Motilal Nehru

Early life and legal career

Motilal Nehru was born into a Kashmiri Pandit family and built a highly successful legal practice at the Allahabad High Court, becoming one of the wealthiest lawyers in the United Provinces, with a lifestyle noted for its Western dress, furnishings and habits before his turn to nationalist politics. He was initially a moderate within Congress politics, favoring constitutional methods over confrontation with the colonial government, and his household in Allahabad, Anand Bhawan, became a center of political life in the region and later housed both Congress meetings and the family of his son Jawaharlal, who was educated in England at Harrow, Cambridge and the Inner Temple largely at Motilal's expense and direction.

Turn toward nationalist politics

The Jallianwala Bagh massacre of 1919 and Gandhi's subsequent leadership of the Non-Cooperation Movement moved Nehru toward more active nationalist politics; he gave up his legal practice, adopted homespun khadi, and was elected Congress president in 1919 and again for the 1928 session. He was arrested and imprisoned multiple times over the following decade for his role in nationalist agitation, including during the civil disobedience movement of 1930.

Swaraj Party and legislative politics

After the suspension of Non-Cooperation following the Chauri Chaura incident in 1922, Nehru broke with Congress's boycott of legislative councils and, with Chittaranjan Das, founded the Swaraj Party in 1923 to contest council elections and obstruct government business from within the legislatures, on the argument that a boycott left the councils entirely in the hands of moderates and loyalists willing to cooperate with the administration. The party won a significant bloc of seats in the Central Legislative Assembly and several provincial councils, with Nehru serving as leader of the party in the Central Assembly and leading its efforts to vote down government bills and budgets, oppose repressive legislation, and press for self-government through legislative means, a strategy that coexisted uneasily with the wider Congress movement's preference for extra-legislative agitation and that weakened after Das's death in 1925.

Nehru Report and later years

In 1928, following the appointment of the all-British Simon Commission to review constitutional reform without any Indian members, an omission that provoked widespread protest, Nehru chaired a committee appointed by an all-parties conference to draft a constitution for India in response to the British government's related challenge that Indians could not agree on one. The resulting Nehru Report proposed dominion status rather than full independence, a bicameral central legislature, and joint electorates rather than separate communal representation, a position that contributed to friction with Muhammad Ali Jinnah and the Muslim League, which rejected several of its terms, particularly on minority safeguards. The report's acceptance of dominion status rather than complete independence also put Motilal at odds with younger Congress radicals, including his own son Jawaharlal and Subhas Chandra Bose, who pressed for outright independence, or purna swaraj, a disagreement resolved at the Lahore session of Congress in December 1929, where Jawaharlal was elected president and the party adopted full independence as its formal goal. Motilal rejoined active Congress politics in his final years, participating in the 1930 civil disobedience movement and the Salt Satyagraha period despite declining health, and died in February 1931 shortly after his release from a term of imprisonment.