The Election of 1937 and formation of Congress Ministries

The Election of 1937 and Formation of Congress Ministries

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The Government of India Act, 1935 introduced provincial autonomy in British India from 1937, opening a new and contested chapter in Congress politics. The years following the withdrawal of the Civil Disobedience Movement in 1934 had already exposed sharp divisions within the Congress over council entry and, more crucially, over whether to accept office under a constitution it had publicly rejected.

The Provincial Elections of 1937 tested this question directly, delivering the Congress a decisive victory and forcing it to resolve, in practice, a debate that had divided its Left and Right wings for years. This article traces the build-up to the 1937 election, its results, the internal debate on office acceptance, the formation of Congress Ministries in eight provinces, and their record in office until their resignation in 1939.

The Council Entry and Office Acceptance Debate

• The withdrawal of the Civil Disobedience Movement around 1934 triggered serious dissension within the Congress, much as had happened after the withdrawal of the Non-Cooperation Movement.
• While Gandhi temporarily withdrew from active politics, the socialists and other leftist elements within the Congress formed the Congress Socialist Party (CSP) in May 1934.
  • Nehru never formally joined the CSP, whose ideology ranged from a loosely defined radical nationalism to a fairly firm commitment to Marxian Scientific Socialism.
• The divide within the Congress soon centred on two issues:
  • Council entry
  • Office acceptance
• This rift came to a head but was averted at the Lucknow Congress of 1936, as both wings — mindful of their shared commitment to the anti-imperialist struggle and the damage a split would cause — chose not to divide the party.
• The Congress decided at Lucknow (early 1936) and Faizpur (late 1936) to contest the elections while postponing the decision on office acceptance to the post-election period.
  • At Lucknow, the majority of delegates, led by Rajendra Prasad and Vallabhbhai Patel and with the blessing of Gandhi, held that contesting elections and later accepting office under the Act of 1935 would help revive the Congress’s flagging morale at a time when direct mass action was not a viable option.
  • The AICC meeting held in Bombay in August 1936 decided in favour of contesting the elections, again postponing the office-acceptance question until after the results were in.
• The federal part of the Government of India Act, 1935 was never implemented, but provincial autonomy came into force from 1937.
  • Although the new constitutional reforms fell far short of India’s national aspirations, the Congress decided to contest the provincial elections under the Act of 1935.
• The Congress’s decision to contest the election of 1937 and subsequently accept office brought sections of Indian capital closer to the party.
  • Even sceptics such as Mody, faced with continually deteriorating economic conditions, drifted closer to the nationalists.
  • Business finance again became a significant factor behind the Congress’s decisive win in 1937, though the party remained far from being under capitalist domination.

The Provincial Elections of 1937

• Provincial elections were held across British India in the winter of 1936–37, as mandated by the Government of India Act, 1935.
• Elections were held in eleven provinces: Madras, Central Provinces, Bihar, Orissa, United Provinces, Bombay Presidency, Assam, NWFP, Bengal, Punjab, and Sindh.
• The 1937 election was the first in which large masses of Indians were eligible to vote.
  • An estimated 30.1 million persons — including 4.25 million women — had acquired the right to vote, amounting to 14% of the total population.
  • Of these, 15.5 million people, including 917,000 women, actually exercised their franchise.
• The Congress election manifesto reaffirmed the party’s total rejection of the 1935 Act and promised:
  • the restoration of civil liberties,
  • the release of political prisoners,
  • the removal of disabilities on grounds of sex and untouchability,
  • a radical transformation of the agrarian system — substantial reduction in rent and revenue, scaling down of rural debts, and cheap credit, and
  • the right to form trade unions and to strike.
• The Congress’s election campaign received a massive response and once again aroused political consciousness and energy among the people.

Election Results of 1937

• The results strongly favoured the Indian National Congress, which won 716 of the 1,161 seats it contested and secured a majority in most provinces.
  • The exceptions were Bengal, Assam, NWFP, Punjab, and Sindh; in the first three of these, however, it was still the single largest party.
  • The Congress’s prestige as the credible alternative to the colonial state rose even further.
• Of the 864 “general” constituency seats, the Congress contested 739 and won 617.
• Of the 125 non-general constituencies it contested, 59 were reserved for Muslims, of which the Congress won 25 seats — 15 of them in the entirely Muslim-majority North-West Frontier Province.
• The Congress won only 73 of the 151 seats reserved for the depressed classes across India.
  • Its 1937 victory rested significantly on newly enfranchised voters, including sections of the industrial working class and the peasantry, among them some Dalits.
• The All-India Muslim League won 106 seats (6.7% of the total), making it the second-ranking party.
  • The results were a setback for the League, which fared poorly even in Muslim-majority provinces.
  • After the election, Muhammad Ali Jinnah offered to form coalitions with the Congress, on condition that the Congress not nominate any Muslims to the ministries, since the League claimed to be the sole representative of Indian Muslims. The Congress found this unacceptable and declined the offer.
• The only other party to win more than 5% of all assembly seats was the Unionist Party of Punjab, with 101 seats.

