Nehru Report

The Nehru Report was submitted in August 1928 as the final document of a committee appointed by the All Parties Conference convened at Bombay and Delhi to draft a constitution for India. The committee was chaired by Motilal Nehru, with Jawaharlal Nehru as secretary, and included Tej Bahadur Sapru, Subhas Chandra Bose, M. S. Aney, Mangal Singh, Ali Imam, Shuaib Qureshi and G. R. Pradhan. It was a direct Indian response to the challenge thrown down by Lord Birkenhead, Secretary of State, who taunted Indians to produce an agreed constitution, and to the all-white Simon Commission appointed in 1927, which the Congress and a section of the Muslim League had boycotted. The Report represented the first serious attempt by Indians themselves to frame the principles of a self-governing constitution.

Its central demand was dominion status on the lines of the self-governing dominions, with full responsible government — a position that marked a compromise with the younger nationalists led by Jawaharlal Nehru and Subhas Bose, who pressed for Purna Swaraj (complete independence). The Report proposed a bicameral federal legislature at the centre with a responsible cabinet, provincial autonomy, and a unitary residue of powers vesting in the centre. It enumerated a detailed list of nineteen fundamental rights, including universal adult suffrage, equality before law, and freedom of conscience — anticipating Part III of the future Constitution. Crucially on the communal question it rejected separate electorates, proposing instead joint electorates with reservation of seats for minorities in proportion to population in provinces where they were in a minority, and it declined to concede separate Muslim representation in Punjab and Bengal.

It was precisely these communal provisions that doomed the Report. Muhammad Ali Jinnah responded at the 1928 All Parties Convention at Calcutta with his Fourteen Points (March 1929), demanding one-third Muslim representation in the central legislature, separate electorates, and residuary powers for the provinces. The rejection of the Nehru Report is conventionally treated as the parting of ways between the Congress and the Muslim League and a milestone on the road to the two-nation theory. The British government, for its part, never accepted dominion status; the Congress's own Lahore session of 1929 under Jawaharlal Nehru superseded the Report by adopting Purna Swaraj as the goal and launching civil disobedience.

For the examinations the Nehru Report is heavily tested. In UPSC Modern History (GS Paper I) it appears as the first indigenous constitutional draft and is contrasted with the Simon Commission, the Fourteen Points, and the later Government of India Act 1935; expect questions on its authors, its stand on separate electorates, and its fundamental-rights chapter. In CSS Pakistan Affairs it is examined from the Muslim perspective as the trigger for Jinnah's Fourteen Points and a grievance underpinning Muslim separatism. The typical question angle asks why the Report failed and what it reveals about the hardening of communal politics in late-1920s India.