CHAPTER 4. FOUNDATION OF THE CONGRESS:

THE MYTH Indian National Congress was founded in December 1885 by seventy-two political workers. It was the first organized expression of Indian nationalism on an all-India scale. A.O. Hume, a retired English ICS officer, played an important role in its formation. But why was it founded by these seventy- two men and why at that time? A powerful and long-lasting myth, the myth of ‘the safety valve,’ has arisen around this question. Generations of students and political activists have been fed on this myth. But despite widespread popular belief, this myth has little basis in historical fact. The myth is that the Indian National Congress was started by A.O. Hume and others under the official direction, guidance and advice of no less a person than Lord Dufferin, the Viceroy, to provide a safe, mild, peaceful, and constitutional outlet or safety valve for the rising discontent among the masses, which was inevitably leading towards a popular and violent revolution. Consequently, the revolutionary potential was nipped in the bud. The core of the myth, that a violent revolution was on the cards at the time and was avoided only by the foundations of the Congress, is accepted by most writers; the liberaIs welcome it, the radicals use it to prove that the Congress has always been compromising if not loyalist vis-a-vis imperialism, the extreme right use it to show that the Congress has been anti-national from the beginning. All of them agree that the manner of its birth affected the basic character and future work of the Congress in a crucial manner. In his Young India published in 1916, the Extremist leader Lala Lajpat Rai used the safety-valve theory to attack the Moderates in the Congress. Having discussed the theory at length and suggested that the Congress ‘was a product of Lord Dufferin’s brain,’ he argued that ‘the Congress was started more with the object of saving the British Empire from danger than with that of winning political liberty for India. The interests of the British Empire were primary and those of India only secondary.’ And he added: ‘No one can say that the Congress has not been true to that ideal.’ His conclusion was: ‘So this is the genesis of the Congress, and this is sufficient to condemn it in the eyes of the advanced Nationalists.” More than a quarter century later, R. Palme Dutt’s authoritative work India Today made the myth of the safety-valve a staple of left-wing opinion. Emphasizing the myth, Dutt wrote that the Congress was brought into existence through direct Governmental initiative and guidance and through ‘a plan secretly pre-arranged with the Viceroy’ so that it (the Government) could use it ‘as an intended weapon for safeguarding British rule against the rising forces of popular unrest and anti-British feeling.’ It was ‘an attempt to defeat, or rather forestall, an impending revolution.’ The Congress did, of course, in time become a nationalist body; ‘the national character began to overshadow the loyalist character.’ It also became the vehicle of mass movements. But the ‘original sin’ of the manner of its birth left a permanent mark on its politics. Its ‘two-fold character’ as an institution which was created by the Government and yet became the organizer of the anti-imperialist movement ‘ran right through its history.’ It both fought and collaborated with imperialism. It led the mass movements and when the masses moved towards the revolutionary path, it betrayed the movement to imperialism. The Congress, thus, had two strands: ‘On the one hand, the strand of cooperation with imperialism against the “menace” of the mass movement; on the other hand, the strand of leadership of the masses in the national struggle.’ This duality of the Congress leadership from Gokhale to Gandhi, said Dutt, in fact reflected the two-fold and vacillating character of the Indian bourgeoisie itself; ‘at once in conflict with the British bourgeoisie and desiring to lead the Indian people, yet feeling that “too rapid” advance may end in destroying its privileges along with those of the imperialists.’ The Congress had, thus, become an organ of opposition to real revolution, that is, a violent revolution. But this role did not date from Gandhiji; ‘this principle was implanted in it by imperialism at the outset as its intended official role.’ The culmination of this dual role was its ‘final capitulation with the Mountbatten Settlement.’Earlier, in 1939, M.S. Golwalkar, the RSS chief, had also found the safety-valve theory handy in attacking the Congress for its secularism and, therefore, anti-nationalism. In his pamphlet We Golwalkar complained that Hindu national consciousness had been destroyed by those claiming to be ‘nationalists’ who had pushed the ‘notions of democracy’ and the perverse notion that ‘our old invaders and foes’, the Muslims, had something in common with Hindus. Consequently, ‘we have allowed our foes to be our friends and with our hands are undermining true nationality.’ In fact, the tight in India was not between Indians and the British only. It was ‘a triangular fight.’ Hindus were at war with Muslims on the one hand and with the British on the other. What had led Hindus to enter the path of ‘denationalization,’ said Golwalkar, were the aims and policy laid down by flume, Cotton, and Wedderburn in 1885; ‘the Congress they founded as a “safety valve” to “seething nationalism,” as a toy which would lull the awakening giant into slumber, an instrument to destroy National consciousness, has been, as far as they are concerned, a success.’The liberal C.F. Andrews and Girija Mukherji fully accepted the safety-valve theory in their work, The Rise and Growth of the Congress in India published in 1938. They were happy with it because it had helped avoid ‘useless bloodshed.’ Before as well as after 1947, tens of scholars and hundreds of popular writers have repeated some version of these points of view. *Historical proof of the safety-valve theory was provided by the seven volumes of secret reports which flume claimed to have read at Simla in the summer of 1878 and which convinced him of the existence of ‘seething discontent’ and a vast conspiracy among the lower classes to violently overthrow British rule.Before we unravel the mystery of the seven volumes, let us briefly trace the history of its rise and growth. It was first mentioned in William Wedderburn’s biography of A.O. flume published in 1913. Wedderburn (ICS) found an undated memorandum in Hume’s papers which dealt with the foundation of the Congress. He quoted at length from this document. To keep the mystery alive so that the reader may go along with the writer step by step towards its solution, I will withhold an account of Wedderburn’s writing, initially giving only those paragraphs which were quoted by the subsequent writers. According to Lajpat Rai, despite the fact that Hume was ‘a lover of liberty and wanted political liberty for India under the aegis of the British crown,’ he was above all ‘an English patriot.’ Once he saw that British rule was threatened with ‘an impending calamity’ he decided to create a safety valve for the discontent. As decisive proof of this Lajpat Rai provided a long quotation from Hume’s memorandum that Wedderburn had mentioned along with his own comments in his book. Since this passage is quoted or cited by all subsequent authors, it is necessary to reproduce it here at length.“I was shown,” wrote Hume, “several large volumes containing a vast number of entries; English abstracts or translations longer or shorter — of vernacular reports or communications of one kind or another, all arranged according to districts (not identical with ours) The number of these entries was enormous; there were said, at the time to be communications from over 30,000 different reporters.” He (Hume) mentions that he had the volumes in his possession only for a week... Many of the entries reported conversations between men of the lowest classes, “all going to show that these poor men were pervaded with a sense of the hopelessness of the existing state of affairs; that they were convinced that they would starve and die, and that they wanted to do something, and stand by each other, and that something meant violence. a certain small number of the educated classes, at the time desperately, perhaps unreasonably, biller against the Government, would join the movement assume here and there the lead, give the outbreak cohesion, and direct it as a national revolt.”’ Very soon, the seven volumes, whose character, origin, etc., were left undefined in Lajpat Rai’s quotation, started undergoing a metamorphosis. In 1933, in Gurmukh Nihal Singh’s hands, they became ‘government reports.’ Andrews and Mukherjitransformed them into ‘several volumes of secret reports from the CID’ which came into Hume’s possession ‘in his official capacity.’ The classical and most influential statement came from R. Palme Dutt. After quoting the passage quoted by Lajpat Rai from Wedderburn, Dutt wrote: ‘Hume in his official capacity had received possession of the voluminous secret police reports.” Numerous other historians of the national movement including recent ones such as R.C. Majumdar and Tara Chand, were to accept this product of the creative imagination of these writers as historical fact. So deeply rooted had become the belief in Hume’s volumes as official documents that in the 1950s a large number of historians and would-be historians, including the present writer, devoted a great deal of time and energy searching for them in the National Archives. And when their search proved futile, they consoled themselves with the thought that the British had destroyed them before their departure in 1947. Yet only if the historians had applied a minimum of their historiographic sense to the question and looked at the professed evidence a bit more carefully, they would not have been taken for a ride. Three levels of historical evidence and logic were available to them even before the private papers of Ripon and Dufferin became available. The first level pertains to the system under which the Government of India functioned in the 1870s. In 