C. Rajagopalachari: Last Governor-General, CR Formula and Swatantra Party

C Rajagopalachari (1878 to 1972), known everywhere as Rajaji, was a lawyer from the Tamil country who became one of Mahatma Gandhi’s closest lieutenants, premier of Madras in 1937, the author of the 1944 CR formula and the only Indian ever to hold the office of Governor-General of India. He later broke with the Congress, founded the Swatantra Party in 1959 and was among the first three recipients of the Bharat Ratna in 1954.

Most readers carry a flat picture of him: a loyal Gandhian who simply filled the last ceremonial seat before the Republic. The record is more argumentative than that. Rajaji opposed Quit India, offered the Muslim League a plebiscite on separation two years before the Cabinet Mission, imposed Hindi on Madras schools in the 1930s and campaigned against Hindi as an official language in the 1960s. This note keeps those turns in order and separates what is documented from what is merely repeated.

C Rajagopalachari at a Glance

The table below gives the facts a revision note needs. Where sources disagree, the disagreement is shown rather than hidden.

Who Was Rajaji Before 1937?

He was a successful lawyer who gave up practice to work full time for Gandhi, and by the early 1920s he was one of the inner circle. Britannica records that he edited Gandhi’s journal Young India while Gandhi was in prison, and that Gandhi called him “the keeper of my conscience”. The two families were later joined by marriage: Rajaji’s daughter Lakshmi married Gandhi’s son Devdas.

His record in the national movement runs through the main Gandhian campaigns:

• the protests against the Rowlatt Acts (1919), which allowed detention without trial in political cases;
• the Non-Cooperation Movement of 1920 to 1922;
• the Civil Disobedience Movement of 1930, when he led a salt march from Tiruchirappalli to Vedaranyam on the Thanjavur coast in April 1930 and broke the salt law there;
• 20 years on the Congress Working Committee, from 1922 to 1942.

Vedaranyam is the detail to fix. Dandi was the Gujarat march; Vedaranyam was its counterpart in the Madras Presidency, and Rajaji was the man who organized it. Any account of how the Salt Satyagraha spread beyond Gujarat comes back to this pairing.

What Did Rajaji Do as Premier of Madras?

After the 1937 provincial elections held under the Government of India Act, 1935, Rajaji became premier of Madras, the title then used for a provincial head of government. His ministry lasted until 1939, when the Congress ministries resigned in protest against Britain declaring India a party to the Second World War without consulting Indian leaders.

The ministry’s record is mixed, and a fair assessment has to hold both sides. On one side sit the reforms:

• prohibition, the ban on liquor that remained his lifelong cause, paired with a sales tax to replace the lost excise revenue;
• the Agricultural Debt Relief Act of 1938, to ease peasant indebtedness;
• the Temple Entry Authorization and Indemnity Act, 1939, which removed the legal risk for temple trustees who opened their temples to Dalits. On 8 July 1939, A. Vaidyanatha Iyer led a group of Dalits into the Meenakshi temple at Madurai.

On the other side sits Hindi. The ministry made Hindi a compulsory subject in schools across a Tamil-speaking province, and the protests it set off are the opening chapter of Tamil Nadu’s anti-Hindi politics, a thread later picked up by the Self-Respect Movement and the Dravidian parties. Britannica notes that Rajaji reversed himself in later life, backing English as the language of government. The man who introduced compulsory Hindi in 1937 ended up on the other side of the 1960s language debate.

The CR Formula of 1944 Explained

The CR formula was Rajaji’s proposal to break the deadlock between the Congress and the Muslim League by conceding a conditional, plebiscite-based separation. He drew it up while most Congress leaders were in jail after the Quit India Movement, a movement he had opposed. He showed it to Gandhi in prison and got his assent to take it to Jinnah.

What the formula proposed

The Congress party’s own account of the talks lists three working parts:

• the League would endorse the demand for independence and cooperate with the Congress in a provisional government during the war;
• after the war, a commission would demarcate contiguous districts in the north-west and east where Muslims were in an absolute majority, and a plebiscite of all inhabitants of those districts would decide on separation;
• if separation was chosen, mutual agreements would safeguard defense, commerce and communications.

Read the second point slowly, because it is the whole trick of the formula. The vote was by all inhabitants, not by Muslims alone, and it counted district by district, not province by province. Punjab and Bengal would have been split. That’s why Jinnah dismissed the offer as a “maimed, mutilated and moth eaten Pakistan” and held out for the whole of both provinces.

