Towards Civil Disobedience In February , Mahatma Gandhi decided to withdraw the Non-Cooperation Movement. He felt the movement was turning violent in many places and satyagrahis needed to be properly trained before they would be ready for mass struggles. Within the Congress, some leaders were by now tired of mass struggles and wanted to participate in elections to the provincial councils that had been set up by the Government of India Act of . They felt that it was important to oppose British policies within the councils, argue for reform and also demonstrate that these councils were not truly democratic.
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 for full independence.
In such a situation of internal debate and dissension two factors again shaped Indian politics towards the late 1920s. The first was the effect of the worldwide economic depression. Agricultural prices began to fall from and collapsed after . As the demand for agricultural goods fell and exports declined, peasants found it difficult to sell their harvests and pay their revenue.
By , the countryside was in turmoil. Against this background the new Tory government in Britain constituted a Statutory Commission under Sir John Simon. Set up in response to the nationalist movement, the commission was to look into the functioning of the constitutional system in India and suggest changes. The problem was that the commission did not have a single Indian member.
They were all British. When the Simon Commission arrived in India in , it was greeted with the slogan ‘Go back Simon’. All parties, including the Congress and the Muslim League, participated in the demonstrations. In an effort to win them over, the viceroy, Lord Irwin, announced in October , a vague offer of ‘dominion status’ for India in an unspecified future, and a Round Table Conference to discuss a future constitution.
This did not satisfy the Congress leaders. The radicals within the Congress,