadlocks on every measure.

Programme of the Swarajists

Attainment of dominion status.

Right to frame a constitution.

Control over the bureaucracy.

Establishment of the principle that the bureaucracy derived its power from the people.

The people’s right to control the machinery and system of government.

Full provincial autonomy.

Attainment of swarajya.

Organisation of labour — both industrial and agricultural.

Establishment of control over local and municipal bodies.

An agency for propaganda outside India.

Federation of Asiatic countries for the promotion of trade and commerce.

Continuation of the Congress’s constructive programme.

Gandhi’s Attitude Towards the Swarajists

Gandhi was initially opposed to the Swarajists’ proposal of council entry. But after his release from prison on health grounds in February 1924, he gradually moved towards reconciliation with them, for three reasons:

He felt that continued public opposition to the council-entry programme would prove counter-productive.
In the November 1923 elections, the Swarajists had won 42 out of 141 elected seats and secured a clear majority in the provincial assembly of the Central Provinces; in the legislatures, they had joined hands with the Liberals and independents such as Jinnah and Malaviya. The courageous, uncompromising manner in which the Swarajists conducted themselves convinced Gandhi that they would not become merely another limb of the colonial administration.
Towards the end of 1924, the government launched a crackdown on revolutionary terrorists as well as the Swarajists. This angered Gandhi, who responded by expressing solidarity with the Swarajists and yielding to their wishes.

Decline of the Swarajists

The Swarajists’ strength as a political force lay in the unity they had forged within the legislatures, developing it into a working coalition. But the ideological consensus underpinning that unity was weak and shallow, since it brought together leaders of widely varied political outlooks — and neither the policy of obstruction nor that of constitutional advance proved strong enough, on its own, to hold them together.
This internal strain produced two notable defections: the Nationalist Party, formed under Malaviya and N.C. Kelkar, and the Independent Party, formed under Jinnah.
By 1924, the Swarajist position had weakened further amid widespread communal riots and a split among the Swarajists themselves along Responsivist–Non-responsivist lines; the death of C.R. Das in 1925 weakened the party still more.
- The Responsivists — Lala Lajpat Rai, Madan Mohan Malaviya, and N.C. Kelkar — advocated cooperating with the government and holding office wherever possible, in order to protect what they termed “Hindu interests.” They accused Non-responsivists such as Motilal Nehru of being “anti-Hindu” and a “beef-eater.”
The party’s main leadership eventually reaffirmed its faith in mass civil disobedience and withdrew from the legislatures in March 1926, while another faction of Swarajists contested the 1926 elections as a party in disarray, faring poorly.
The underlying policy of obstruction and wrecking reforms from within had serious limitations — it could work only up to a point before becoming a severe constraint on the party itself.
The arrival of the Simon Commission created a new political situation altogether, as parties came together in the anti-Simon agitation, rendering the older constitutional programme largely irrelevant.
Finally, in 1930, the Swarajists walked out as a consequence of the Lahore Congress resolution on Purna Swaraj, merging fully with the Congress at the start of the Civil Disobedience Movement (1930–34).

Achievements of the Swarajists

In coalition with other partners, they repeatedly outvoted the government — even on matters relating to budgetary grants — and passed adjournment motions.

They agitated powerfully through speeches on self-government, civil liberties, and industrialisation.

Vithalbhai Patel was elected Speaker of the Central Legislative Assembly in 1925.

A particularly notable achievement was the defeat of the Public Safety Bill (1928), which had aimed to empower the government to deport undesirable and subversive foreigners — a measure driven by government alarm at the spread of socialist and communist ideas, which it believed were being fostered by foreign activists sent by the Comintern.

Through their activities, they helped fill the political vacuum at a time when the national movement was recouping its strength.

They exposed the hollowness of the Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms, or the “Montford” scheme.

They demonstrated that the councils could, in fact, be used creatively as instruments of struggle.

Drawbacks of the Swarajists

They lacked any coherent policy to coordinate their militancy inside the legislatures with the mass struggle outside them, relying almost entirely on newspaper reporting to communicate with the public.