The Debate on Office Acceptance

Arguments Against Office Acceptance

• Jawaharlal Nehru, Subhas Bose, the Congress Socialists, and the Communists were firmly opposed to office acceptance and to working the 1935 Act.
• Nehru presented the Left’s case most forcefully, particularly in his Presidential Address at Lucknow in early 1936:
  • Accepting office would mean “negating our rejection” of the 1935 Act and standing self-condemned — assuming responsibility without real power, since the basic structure of the colonial state would remain unchanged.
  • While the Congress could do little for the people from within office, it would end up cooperating “in some measure with the repressive apparatus of imperialism” and sharing responsibility for that repression.
  • Office acceptance would also strip the movement of the revolutionary character it had carried since 1919, reducing the struggle to a choice between seeking genuine revolutionary change and settling for petty reforms under British imperialism — in practice, “a surrender.”
  • It risked drawing the Congress into ordinary parliamentary activity, causing it to lose sight of freedom, economic and social justice, and the removal of poverty, and to become co-opted and deradicalised — “a pit from which it would be difficult… to come out.”
• Nehru and the Left instead proposed the older Swarajist strategy: enter the assemblies to create deadlocks and obstruct the working of the Act.
  • As a longer-term strategy, they advocated greater reliance on workers’ and peasants’ class organisations, their integration with the Congress, imparting a socialist direction to the party, and preparing for the resumption of mass struggle.

Arguments in Favour of Office Acceptance

• The pro-office-acceptance group — the “ministerialists” — insisted they were equally committed to opposing the 1935 Act and rejected the label of constitutionalists.
  • They agreed that “real work lies outside the legislature” and that legislative work could only ever be a short-term tactic, since freedom could not be won through it alone.
  • However, they argued that the prevailing political situation made a constitutional phase necessary, since a mass movement was not a realistic option at the time; the Congress should therefore combine mass politics with work inside the legislatures and ministries.
  • In essence, the choice was not one of principle but between two strategies — obstruct from within, or use office constructively (referred to as the S-T-S and S-V approaches).
• The ministerialists conceded the risks of office but argued that the answer was to resist wrong tendencies from within, not abandon office altogether.
  • Leaving the administrative field entirely to pro-Government forces, they warned, would let other parties use office to weaken nationalism and promote reactionary or communal politics.
  • Despite their limited powers, provincial ministries could still promote constructive work — village and Harijan uplift, khadi, prohibition, education, and relief from the burden of debt, taxes, and rent.
• The core question the ministerialists posed was whether office acceptance necessarily meant co-option by the colonial state, or whether ministries could instead be used to defeat colonial strategy from within.
  • As one advocate, Vishwanathan, put it: the Councils should not be seen as offices to hold, but as “centres and fortresses from which British imperialism is radiated” — to be used by the Congress “for Revolution,” not surrendered to.

Gandhi’s Position and the AICC’s Decision

• Though Gandhiji wrote little on the subject directly, in Working Committee discussions he initially opposed office acceptance, favouring quiet preparation in the villages for a resumption of civil disobedience instead.
  • By early 1936, however, he felt this alternative was not yet feasible, and — given the overwhelming mood of the party — was willing to give the formation of Congress ministries a trial.
• The AICC sanctioned office acceptance, overriding the objections of Nehru and other CSP leaders.
  • Gandhi, in one of his characteristic compromise positions, endorsed the decision while continuing to place his faith in non-violence and constructive work carried out from outside the legislatures.
• Nehru’s opposition rested on the argument that by running provincial governments, the Congress would be helping to “keep the imperialist structure functioning,” thereby letting down the very masses it had helped mobilise — a warning that, within a few years, proved prophetic.

Formation of the Congress Ministries (1937)

• Congress Ministries were formed in 8 of the 11 provinces of British India in 1937.
• To coordinate their work and prevent the British hope of a “provincialisation” of the Congress from materialising, a central control body — the Parliamentary Sub-Committee — was set up, comprising Sardar Patel, Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, and Rajendra Prasad.
  • The Congress now functioned simultaneously as the government in the provinces and as the opposition to the Central Government, where effective state power still lay.
• Gandhiji captured the spirit in which office was to be held, writing in Harijan on 7 August 1937 that offices were to be “held lightly, not tightly” — “crowns of thorns, never of renown” — taken up only to see whether they could quicken the movement’s pace towards its goal.

