# Home Rule and the Lucknow Pact
**होम रूल और लखनऊ समझौता**

- Canonical page: https://indianepics.online/event/lucknow-pact-1916/
- Chapter: [Crown and the freedom struggle](https://indianepics.online/chapter/raj.md)
- Track: evidence (archaeology and documents)
- When: 1916 CE – 1917 CE
- Where: Lucknow (26.85, 80.95)
- Tags: political

## Summary

Tilak and Annie Besant launch Home Rule leagues in 1916; at Lucknow that December the Congress and the Muslim League agree a joint scheme.

1916 में तिलक और एनी बेसेंट ने होम रूल लीगें शुरू कीं; उसी दिसंबर लखनऊ में कांग्रेस और मुस्लिम लीग ने एक साझा योजना पर सहमति जताई।

## Account

Tilak, back from Mandalay, founded his Home Rule League at Belgaum in April 1916, and Annie Besant founded the All-India Home Rule League at Madras that September. Their branches, pamphlets and reading rooms carried nationalist politics beyond the councils to small towns. Besant's internment in June 1917 drew protest across India, and on 20 August 1917 the Secretary of State, Edwin Montagu, announced that British policy was the "progressive realisation of responsible government" in India.

At Lucknow in December 1916 the Congress, its moderates and extremists reunited after the split at Surat in 1907, and the Muslim League, with Jinnah prominent in both, adopted a common scheme of reforms. It asked for elected majorities in the councils and accepted separate electorates for Muslims, with more seats than their share of the population where they were a minority and fewer in Bengal and the Punjab, where they were a majority.

The pact is remembered as the high point of Congress–League cooperation, and also as the moment the Congress accepted separate electorates.

## Sources

- Sastri, The Congress-League Scheme: An Exposition (1917) — https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.71644
- Natesan (ed.), The Indian Demands: A Symposium on the Memorandum of the Nineteen and Speeches at the Congress and Moslem League (1917) — https://archive.org/details/indiandemandssym00gana

## Image

Bal Gangadhar Tilak. Unknown authorUnknown author, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3ABal_Gangadhar_Tilak.jpg

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