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| Image Credit-britannica |
- Born: May 6, 1861, Delhi India
- Died: February 6, 1931 (age 69) Lucknow India
- Founder: Swaraj Party
- Political Affiliation: Swaraj Party
- Role in: Non-cooperation Movement
Biography of Motilal Nehru, Indian freedom fighter and political leader
Motilal Nehru, whose full name was Pandit Motilal Nehru. He was born on May 6, 1861, in Delhi, India. He died on February 6, 1931, in Lucknow. He was a noted lawyer and a leader of the Indian independence movement, a co-founder of the Swaraj ("Self-Government") party, and the father of India's first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru.
Motilal, a member of a prosperous Brahmin family of Kashmiri origin, quickly established an advocacy profession earning a prestigious law degree, and began practice in the Allahabad High Court in 1896. He left politics until middle age, when in 1907, in Allahabad, he presided over a provincial convention.
The convention of the Indian National Congress (Congress Party), a political organization striving for a position of dominance for India. He was considered a moderate until 1919 (who advocated constitutional reform, unlike the revolutionaries who took the constitutional path of agitation), when he lost faith in British policies and published his new radical ideas in a daily newspaper, Delivered to the public through The Independent.
The Jallianwala Bagh incident in Amritsar in 1919 raised him against the British. The massacre of hundreds of innocent Indians by the British in the Amritsar incident prompted Motilal to join Mahatma Gandhi's non-cooperation movement, give up his career in law and switch to a simpler, non-English style of life. In 1921, both he and Jawaharlal Nehru were arrested by the British and imprisoned for six months.
In 1923 Motilal, along with Chiranjan Das, helped to establish the Swaraj Party (1923–27), whose policy was to win elections to the Central Legislative Assembly and disrupt its proceedings from within. In 1928 he wrote the Congress Party's Nehru Report, a future constitution for independent India, based on granting Dominion status. After the British rejected these proposals, Motilal participated in the Civil Disobedience Movement of 1930, which was related to the Salt March, for which he was imprisoned. He died (6, 1931) soon after his release.