Madras Presidency

• The Government of India Act, 1935 established a bicameral legislature in Madras, comprising the Governor, a Legislative Assembly, and a Legislative Council.
• The Justice Party had ruled Madras for 17 years since 1920, its hold briefly interrupted only in 1926–28.
  • The Justice Government under the Raja of Bobbili had been steadily losing ground since the early 1930s, weakened by factional politics and the Raja’s autocratic style of rule.
  • The party was seen as collaborationist, aligned with harsh British policy, and its Depression-era economic policies — notably its refusal to cut land revenue in non-zamindari areas by 12.5% — proved deeply unpopular.
  • The Bobbili Raja, himself a zamindar, cracked down on Congress protests demanding revenue reduction.
• The Swaraj Party, previously the Justice Party’s main opposition, merged with the Congress in 1935 once the Congress decided to enter electoral politics.
  • The Civil Disobedience Movement, land tax reduction agitations, and union organisation helped the Congress mobilise popular opposition to the Bobbili Raja government.
  • Revenue agitations drew peasants into the Congress fold, while the Gandhian hand-spinning programme secured the support of weavers; preferential treatment shown to European traders won the Congress the backing of indigenous industrialists and commercial interests.
• The Congress won 74% of all seats, eclipsing the incumbent Justice Party, which was reduced to 21 seats.
  • Despite its clear majority in both houses, the Congress hesitated to form a government, objecting to the special powers the 1935 Act gave the Governor.
  • An interim government was formed instead, with Kurma Venkata Reddy Naidu of the Justice Party as Chief Minister from 1 April 1937.
• Congress leaders such as S. Satyamurti, uneasy with the decision to stay out of power, campaigned to persuade the Congress High Command to accept office within the Act’s limitations, and pressed the British Government for assurances that the Governor’s special powers would not be misused.
  • On 22 June, Viceroy Linlithgow issued a statement expressing the British Government’s willingness to work with the Congress in implementing the 1935 Act.
  • On 1 July, the Congress Working Committee (CWC) agreed to form governments in the provinces it had won, and on 14 July, Rajaji (C. Rajagopalachari) was sworn in as Chief Minister of Madras.
• The 1937 elections thus marked both the start of Congress participation in governance and the beginning of Rajaji’s ascendancy within the Madras Congress Legislature Party.

Sindh

• These were the first elections held in Sindh since its creation as a separate province in 1936.
  • Of the Sind Legislative Assembly’s 60 members, the Sind United Party emerged the largest with 22 seats.
  • In the general constituencies, the Sind Hindu Mahasabha won 11 seats and the Congress 8 seats.
• Jinnah’s attempt to set up a League Parliamentary Board in Sindh in 1936 had failed, despite Muslims forming 72% of the province’s population.
  • Of the 34 seats reserved for Muslims, the Muslim League could secure none.

United Provinces

• The UP legislature comprised a Legislative Council of 52 elected and 6–8 nominated members, and a Legislative Assembly of 228 elected members drawn from exclusive Muslim, “General,” and “Special” constituencies.
• The Congress won a clear majority with 133 seats, while the Muslim League won only 27 of the 64 seats reserved for Muslims.

Assam

• The Congress emerged the single largest party in Assam, winning 33 of 108 seats, though it was not in a position to form a ministry on its own.
  • The Governor instead called upon Sir Muhammad Sadulla, former Judicial Member of Assam and leader of the Assam Valley Muslim Party, to form the ministry, with the Congress as part of the ruling coalition.

Bombay

• The Government of India Act, 1935 created a bicameral legislature in Bombay Presidency.
• Ambedkar’s Independent Labour Party won a spectacular victory in the reserved seats, taking 11 of the 15 reserved for the depressed classes; the Ambedkarites also performed well in the Central Provinces and Berar.
• The Congress fell just short of an outright majority but drew on the support of small pro-Congress groups to form a working majority, with B.G. Kher becoming Bombay’s first Chief Minister.

Bengal

• The Congress emerged the largest single party in Bengal with 52 seats, but the Krishak Praja Party (KPP) of A.K. Fazlul Huq, with 36 seats, formed a coalition government instead.
  • The KPP had posed a major challenge to the Muslim League in the 1937 election, but soon after, Huq brought it into a coalition with the League.
  • Huq’s popularity declined as he leaned increasingly towards zamindar and rich-peasant interests, reneging on election promises made to tenant and poor-peasant constituencies.
  • He formally joined the League in 1937 and was later given the honour of moving the Lahore Resolution in 1940.

