The Home Rule Movement was the Indian response to the First World War in a less charged but a more effective way than the response of Indians living abroad which took the form of the romantic Ghadr adventure.

Prominent leaders—Bal Gangadhar Tilak, Annie Besant, G.S. Khaparde, Sir S. Subramania Iyer, Joseph Baptista, and Muhammad Ali Jinnah among others—got together and decided that it was necessary to have a national alliance that would work throughout the year (unlike the Congress which had annual sessions) with the main objective of demanding self-government or home rule for all of India within the
British commonwealth. This alliance was to be the All India Home Rule League along the lines of the Irish Home Rule League.

In the end, however, two Home Rule Leagues were launched—one by Bal Gangadhar Tilak and the other by Annie Besant, both with the aim of beginning a new trend of aggressive politics.

Some of the factors leading to the formation of the Home Rule Movement were as follows:

(i) A section of the nationalists felt that popular pressure was required to attain concessions from the
government.

(ii) The Moderates were disillusioned with the Morley – Minto reforms.

(iii) People were feeling the burden of wartime miseries caused by high taxation and a rise in prices, and were ready to participate in any aggressive movement of protest.

(iv) The war, being fought among the major imperialist powers of the day and backed by naked propaganda against each other, exposed the myth of white superiority.

(v) Tilak was ready to assume leadership after his release in June 1914, and had made conciliatory gestures— to the government reassuring it of his loyalty and to the Moderates that he wanted, like the Irish Home Rulers, a reform of the administration and not an overthrow of the government. He also admitted that the acts of violence had only served to retard the pace of political progress in India.
He urged all Indians to assist the British government in its hour of crisis.

(vi) Annie Besant, the Irish theosophist based in India since 1896, had decided to enlarge the sphere of her activities to include the building of a movement for home rule on the lines of the Irish Home Rule Leagues.

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

External link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Home_Rule_movement