Nehru Report (1928)

Background and contents

The Simon Commission, appointed by Britain in 1927 to review constitutional reform, contained no Indian members and was boycotted across the political spectrum. In response, an All Parties Conference set up a committee under Motilal Nehru, with members including Tej Bahadur Sapru, Subhas Chandra Bose, and M. R. Jayakar, to draft a constitution that Indians themselves could put forward. The resulting Nehru Report recommended dominion status within the British Empire, a fully responsible parliamentary government, linguistic reorganization of provinces, a bill of fundamental rights, and — most contentiously — joint electorates rather than separate communal electorates, with reserved seats for Muslims only in provinces where they were a minority and only for a limited period.

Reception and consequences

The report's rejection of permanent separate electorates and its limits on reserved seats alienated sections of the Muslim League, and Muhammad Ali Jinnah's attempt to secure amendments at the subsequent All Parties Convention in Calcutta failed. Jinnah responded the following year with his Fourteen Points, reasserting demands for separate electorates and communal safeguards, a rift that widened the gap between the Congress and the League over the following two decades. Within the Congress itself, younger leaders — including Jawaharlal Nehru and Subhas Chandra Bose — pushed at the Calcutta session of December 1928 for a demand of complete independence (purna swaraj) rather than dominion status, and the Congress issued Britain a one-year ultimatum on the question, a deadline that lapsed and led to the Purna Swaraj declaration of January 1930.