What happened next

Gandhi used the formula as the basis of his talks with Jinnah at Jinnah’s Bombay residence from 9 to 27 September 1944. The talks failed. Inside the Congress, the formula was resented by leaders in jail; outside, it marked the first time a senior Congress leader had accepted that some form of partition could be negotiated. The idea of a divided Punjab and Bengal returned in 1947, which is why historians read the CR formula as a preview of the final settlement rather than a dead end. Its place in the sequence is easy to remember: Cripps Mission (1942), CR formula (1944), Wavell Plan (1945), Cabinet Mission (1946).

Rajaji as Governor-General and Chief Minister

At Independence, Rajaji became the first Governor of West Bengal, the province carved out of Bengal by Partition. On 21 June 1948 he took over from Lord Mountbatten as Governor-General and held the office until 26 January 1950, when the Constitution came into force and the President replaced the Governor-General. Every holder before him had been British. The site’s note on the last Governor-General of India maps the full list from Warren Hastings onward.

The jobs that followed show how much weight he carried in the first years of the Republic:

• Union Home Minister, succeeding Sardar Patel after Patel’s death in December 1950, until he resigned in 1951 over differences with Nehru;
• Chief Minister of Madras, 1952 to 1954, as the Congress’s consensus choice after the 1952 elections left it short of a majority;
• the Bharat Ratna, announced in the Gazette of India on 15 August 1954 alongside Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan and C. V. Raman, the award’s first batch.

His second term as Chief Minister ended in controversy. The Modified Scheme of Elementary Education of 1953 cut school hours at the elementary level, and critics led by the Dravidian movement called it Kula Kalvi Thittam, the “hereditary education scheme”, arguing it pushed children back into their parents’ occupations. He resigned in 1954, officially on health grounds, and K. Kamaraj succeeded him as Chief Minister.

Swatantra Party: Rajaji’s Break with Nehru

The Swatantra Party was Rajaji’s answer to what he saw as the Congress’s drift toward state control of the economy. He resigned from the Congress in 1957, formed the Congress Reform Committee with other dissidents and, in 1959, merged it into the new Swatantra (Independent) Party. Britannica describes the party as conservative and anti-communist, standing for free enterprise and less central control over the states.

The numbers show how far the idea traveled. Swatantra won 18 Lok Sabha seats in 1962 and 44 in 1967, when it became the single largest opposition party in the fourth Lok Sabha. For a party less than a decade old, competing against a dominant Congress, that was a serious showing. It faded after 1971, but it remains the clearest example of an organized liberal, pro-market opposition in India’s first two decades.

The usual confusion is ideological. Swatantra was not a regional or caste party; it drew support from former princely families, business groups and the old Congress right, and it argued from economics, not identity.

Writings and the Rajaji Persona

Rajaji wrote as seriously as he campaigned, and his retellings of the two epics carried his name well beyond politics. His English retelling of the Mahabharata came out in 1951. His Tamil prose Ramayana, Chakravarti Tirumagan, won the Sahitya Akademi Award for Tamil in 1958. People rarely expect a Governor-General on a literature list, which is exactly why the fact is worth remembering.

The two books also explain the scholar-statesman image that clings to him. Few politicians of his rank have retold a national epic in plain prose for ordinary readers, and he did it twice, in English and in Tamil.

What Do Historians Dispute About Rajaji?

Three arguments recur, and an answer that names them reads as better informed than one that only praises him.

The first is Partition. Supporters read the CR formula as realism that might have saved Punjab and Bengal from the violence of 1947. Critics read it as the moment a senior Congress leader conceded the principle of division.

The second is language and education. The compulsory Hindi of 1937 and the elementary scheme of 1953 are the two decisions Tamil politics still holds against him, while his later defense of English is cited by the same critics with approval.

The third is economics. To his admirers, Swatantra was an early warning about the costs of a controlled economy; to his opponents, it defended princes and big business against land reform. Both readings use the same facts. The difference is the weight given to them.

Even his birth year is not settled: most Indian sources give 10 December 1878, Britannica gives 1879. Use 1878 in an answer and know that the other date exists.

Rajaji Today

The most recent official recognition came on 23 February 2026, when President Droupadi Murmu inaugurated a bust of Rajagopalachari at Rashtrapati Bhavan, at the Grand Open Staircase opposite the statue of Mahatma Gandhi, replacing the bust of Edwin Lutyens. The President’s Secretariat framed it as part of a series of steps to shed the colonial mindset, a theme the government ties to the Panch Pran pledges. A Rajaji Utsav exhibition on his life was open to the public from 24 February to 1 March 2026.

The President’s release adds a small story worth keeping: when Rajaji moved into Government House, he hung portraits of Ramakrishna Paramahamsa and Mahatma Gandhi in his room.