Punjab

• The Unionist Party, led by Sikander Hyat Khan, won 67 of 175 seats; the Congress won 18 and the Akali Dal 10.
• The Unionists formed a coalition ministry with Sikander Hyat Khan as premier.
  • Sikander soon reached an understanding with Jinnah through the Jinnah–Sikander Pact of 1937. Though the alliance remained tense, it lent the Unionists a degree of legitimacy among Punjabi Muslims, while giving Jinnah a springboard to project the Muslim League as the centre of South Asian Muslim politics.

Other Provinces: Central Provinces, Bihar, Orissa, and the NWFP

• The Congress won clear majorities in the Central Provinces, Bihar, and Orissa.
• In the overwhelmingly Muslim-majority North-West Frontier Province, the Congress won 19 of 50 seats and, with minor-party support, was able to form a ministry.

Rule of the Congress Ministries (1937–39)

Impact of the Formation of Congress Ministries

• The formation of Congress ministries transformed the country’s psychological atmosphere, raising expectations among almost all classes.
  • Civil liberties expanded across the board, and provinces began passing legislation on land reform, industrial reform, and social reform.
  • The Congress’s prestige rose sharply as an alternative power seen to serve the interests of the masses, particularly the peasantry, and the party now had a chance to demonstrate that it could use state power for the people’s benefit, not merely lead them in mass struggle.
• Yet the ministries’ power and financial resources were limited.
  • They could not alter the fundamentally imperialist character of the administration or usher in a radical era.
  • Within these narrow limits — and in the brief two years and four months they held office — they nonetheless tried to introduce reforms and ameliorative measures that offered people a glimpse of the Swaraj to come.
• The Congress ministers set an example in plain living: they cut their own salaries from Rs. 2,000 to Rs. 500 a month, remained easily accessible to the public, and in a short span passed a substantial body of ameliorative legislation fulfilling many manifesto promises.

Work of the Congress as Provincial Government

Political Measures: Defence and Extension of Civil Liberties

• All emergency powers acquired by provincial governments in 1932 under the Public Safety Acts and similar laws were repealed.
• Bans on organisations such as the Hindustan Seva Dal and various Youth Leagues, and on political books and journals, were lifted.
  • The ban on the Communist Party, imposed by the Central Government, technically remained, but Communists could now function freely and openly in Congress provinces.
• All press restrictions were removed: securities taken from newspapers and presses were refunded, pending prosecutions withdrawn, and the blacklisting of newspapers for government advertising abandoned.
• Confiscated arms were returned and forfeited arms licences restored.

Curbing Police Powers

• Of all British functionaries, the police were the most feared and hated by ordinary Indians.
• Gandhiji wrote that the Congress’s success would be measured by its ability to render the police and military “practically idle,” proving that it could rule with minimal reliance on either.
• In Congress provinces, police powers were curbed and the shadowing of political workers and reporting of public speeches by CID (Central Investigation Department) agents was stopped.

Release of Political Prisoners and Detenus

• One of the Congress governments’ first acts was to release thousands of political prisoners and detenus and cancel internment and deportation orders.
  • Many revolutionaries convicted in the Kakori and other conspiracy cases were freed.
  • In U.P. and Bihar, however, several revolutionaries convicted of violent crimes remained imprisoned.
    • Most had earlier been sent to kala pani (the Cellular Jail in the Andamans) before being transferred to their home provinces after a prolonged hunger strike in July 1937. Their release required the Governors’ consent, which was initially refused.
    • The U.P. and Bihar ministries resigned over the issue on 15 February, and the matter was resolved through negotiation, with all prisoners in both provinces released by the end of March.
  • The contrast with the non-Congress provinces of Bengal and Punjab was stark: there, civil liberties remained curbed, and revolutionary prisoners kept in jail for years without trial were not released despite repeated hunger strikes and popular agitation.
• In Bombay, the government restored lands confiscated during the no-tax campaign of the Civil Disobedience Movement (1930) to their original owners — again only after threatening resignation to persuade the Governor — and reinstated the pensions of officials dismissed in 1930–32 for sympathising with the movement.

Blemishes on the Civil Liberties Record

• There were, however, exceptions to this record.
  • In Madras, under Premier C. Rajagopalachari, the government prosecuted the Socialist leader Yusuf Meherally in July 1937 for an “inflammatory” speech in Malabar (though he was soon let off), and in October 1937 sentenced Congress Socialist S.S. Batliwala to six months’ imprisonment for a “seditious” speech.
  • More troubling was the conduct of some right-wing ministers: K.M. Munshi, Home Minister of Bombay, used the CID to watch Communists and other left-wing Congressmen, drawing a rebuke from Nehru, while the Madras government similarly used the police to shadow radical Congressmen.
• These blemishes must be seen against the backdrop of a genuine, wide-ranging expansion of civil liberties even in Bombay and Madras — and the Left within the Congress remained vigilant, exerting continual pressure on right-wing ministers to avoid tampering with civil liberties.

