Balgangadhar Tilak who served a jail sentence from 1908-1914, returned to the Congress which had now become more open to him after the disappointment of the Council elections under the Morley Minto reforms.

By 1914-15 the swadeshi movement, the efforts at council entry and influencing the administration from within and the revolutionary movement had all spent themselves. It was a time for a new thrust to the national movement that was to come from the Home Rule Movement of Annie Besant and Tilak.

Tilak worked from within the Congress to set up a kind of agitational network through his Home Rule League, which he set up in April 1916. At about the same time Theosophist leader Annie Besant rose to great prominence and proposed to start agitation for a great measure of self-government for the Indians. Besant also proposed to set up a Home Rule League in the country modeled on the Irish Home Rule
movement to spread awareness. Besant’s League was set up in September 1916.

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:

(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.

Thus 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.

Must read: Why the Home Rule agitation proved to be short-lived?

Why the Home Rule League Movement started?

External link: https://magazines.odisha.gov.in/Orissareview/2014/August/engpdf/46-49.pdf