Home Rule and the Lucknow Pact

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.