Economic Measures

The Congress Ministries sought to give the peasantry and workers economic relief as quickly as possible.

Agrarian Reforms

• The Congress was committed by its manifesto to agrarian reform through reform of land tenures and reduction of rent, revenue, and debt.
• Why the Congress could not overhaul the zamindari system entirely:
  • The 1935 Act did not give provincial ministries sufficient powers to do so, and the ministries suffered from an acute shortage of finances, since the bulk of India’s revenues remained with the Government of India.
  • The existing administrative structure — guarded by the Viceroy’s and Governors’ powers — could not be touched.
  • The Congress’s strategy of class adjustment also worked against a complete overhaul: building a multi-class anti-colonial movement required balancing competing class interests and winning over or neutralising as much of the landlord class as possible, especially since smaller landlords were often active participants in the national movement.
  • Time was short. The Congress leadership knew its ministries would not last, as the logic of confronting imperialism made cooperation unsustainable — a constraint that grew sharper as war clouds gathered over Europe from 1938.
  • Nearly all Congress-run provinces (U.P., Bihar, Bombay, Madras, Assam) had reactionary upper houses (legislative councils), elected on a narrow franchise and dominated by landlords, capitalists, and moneylenders. To pass legislation through these chambers, the Congress had to conciliate these very interests — for instance, the Bihar government compromised with zamindars on its tenancy bills, while the U.P. government went slow on debt legislation to secure moneylender and merchant support for tenancy reform.
  • Finally, India’s agrarian structure was itself immensely complex, with limited reliable data even on land rights, making any one-shot structural reform an extremely formidable undertaking.
• Within these constraints, the Congress Ministries’ agrarian policy still went a considerable way towards helping the peasantry, though the exact legislation varied by province depending on local agrarian relations, the Congress’s social base, the outlook of its provincial leadership, and the extent of peasant mobilisation. Broadly, it addressed tenancy rights, security of tenure, rents, and rural indebtedness.
• Achievements:
  • Tenancy bills passed in U.P., Bihar, and Orissa extended rights to tenants and placed restrictions on zamindars.
  • In Madras, similar legislation was being drafted when the ministry resigned before it could be enacted.
  • Tenancy reform measures extending security of tenure were also carried in Bombay, the Central Provinces, and the NWFP.
• This legislation improved and secured the position of millions of tenants in zamindari areas, but the basic system of landlordism remained untouched.
  • It mainly benefited statutory and occupancy tenants; the interests of sub-tenants and agricultural labourers were largely overlooked, partly because these groups had not yet been mobilised by the kisan sabhas and remained outside the restricted franchise of the 1935 Act.

Regulation of Moneylenders

• Except in U.P. and Assam, the Congress governments passed debtors’ relief acts regulating moneylenders’ business, including provisions for the cancellation or drastic reduction of accumulated interest.
• These governments also undertook modest rural reconstruction measures — in Bombay, some 40,000 tied serfs were liberated, and grazing fees in forests were abolished in Bombay and reduced in Madras.
• While landlords opposed the tenancy bills, the debtors’ relief bills faced opposition from moneylenders and, notably, lawyers — otherwise Congress supporters — who derived significant income from debt litigation.

Labour Welfare Measures

• The Congress Ministries generally adopted a pro-labour but conciliatory stance, aiming to advance workers’ interests while promoting industrial peace: reducing recourse to strikes, establishing conciliation machinery, advocating arbitration before strikes, and positioning the Congress and its ministers as intermediaries between labour and capital while seeking wage increases for workers.
  • This approach alarmed Indian capitalists, who organised themselves to press provincial governments to “hasten slowly” on labour matters.
• In Bombay, a Textile Enquiry Committee recommended a wage increase, which was implemented despite mill owners’ objections.
  • In November 1938, the government passed the Industrial Disputes Act, built on Premier B.G. Kher’s philosophy of “class collaboration and not class conflict,” emphasising conciliation, arbitration, and negotiation over direct action, and designed to prevent lightning strikes and lockouts.
    • The Act was strongly opposed by Left Congressmen — Communists and Congress Socialists — for restricting the right to strike and introducing a complicated new registration procedure for trade unions that could favour employer-sponsored unions.
• In Madras, the government similarly promoted “internal settlement” of labour disputes through government-sponsored conciliation and arbitration.
• In U.P., Kanpur saw serious labour unrest, with workers expecting active support from the elected government; a major strike broke out in May 1938.
  • The government set up a Labour Enquiry Committee under Rajendra Prasad, which recommended a minimum wage increase, formation of an arbitration board, an independent board to recruit labour for all mills, maternity benefits for women workers, and recognition of the Left-dominated Mazdur Sabha by employers.
• A similar Bihar Labour Enquiry Committee, also headed by Rajendra Prasad, was set up in 1938, recommending stronger trade union rights, improved labour conditions, and compulsory conciliation and arbitration before any strike.
• The Congress governments also removed obstacles to indigenous industrial expansion and actively encouraged new industrial ventures such as automobile manufacturing.