Their obstructionist strategy had inherent limitations.

Both the “Swarajist Programme” and the “Swarajist at Work” showed marked contradictions and inadequacies: they stood for a kind of class collaboration — unity between zamindar and peasant, capitalist and worker — resting on shaky ground, and they could never fully harmonise constitutional politics inside the legislature with mass politics outside it.

They could not sustain cooperation with their coalition partners for very long, owing to conflicting ideas, which further limited their overall effectiveness.

In their later phase, a tendency toward responsive cooperation crept in, replacing genuine non-cooperation: they failed to resist the perks and privileges of power and office — Motilal Nehru sat on the Skeen Committee, Vithalbhai Patel became president of the assembly, and A. Ramaswamy Iyengar accepted membership of the Public Accounts Committee.

They failed to support the peasants’ cause in Bengal, and consequently lost support among Muslim members, who were largely pro-peasant.

Constructive Work of the No-Changers

While the Swarajists fought their battles inside the legislatures, the No-changers carried on laborious, quiet, undemonstrative, grassroots constructive work, centred on:

The promotion of khadi and spinning.
National education.
Hindu-Muslim unity.
The struggle against untouchability.
The boycott of foreign cloth and liquor, and work on flood relief.

This effort was symbolised by hundreds of ashrams that sprang up across the country, where political cadres received practical training in khadi work and in work among the lower castes and tribal communities — especially in the Kheda and Bardoli areas of Gujarat — while popularising the charkha and khadi more widely.

Benefits of Constructive Work

It brought much-needed relief to the poor and advanced the broader process of nation-building.
It made urban-based, upper-caste cadres familiar with the real conditions of villages and lower castes.
It gave Congress workers continuous, effective work during the movement’s passive phases, helping them build bonds with sections of the masses hitherto untouched by politics, while developing their organising capacity and self-reliance.
It filled the rural masses with new hope and increased Congress’s influence among them — since no united struggle against colonialism was possible without the uplift of the lower castes and Adivasis.
The boycott of foreign cloth was, in particular, a stroke of genius that demonstrated to the rulers and the world the Indian people’s determination to be free.
National schools and colleges trained young men in an alternative, non-colonial ideological framework. Many of the young men and women who had dropped out of official institutions during 1920–21 eventually returned to them, but a good number instead became whole-time cadres of the movement.
Overall, constructive work served as a major channel for recruiting the “soldiers of freedom” and training them politically, while also testing and identifying future leaders and “officers” of the movement — a body of constructive workers that would go on to act as the steel frame of the nationalist movement during its active Satyagraha phase.
Khadi bhandar workers, students and teachers of the national schools and colleges, and inmates of Gandhian ashrams together formed the backbone of the later civil disobedience movements, serving both as organisers and as active Satyagrahis.

A Critique of Constructive Work

National education chiefly benefited the urban lower-middle classes and the richer peasants; enthusiasm for it tended to surface only during periods of heightened movement activity.
In quieter, more passive periods, the lure of degrees and jobs drew students back to official schools and colleges.
The popularisation of khadi remained an uphill task, since it was costlier than imported cloth.
While the campaign against untouchability addressed its social dimension, it laid little emphasis on the underlying economic grievances of landless and agricultural labourers — who made up the majority of the untouchable community.

Gandhi himself was released from jail in 1924 and remained aloof from direct politics, channelling his energies instead into constructive work — a stance that led the government to consider him, for the time being, a spent political force.

Conclusion

The split between the Swarajists and the No-changers reflected a genuine strategic dilemma facing the national movement after the sudden withdrawal of Non-Cooperation: whether to fight British rule from within its own institutions or to build strength quietly from the ground up. Neither path alone proved decisive — the Swarajists’ council politics eventually fractured under communal and ideological strain, while the No-changers’ constructive work, though invaluable in building organisational depth among the masses, could not by itself force political change. Together, however, the two strands kept the national movement alive through its most uncertain years, laying the institutional and grassroots foundations on which the Civil Disobedience Movement would later be built.