How to Study C Rajagopalachari for Exams

Rajaji sits in GS Paper I across two chapters: the national movement (Civil Disobedience, the 1937 ministries, Quit India and the pre-Partition negotiations) and post-Independence consolidation (the transition from Dominion to Republic, early Center-state politics and the rise of opposition parties). Prelims treats him as a source of one-line facts. Mains uses him as an example inside broader questions, for instance the 2025 GS Paper I question “Trace India’s consolidation process during early phase of independence in terms of polity, economy, education and international relations.“, where the Governor-General years and the Swatantra opposition both fit. History accounts for 184 of the 1,403 questions in the site’s Prelims question bank, and the national movement is its densest block.

Revision facts to fix:

• Vedaranyam salt march, April 1930, the Madras counterpart of Dandi.
• Premier of Madras 1937 to 1939: prohibition, debt relief, temple entry, compulsory Hindi.
• CR formula, 1944: district-wise plebiscite of all inhabitants; Gandhi-Jinnah talks 9 to 27 September 1944.
• Governor-General 21 June 1948 to 26 January 1950, the only Indian.
• Bharat Ratna 1954, first batch, with Radhakrishnan and Raman.
• Swatantra Party 1959; 44 Lok Sabha seats and largest opposition party in 1967.
• Sahitya Akademi Award (Tamil) 1958 for Chakravarti Tirumagan.

The common confusions come in pairs. Rajaji was the last Governor-General but not the first; Mountbatten was the first of independent India. He was the first Governor of West Bengal, not of Bengal Presidency. The CR formula offered a plebiscite of all inhabitants, not of Muslims only. And the Swatantra Party is not the Swaraj Party of 1923, founded by C. R. Das and Motilal Nehru; the shared initials C.R. make this a favorite trap.

For your preparation, Rajaji is less a single topic than a thread that runs from 1920 to 1967. Learn him as the leader who kept disagreeing with his own side, on Quit India, on Pakistan, on planning and on Hindi, and a whole set of questions on dissent within the national movement becomes easier to answer.

Frequently Asked Questions

Practice Questions

Prelims

1. Who organized a salt march to Vedaranyam on the Thanjavur coast in April 1930 to break the salt law?

• (a) V. O. Chidambaram Pillai
• (b) C. Rajagopalachari
• (c) K. Kamaraj
• (d) S. Satyamurti

Answer: (b) Rajaji led the Tiruchirappalli to Vedaranyam march, the Madras counterpart of Dandi.

2. Consider the following statements about the CR formula: 1. It proposed a plebiscite in which only Muslim voters of the demarcated districts would take part. 2. It formed the basis of the Gandhi-Jinnah talks of September 1944. Which of the statements given above is/are correct?

• (a) 1 only
• (b) 2 only
• (c) Both 1 and 2
• (d) Neither 1 nor 2

Answer: (b) The plebiscite was to be of all inhabitants of the districts, not Muslims alone; statement 2 is correct.

3. Consider the following statements: 1. C. Rajagopalachari was the first Governor of West Bengal. 2. C. Rajagopalachari was the first Governor-General of independent India. 3. C. Rajagopalachari received the Bharat Ratna in 1954. Which of the statements given above are correct?

• (a) 1 and 2 only
• (b) 2 and 3 only
• (c) 1 and 3 only
• (d) 1, 2 and 3

Answer: (c) Mountbatten was the first Governor-General of independent India; Rajaji was the last.

4. The Swatantra Party, founded in 1959, is best described as a party that advocated:

• (a) linguistic reorganization of the Madras Presidency
• (b) free enterprise and reduced central control of the economy
• (c) council entry to wreck the legislatures from within
• (d) a separate Dravidian state

Answer: (b) Swatantra argued for free enterprise against Nehruvian planning; council entry describes the Swaraj Party of 1923.

5. C. Rajagopalachari won the Sahitya Akademi Award for which of the following?

• (a) An English translation of the Bhagavad Gita
• (b) A Tamil prose retelling of the Ramayana, Chakravarti Tirumagan
• (c) A history of the Madras Presidency
• (d) A collection of Tamil short stories on rural life

Answer: (b) He won the 1958 Sahitya Akademi Award for Tamil for Chakravarti Tirumagan.

Mains

1. Many voices had strengthened and enriched the nationalist movement during the Gandhian phase. Elaborate. (15 marks, 250 words) Previous year: Mains 2019, GS Paper I.
2. The CR formula of 1944 has been read both as a realistic attempt to avoid Partition and as a concession of its principle. Critically examine. (15 marks, 250 words)
3. Evaluate the record of the Rajagopalachari ministry in Madras (1937-39) with reference to social reform and language policy. (10 marks, 150 words)
4. How did the office of the Governor-General change between 1947 and 1950, and what was the significance of an Indian holding it? (10 marks, 150 words)
5. The Swatantra Party offered the first organized liberal challenge to the Congress system. Discuss its ideas and electoral impact. (15 marks, 250 words)