Social Measures

• Prohibition was introduced in selected areas across different provinces.
• Measures for the advancement of Harijans (Gandhiji’s term for the “untouchables”) included:
  • laws enabling temple entry and free access to public offices, water sources (wells and ponds), roads, transport, hospitals, publicly funded educational institutions, and restaurants and hotels;
  • a bar on any court or public authority recognising customs that imposed civil disabilities on Harijans;
  • increased scholarships and freeships for Harijan students, and efforts to expand Harijan representation in the police and other government services.
• The ministries paid close attention to primary, technical, and higher education, and to public health and sanitation.
  • Education for girls and Harijans was expanded, basic education with an emphasis on manual and productive work was introduced, and mass adult literacy campaigns were organised.
  • Khadi, spinning, and village industries received support and subsidies, and prison reform schemes were undertaken.
• The Congress governments also participated in the National Planning Committee, appointed in 1938 by Congress President Subhas Bose.

Challenges Before the Congress Governments

Coordinating Legislative Work with Mass Mobilisation

• A core Congress strategy was to keep mass political activity alive even in this non-mass-struggle phase — within the bounds of legality — using offices themselves to promote popular mobilisation, coordinating extra-legislative activity with legislative work.
  • In U.P., this coordination worked well: popular organs of authority such as Congress police stations and panchayats dispensing justice under local Congress committees were set up, alongside district-level Congress grievance committees and mass literacy campaigns explaining the ministries’ work to the public.
• Not all Congress governments managed this coordination successfully, particularly where the right wing dominated the provincial Congress and government.
  • This raised a genuine dilemma: could a party running a government simultaneously remain the organiser of popular movements and the enforcer of law and order?
  • While many Congressmen saw their role as strengthening the ministries through popular agitation and avoided provoking punitive action, others sought to expose the ministries’ “breaches of faith” and expose the Congress as, in their view, an organ of the upper classes.
  • Leaders such as C. Rajagopalachari and K.M. Munshi did not hesitate to use state machinery in a politically repressive manner.
• The formation of ministries and the expansion of civil liberties unleashed popular energies everywhere: kisan sabhas sprang up across the country, trade union membership and activity grew immensely, student and youth movements revived, and the states’ people’s movement received a powerful boost.
  • Left parties expanded manifold. The banned Communist Party still managed to bring out its weekly organ, The National Front, from Bombay; the CSP published The Congress Socialist and other journals in Indian languages; and the Kirti Communists of Punjab, unable to publish in Unionist-ruled Punjab, brought out Kirti Lehar from Meerut, U.P.

Clashes with Popular Movements

• Many popular movements inevitably clashed with the Congress governments.
  • Peasant agitations often took the form of large demonstrations and marches; in Bihar, the Kisan Sabha’s calls for rent refusal and forcible occupation of landlords’ lands brought it into frontal confrontation with the ministry, with cases of attacks on landlords and looting of crops.
  • In Bombay, the AITUC, Communists, and Ambedkar’s followers organised a strike on 7 November 1938 in seventeen of seventy-seven textile mills against the Industrial Disputes Act; stone-throwing and disorder at two mills led the police to open fire, killing two and injuring over seventy.
  • The Madras government also took a firm line on strikes, some of which turned violent, while Kanpur workers struck repeatedly, sometimes violently confronting the police.
• The Congress ministries struggled to respond when their own mass base turned against them. Their mediatory efforts succeeded to some extent in U.P. and Bihar, and partly in Madras, but not in Bombay, and they generally failed to satisfy their Left-wing critics.
  • They frequently treated militant protests, especially trade union struggles, as law-and-order problems, invoking Section 144 of the Criminal Code against agitating workers and arresting peasant and trade union leaders — drawing sharp criticism from the Left for suppressing peasants’ and workers’ organisations.

