Home Rule and the Lucknow Pact

Tilak came out of jail in 1914 with his health broken, into a country where the fiery mood of the previous decade had faded.

He set himself three tasks, and none of them is a demand: all three are jobs of repair.

First, to reunite the two sides of the Congress, split since Surat in 1907. This happened at the Lucknow session in 1916.

Second, to promote Hindu–Muslim cooperation. At the same session came the Lucknow Pact between the Congress and the All-India Muslim League.

Under it, the Congress accepted separate electorates for Muslims (seats where only Muslims would vote) in elections to the provincial and central legislative councils, bodies the colonial government had set up decades earlier with very limited powers.

Third, home rule. With Annie Besant (an Irish philosopher, reformer and activist who became a passionate supporter of Indian self-government), Tilak launched the Home Rule Movement in 1916.

Notice what it asked for: self-government for India within the British Empire. Not the full independence the earlier Nationalists demanded, but real control over India's own affairs, as a practical first step.

The British were not ready to give even this. And that refusal is what pushed the struggle into a new stage of mass political action.