Positive Gains

The Home Rule Leagues and the associated activities had some positive effects and contributed to the fresh direction that the freedom struggle was to take in the coming years. The Home Rule Movement marked a transition between the deliberative and rather inactive nature of the Congress till then and the Gandhian phase that was to come with its mass involvement in the struggle for freedom.

(i) The movement shifted the emphasis from the educated elite to the masses and permanently deflected the movement from the course mapped by the Moderates.

(ii) It created an organisational link between the town and the country, which was to prove crucial in later years when the national movement entered its mass phase in a true sense.

(iii) It created a generation of ardent nationalists.

(iv) It prepared the masses for politics of the Gandhian

style.

(v) The August 1917 declaration of Montagu and the

Montford reforms were influenced by the Home Rule agitation.

(vi) The efforts of Tilak and Annie Besant towards the

Moderate-Extremist reunion at Lucknow (1916) revived the Congress as an effective instrument of Indian nationalism.

(vii) The home rule movement lent a new dimension and a sense of urgency to the national movement.