Publisher's Synopsis
Lala Lajpat Rai was one of the outstanding leaders of modern India, a contemporary of Dadabhai Naroji, Tilak, Gokhale and Gandhi. His public life spanned the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first three decades of the twentieth century. He practiced law at the Lahore Chief Court and built up a lucrative practice, but was drawn very early into public activities pertaining to religious, educational and social reforms and then into nationalist politics. Lajpat Rai was one of the foremost leaders of the Indian National Congress. His arrest and deportation without trial to Burma in 1907 created a great sensation in India. He spent the war years (1914-18) in the United States propagating the Indian case for self- government. He returned to India in 1920 and had the honour of presiding over the Calcutta session of the Indian National Congress which approved of Gandhi's campaign for non-cooperation with the government. He was deputy leader of the Swaraj Party in the Legislative Assembly and played a prominent role in provincial as well as national politics in the 1920s. While leading a demonstration against the Simmon Commision at Lahore in 1928 he received injuries in an assault by the police which hastened his death. The third volume in the series covers the period from January 1907 to March 1909. during this period Lajpat Rai found himself in the centre of a political storm. In May 1907 he was arrested and deported to Mandalay in Burma by the Government of India by the recommendation of Sir Denzil Ibbetson, the Lieutenant-Governor of the Punjab, who suspected that Lajpat Rai was planning a mass uprising on the fiftieth anniversary of the Mutiny of 1857. As this book would show Lajpat Rai was released after six months when the Viceroy, Lord Minto, realised his mistake. Soon after his return to India, Lajpat Rai's name was proposed by the extremist group for the presidentship of the Surat session of the Indian National Congress. But as an act of self-abnegation he declined the honour and instead made efforts to prevent a clash between the two Congress groups. The session had a disastrous end, leading to a split between the Moderates and the Extremists which lasted for nine years. Lajpat Rai undertook a seven-month tour of England in 1908-9 to put across the case for Indian self-government to the British press, parliament and people while the Reforms Bill was on the parliamentary anvil.