Gandhi’s Dilemma

• Gandhiji too believed ministry formation was heading towards a crisis, though for reasons distinct from the Communists’ critique.
  • He opposed militant agitation because he felt its covertly or overtly violent character threatened his non-violent strategy, having initially advised the ministries to rule without relying on police or army; he later argued that “violent speech or writing does not come under the protection of civil liberty.”
  • At the same time, he objected to the ministries’ frequent recourse to colonial law-and-order machinery against popular agitation, preferring reliance on political education of the masses against violence. He criticised Left-wing incitement to class violence while also restraining Right-wing confrontation with the Left, and defended the right of Socialists and Communists to organise so long as they abided by Congress methods.
  • He recognised the deeper dilemma: repeated use of law-and-order machinery risked eroding the Congress’s popular support among workers and peasants, making it harder to organise a future mass movement. In December 1938, he wrote that if the ministries found they “cannot run the State without the use of the police and the military,” it would be the clearest sign, in non-violent terms, that the Congress should give up office and “again wander in the wilderness in search of the Holy Grail.”

Did the Congress Ministries Meet Popular Expectations?

The achievements of the Congress Ministries over two years left several groups that had voted for the Congress — the industrial working class, the peasantry, and Dalits — feeling their hopes had not been fully met.

Dalits

• Dalits and their leaders remained unimpressed, viewing the ministries’ limited legislation on caste disabilities and temple entry as little more than “window dressing” — a token legislative programme rather than substantive change.

Industrial Working Class

• The formation of ministries in eight provinces initially raised jubilation and expectations from both labour and capital, leaving the Congress to continually balance the two.
  • The need to secure labour votes in 1937 had pushed the Congress to include labour-welfare promises in its manifesto; its victory therefore raised great hopes among workers, and several trade union leaders became labour ministers in Congress cabinets.
  • Trade union membership rose by 50%, particularly in Congress-ruled provinces, fuelling a sharp rise in industrial unrest in 1937–38 that alarmed Indian industrialists.
• Implementing its labour-welfare promises further irritated capitalists, as did the ministries’ conservative fiscal policies — facing financial stringency, provincial governments had little choice but to raise taxes such as property and sales tax, which business disliked.
  • Capitalist interests closed ranks in response, alarming the Congress high command, and by spring 1938 Congress policy shifted markedly to placate capital.
  • The clearest sign of this shift was the Bombay Trades Disputes Act (November 1938), which aimed to prevent both strikes and lockouts but was tilted heavily towards capitalists, marking a broader anti-labour turn in Congress policy.
    • Every other party condemned the Act, and its passage was immediately met with a general strike in Bombay.
  • This anti-labour mood spread to other provinces too, with industrial disputes gradually declining from 1939.
  • The shift in Congress’s industrial relations policy dispelled capitalist fears and brought about a broader rapprochement between Congress and business.
• In non-Congress Bengal, by contrast, Congress leaders were quick to support the 1937 general jute mill strike, seeing it as an opportunity to discredit the Fazlul Huq ministry and target the “white bosses” of the IJMA — Nehru even called it “a part of our freedom movement” — even as Congress governments in Bombay, Madras, and U.P. used similarly strong-arm tactics to control industrial unrest in their own provinces.
  • Business attitudes remained mixed and difficult to generalise: some businessmen in U.P. and Madras retained reservations about the Congress, while Muslim businessmen largely remained alienated from it.

Peasantry

• Pre-election peasant militancy had helped the Congress win in 1937, but the party subsequently struggled to meet its kisan voters’ hopes for radical change in agrarian relations.
  • Right-wing leaders such as Vallabhbhai Patel, Bhulabhai Desai, C. Rajagopalachari, and Rajendra Prasad, along with committed Gandhians favouring constructive work, preferred constitutional politics to radical agitation.
  • Yet ahead of the elections, they could not ignore the organisational base built by provincial kisan sabhas, and under Left pressure had agreed to include abolition of zamindari in the election manifesto in some provinces.
  • Socialists and right-wing leaders had acted in unison during the 1937 campaign, reaping the benefits in the Congress’s unexpectedly strong showing in several provinces.
• When Congress ministries took office from July 1937, rural masses hailed it as an emancipatory moment marking the arrival of an alternative authority — but even as ministry formation raised expectations and militancy among the peasantry, it also returned right-wingers to power, who then sought to pull the Congress back from what they saw as the socialists’ influence.
  • In Bihar, where the Kisan Sabha mobilised a powerful movement around bakasht land (land where permanent tenancies had been converted into short-term ones), the conservative provincial leadership instead renegotiated an alignment with landlords through formal “agreements.”
    • When the resulting tenancy legislation was significantly diluted under landlord pressure, peasants responded with a militant bakasht land movement in 1938–39 under Kisan Sabha leadership.
  • In U.P., Kisan Sabha activists were disillusioned when the provincial ministry blunted a 1938 tenancy legislation that had originally promised to halve rents.
  • In Orissa, kisan leaders were similarly frustrated by pro-landlord amendments to the proposed tenancy legislation, which the Governor blocked further until a mass Kisan Day rally on 1 September 1938 forced action.
• A further dilemma faced the Congress leadership over princely India: whether or not to support the Prajamandal movement.

