Surat Congress and the aftermath (age 36)

All knew that the Surat meeting of the Congress would be a decisive one in measuring the strength of the Moderates and the Nationalists. When the meeting convenes, the Nationalists are there in strength with Tilak, Sri Aurobindo, B.C. Chatterji, Khaparde and others. There is a major clash between the two parties and Congress adjourns before approval of either party’s agenda.

It was in Surat that the Congress split into a conservative and an extremist wing. Historians had all along supposed that Tilak was responsible for the break-up, although he denied it himself time and again. A letter of Sri Aurobindo’s was published in 1954, written twenty years before, in which the truth finally surfaced: ‘History very seldom registers the things that were decisive but took place behind the veil; it records the show in front of the curtain. Very few people know that it was I (without consulting Tilak) who gave the order that led to the breaking of the Congress …’