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 ninth volume in the series opens in February 1920, when Lajpat Rai had just returned to India after spending nearly six years abroad, and covers the next ten months. A year earlier, while in America, he had been stirred by the news from India and expressed admiration for Gandhi's strict adherence to his principles. However, at the Calcutta Special Congress over which he presided, Lajpat Rai remained equivocal on Gandhi's resolution on non-cooperation with the government. He even publicly supported V.J. Patel's dissent to Gandhi's programme and cast doubts on the feasibility of his methods. But three months later at the Nagpur Congress, he, along with V.J. Patel and other leaders, decided to fall in line and strongly refuted the arguments of the opponents of Gandhi and called upon the country to carry out Gandhi's programme. Lajpat Rai started an Urdu paper, Bande Mataram, and established the Tilak School of Politics to impart education for political work and train experts in politics and economics. He also presided over the first session of the All India Trade Union Congress and emphasised the need for organising the workers, making them class conscious and educating them in the ways and interests of commonwealth. He continued to take interest in other fields of creative activities, such as education and foreign affairs, which had a bearing on the nationalist struggle.
