Gokhale worked in Pune, being one of the important members of the DES himself. He continued to cooperate with the British government via participation in legislative institutions and councils with a view to use that influence to drive the British towards conceding self-rule in India.

He created the Servants of India Society (SIS) in 1905, which aimed at creating an empowered body of Indian citizenry, which would parallel the Indian Civil Service without being controlled by the British. He envisaged the SIS as a means to run the country once the self-rule was achieved. The SIS provided an endowment to start the Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics in 1930, a foremost educational institute which continues to operate today. The institute is located at the site of Gokhale’s house in Pune – also the venue where he guided Gandhi (and Jinnah) on political matters towards the fag end of his life.

Gokhale became the Congress President in 1905. During his term, he guided Congress towards a more moderate and reformist agenda. He visited South Africa in 1912 to meet Gandhi, and upon Gandhi’s return to India, Gokhale spent time in making him conversant with the prevailing conditions in India and the realities of Indian politics. Gandhi has acknowledged Gokhale as his mentor in his writings. In this sense, the well known Gandhi-Nehru school of thought that shaped modern India was rooted in the Ranade-Gokhale school of politics. After Gokhale died in 1915, this moderate, liberal reformist movement left Pune to be owned by Gandhi as his emergence of the leader of Indian independence movement in 1920 and by Nehru a few years later.

The Tilak-Gokhale Duality

The Ranade-Gokhale school of political thought was frequently at divergence with the Tilak approach despite the fact that Gokhale and Tilak worked together for a long time. Tilak advocated a conservative view of adopting social modernism without government intervention and embracing newer ideas voluntarily with a gradual change from within the society.

This caused a run-in with Gokahle over the Age of Consent Bill in 1891 which aimed at increasing the age of consent from 10 to 12 via legislation. While both Gokhale and Tilak were all for the change, the former saw legislation as an acceptable, even required means of the change because the pace the society was setting was inadequate.

They both became Congress secretaries in 1895 and continued to lead Congress in their own ways for the next decade. In 1905 Gokhale became the Congress President which is when his feud with Tilak peaked.

He opposed Tilak taking over as the Congress President in 1906, and at this point, the Congress was virtually bifurcated into a moderate faction and an extremist faction both being run effectively from Pune. With Tilak getting imprisoned and Gokhale dying soon after his release, their feud only lasted for a year, but it threw Congress in disarray for a decade and half until Gandhi shot to prominence.

It was the greatness of these men that they coexisted and flourished in the same milieu and context over two decades. When Gokhale died, Tilak paid him a glowing tribute: