---
title: "All India Home Rule League (1916): UPSC Notes"
description: "The All India Home Rule League, founded in 1916, sought self-government for India and is essential for understanding modern Indian history and UPSC exams."
url: "https://modeldiplomat.com/learn/glossary/all-india-home-rule-league"
---

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Model Diplomat Research Team · Last reviewed June 22, 2026

TL;DR

- The All India Home Rule League was an early-twentieth-century political movement demanding self-government for India within the British Empire, founded in 1916.
- Why were there two Home Rule Leagues instead of one?
- How did the Home Rule Leagues differ from the Indian National Congress?
- What was the connection between the Home Rule movement and the Montagu Declaration of 1917?
- Why did the Home Rule Leagues decline after 1918?

[Civil Service & Diplomatic Exams](https://modeldiplomat.com/learn/civil-services/glossary)Updated June 22, 2026

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### Indian National Congress

The All India Home Rule League denotes a pair of parallel organisations launched in 1916 to demand swaraj, or self-government, for India within the British Empire on the model of the white settler dominions such as Canada and Australia. The movement drew its name and inspiration from the Irish Home Rule agitation led by figures like Charles Stewart Parnell and the Irish Parliamentary Party, and its immediate trigger was the political vacuum created by the lapse of effective Congress activity after the 1907 Surat Split, the death of Gopal Krishna Gokhale in 1915, and the dislocation of the First World War (1914–1918). The wartime promise of constitutional advance in exchange for Indian loyalty and the Defence of India Act of 1915, which curtailed civil liberties, together sharpened nationalist demand for a concrete timetable toward responsible government. The leagues operated as agitational pressure groups rather than parties contesting power, working alongside and within the Indian National Congress.

### All-India Muslim League

The Home Rule Leagues must be distinguished from the Indian National Congress within which they operated, and from the later Non-Cooperation Movement that superseded them. Whereas the Congress before 1916 functioned through annual sessions and constitutional petitioning, the leagues introduced continuous, year-round agitation organised down to the district level, anticipating the mass mobilisation Mahatma Gandhi would institutionalise. The leagues are also distinct from the Lucknow Pact, concluded in December 1916, which restored unity between Congress moderates and extremists and forged a Congress–Muslim League entente; the leagues exploited the energised atmosphere the Pact created without being identical to it. Unlike Gandhi's later programme, the Home Rule movement explicitly sought self-government within the Empire, not complete independence.

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In June 1917 the Madras government interned Annie Besant, founder of the All India Home Rule League, an act that provoked nationwide protest and secured her release by September and her election as Congress president that December.

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