Karachi Congress session after the Bhagat Singh executions

Who: The Indian National Congress, presided over by Vallabhbhai Patel, with Mahatma Gandhi as its main negotiator; young demonstrators who greeted Gandhi with black flags; and the Central Sikh League, which dealt with Gandhi after the pact.

What: The session met at Karachi in the last week of March 1931. Tendulkar's biography of Gandhi dates the sitting that ratified the pact to 29 March, and published summaries give 26 to 31 March for the whole session. It followed the Gandhi-Irwin Pact of 5 March, which suspended the civil disobedience movement, and came days after Bhagat Singh, Sukhdev and Rajguru were hanged in Lahore on 23 March, despite Gandhi's pleading for commutation. On his arrival, demonstrators shouted "Down with Gandhism" and "Long live Bhagat Singh"; Gandhi, Tendulkar writes, "received them sweetly".

The Congress ratified the pact and appointed Gandhi its sole representative at the Round Table Conference. A resolution sponsored by Nehru and seconded by Madan Mohan Malaviya distanced the Congress from political violence but admired the bravery of the three men and called the executions "wanton vengeance", the Congress's own account says. The session also adopted a charter of Fundamental Rights, drafted with Nehru's additions to Gandhi's eleven points. It covered civic liberties, universal adult suffrage, free and compulsory education, the nationalisation of key industries, and the secular character of the state; equality of religions was among its salient features.

The Encyclopaedia of Sikhism records that the Central Sikh League, which had boycotted the first Round Table Conference as the Congress did, agreed after the pact to take part in the second. It presented Gandhi with a memorandum of 17 Sikh demands, among them a one-third share for Sikhs in the Punjab cabinet and Public Service Commission, joint electorates without reserved seats, and Punjabi as the province's official language.

Where: Karachi, then in British India. The executions took place in Lahore.

Why it mattered: The session met in the shadow of the Lahore executions, kept the Congress inside the pact, and wrote civil and minority rights into its programme. For Sikhs, the sources record the Central Sikh League's demands to Gandhi after the pact, not a Congress promise made at Karachi.