Overall Assessment of the Congress Ministries

• On balance, the legislative and administrative record of the Congress Ministries was positive.
  • Nehru, a stern critic of the ministries in 1938–39, admitted in 1944: “Looking back, I am surprised at their achievements during a brief period of two years and a quarter, despite the innumerable difficulties that surrounded them.”
  • Even the Left’s expectations were, in large measure, fulfilled.
• One notable achievement was the firm handling of communal riots, with district magistrates and police officers instructed to take strong action against communal outbreaks.
• The Congress leadership foiled the British design of using constitutional reform to weaken the national movement, demonstrating instead how a constitutional structure could be used by a movement aiming at the capture of state power without being co-opted by it.
  • The Congress emerged stronger, not diverted from its central goal of self-government despite its engagement in day-to-day administration.
  • Office was used to enhance national consciousness and extend nationalist influence — including into the lower rungs of the bureaucracy — dealing a blow to the morale of the ICS (Indian Civil Service), many of whose officers came to believe British departure was only a matter of time.
  • In later years, especially during the Quit India Movement, the possibility that the Congress could return to power again — now a demonstrated reality — helped neutralise otherwise hostile elements such as landlords and bureaucrats, keeping many of them on the fence.
• Contrary to the hopes of the 1935 Act’s framers, provincial autonomy did not lead to a growth of provincialism or a weakening of the sense of Indian unity; the ministries instead evolved a common front vis-à-vis the Government of India, and despite factionalism, the Congress organisation as a whole remained disciplined.
  • When an all-India political crisis demanded it, the ministries resigned promptly, showing that office acceptance had indeed proved to be just one phase in the freedom struggle, not an end in itself; opportunists began leaving the party at this point.
  • The Congress also avoided the Left–Right split that the British had actively sought to encourage since 1934.
• Above all, the sight of Indians actually exercising state power struck at the colonial myth that Indians were “not fit to rule” — just as mass struggle had earlier struck at the myth of British invincibility.

Emerging Weaknesses within the Congress

• The period of ministry rule also exposed serious weaknesses within the Congress.
  • Factional strife and bickering grew on both ideological and personal grounds — for instance, factional squabbles in the Central Provinces led to the resignation of Dr N.B. Khare as premier.
  • The practice of bogus membership began to appear and grow, alongside a scramble for jobs and positions of advantage, and rising indiscipline among Congressmen.
  • Opportunists, self-seekers, and careerists — drawn by the appeal of associating with a ruling party — entered Congress ranks at various levels, made easier by the party’s open membership; casteism also crept into the search for power in some quarters.
• Gandhiji grew alarmed, writing in Harijan against the growing misuse of office and creeping corruption, remarking that he would rather give the Congress organisation “a decent burial” than tolerate rampant corruption, and advising that offices be given up in preparation for another phase of Satyagraha.
  • Nehru too felt the ministries’ positive role was wearing thin, writing to Gandhiji on 28 April 1938 that “Congress ministries are adapting themselves far too much to the old order and trying to justify it. We are sinking to the level of ordinary politicians.”

The Pirpur Committee

• The All India Muslim League set up the Pirpur Committee in 1938 to compile a detailed report on the alleged excesses of Congress Ministries (1937–39) in different provinces.
  • Its report accused the Congress of interfering with religious rites, suppressing Urdu in favour of Hindi, denying Muslims legitimate representation, and harming Muslim economic interests.

Resignation of the Congress Ministries (1939)

• Viceroy Linlithgow declared India at war with Germany on 3 September 1939 without consulting Indian political opinion, drawing strong Congress objections.
  • The Congress Working Committee offered cooperation only if a central Indian national government were formed and a commitment given to India’s independence after the war.
  • The Muslim League, by contrast, pledged its support to the British, with Jinnah calling on Muslims to extend “honourable co-operation” at this “critical and difficult juncture,” while seeking greater protection for Muslims from the Viceroy.
• Linlithgow refused the Congress’s demands, and on 22 October 1939, the Congress ministries resigned.
  • Both Linlithgow and Jinnah welcomed the resignations; on 2 December 1939, Jinnah called on Indian Muslims to observe 22 December 1939 as a “Day of Deliverance” from Congress rule.
• Gandhiji, too, welcomed the resignations, believing they would help cleanse the Congress of “rampant corruption,” writing to C. Rajagopalachari on 23 October 1939: “It is a bitter pill I know. But it was needed. It will drive away all the parasites from the body.”
• The resignations had one further positive effect: they brought the Congress’s Left and Right wings closer together around a shared policy on the question of participation in the war.