Since the decade of the 1920s, the national movement acquired various ideological strands and thereby expanded its social base. Discuss.

After Non-Cooperation (1920-22), the national movement ceased to be a single stream. Competing yet complementary ideologies emerged through the 1920s, each pulling new social groups into anti-colonial politics.

New ideological strands

• Gandhian mass nationalism: satyagraha, khadi and constructive work made politics accessible to peasants and women — Bardoli (1928) showed disciplined peasant power.
• Swarajists (1923): C. R. Das and Motilal Nehru entered councils to expose them from within, keeping politics alive during the post-1922 lull.
• Socialist-communist stream: AITUC (1920), the CPI's foundation at Kanpur (1925) and workers' and peasants' parties organised industrial labour; the 1928 Bombay textile strike and the Meerut Conspiracy Case (1929) revealed its reach.
• Revolutionary nationalism matured ideologically: the HRA (1924) became the avowedly socialist HSRA (1928), with Bhagat Singh giving revolution a secular, egalitarian content.
• Left nationalism within Congress: Jawaharlal Nehru and Subhas Bose pressed for complete independence, culminating in the Purna Swaraj resolution at Lahore (1929).
• Anti-caste assertion: Ambedkar's Bahishkrit Hitakarini Sabha (1924) and Mahad Satyagraha (1927), and Periyar's Self-Respect Movement (1925), forced social justice onto the national agenda.

Expansion of the social base

• Peasants (kisan sabhas in UP and Bihar, Bardoli), industrial workers, students and youth leagues, and women (All India Women's Conference, 1927; picketing and prabhat pheris) entered organised politics in unprecedented numbers.
• Business groups organised through FICCI (1927), while the Simon Commission boycott (1928) and the debates around the Nehru Report drew nearly all shades of opinion into a common constitutional conversation.

A caveat: communal organisations also consolidated in this decade, and the recurring riots after 1923 sowed divisions that later hardened. Yet by 1930 nationalism had been transformed from an elite affair into a plural, mass movement — the foundation on which Civil Disobedience was launched.