(a) How did the Business class relate itself to the Civil Disobedience Movement? Explain with examples.

(i) During the First World War, Indian merchants and industrialists had made huge profits and become powerful. Keen on expanding their business, they now reacted against colonial policies that restricted business activities.

(ii) They wanted protection against imports of foreign goods, and a rupee-sterling foreign exchange ratio that would discourage imports.

(iii) To organise business interests, they formed the Indian Industrial and Commercial Congress and the Federation of the Indian Chamber of Commerce and Industries (FICCI).

(iv) Led by prominent industrialists like PurshottamdasThakurdas and G.D. Birla, the industrialists attacked colonial control over the Indian economy, and supported the Civil Disobedience Movement when it was first launched.

(v) They gave financial assistance and refused to buy or sell imported goods.

(vi) Most businessmen came to see Swaraj as a time when colonial restriction on business would no longer exist and trade and industry would flourish without constraints.

(vii) But after the failure of the Round Table Conference, business groups were no longer uniformly enthusiastic. They were apprehensive of the spread of militant activities, and worried about prolonged disruption of business.

(b) ‘Workers of Assam had their own understanding of Mahatma Gandhi and the notion of Swaraj.’ Explain with examples.

(i) For plantation workers in Assam, freedom meant the right to move freely in and out of the confined space in which they were enclosed, and it meant retaining a link with the village from which they had come.

(ii) Under the Inland Emigration Act of $\displaystyle 1859$, plantation workers were not permitted to leave the tea gardens without permission, and in fact they were rarely given such permission.

(iii) When they heard of the Non-Cooperation Movement they defied the authorities, left plantation and headed home.

(iv) They, however, never reached their destination. Stranded on the way by a railway and steamer strike, they were caught by the police and brutally beaten up.

(v) The visions of these movements were not defined by the Congress Programme. They interpreted the term Swaraj in their own ways, imagining it to be a time when all suffering and all troubles would be over.

(vi) Yet, when the tribals chanted Gandhiji’s name and raised slogans demanding ‘Swatantra Bharat’, they were also emotionally relating to an all-India agitation.

(vii) When they acted in the name of Mahatma Gandhi, or linked their movement to that of the Congress, they were identifying with a movement which went beyond the limits of their immediate locality.