1878, Flume was Secretary to the Department of Revenue, Agriculture and Commerce. How could the Secretary of these departments get access to Home Department files or CID reports? Also he was then in Simla while Home Department files were kept in Delhi; they were not sent to Simla. And from where would 30,000 reporters come? The intelligence departments could not have employed more than a few hundred persons at the time! And, as Lajpat Rai noted, if Congress was founded out of the fear of an outbreak, why did Flume and British officialdom wait for seven long years? If these volumes were not government documents, what were they? The clue was there in Wedderburn’s book and it was easily available if a writer would go to the book itself and not rely on extracts from it reproduced by previous authors as nearly all the later writers seem to have done. This brings us to the second level of historical evidence already available in Wedderburn. The passages quoted by Lajpat Rai, R. Palme Dutt and others are on pages 80-81 of Wedderburn’s book. Two pages earlier, pages 78-80, and one page later, 82-83, Wedderburn tells the reader what these volumes were and who provided them to Hume. The heading of the section where the quoted passages occur is ‘Indian religious leaders.’ In the very beginning of the section, Wedderburn writes that a warning of the threatened danger came to Flume ‘from a very special source that is, from the leaders among those devoted, in all parts of India, to a religious life.’ Hume referred in his memorandum to the legions of secret quasi-religious orders, with literally their millions of members, which form so important a factor in the Indian problem.” These religious sects and orders were headed by Gurus, “men of the highest quality who . . have purged themselves from earthly desires, and fixed their desires on the highest good.” And “these religious leaders, through their Chelas or disciples, are hilly informed of all that goes on under the surface, and their influence is great in forming public opinion.” It was with these Gurus, writes Wedderburn, ‘that Mr. Hume came in touch, towards the end of Lord Lytton’s Viceroyalty.’ These Gurus approached Hume because Hume was a keen student of Eastern religions, but also because they “feared that the ominous ‘unrest’ throughout the country… would lead to terrible outbreak” and it was only men like Hume who had access to the Government who could help ‘avert a catastrophe.’ “This,” wrote Hume, “is how the case was put to me.” With this background the passages on pages 80-81 become clearer. In other words, the evidence of the seven volumes was shown to Hume by the Gurus who had been sent reports by thousands of Chelas. But why should Hume believe that these reports ‘must necessarily be true?’ Because Chelas were persons of a special breed who did not belong to any particular sect or religion or rather belonged to all religions. Moreover they were ‘bound by vows and conditions, over and above those of ordinary initiates of low grade.’ They were ‘all initiates in some of the many branches of the secret knowledge’ and were ‘all bound by vows, they cannot practically break, to some farther advanced seeker than themselves.’ The leaders were of ‘no sect and no religion, but of all sects and all religions.’ But why did hardly anyone in India know of the existence of these myriads of Gurus and Chelas? Because, explained Hume, absolute secrecy was an essential feature in their lives. They had communicated with Hume only because they were anxious to avert calamity. And, finally, we come to the third level of historiography, the level of profound belief and absolute fantasy. The full character of the Gurus and Chelas was still not revealed by Wedderburn, for he was sheltering the reputation of his old friend, as friendly biographers usually do. The impression given by him was that these Gurus and Chelas were ordinary mortal men. This was, however, not the case. Reconstructing the facts on the basis of some books of Theosophy and Madame Blavatsky and the private papers of the Viceroys Ripon and Dufferin, we discover that these Gurus were persons who, because of their practice of ‘peculiar Eastern religious thought,’ were supposed to possess supernatural occult powers; they could communicate and direct from thousands of mites, enter any place go anywhere, sit anywhere unseen, and direct men’s thoughts and opinions without their being aware of it. *In 1881, Hume came under the spell of Madame Blavatsky who claimed be in touch with these Gurus who were described by her as mahatmas. These mahatmas lived as part of a secret brotherhood in Tibet, but they could contact or ‘correspond’ with persons anywhere in the world because of their occult powers. Blavatsky enabled Hume to get in touch with one of these mahatmas named ‘Koot Hoomi Lal Singh.’ It is this invisible brotherhood that gathered secret information on Indian affairs through their Chelas. In a book published in 1880, A.P. Sinnet, editor of the Pioneer and another follower of Blavatsky, had quoted a letter from Koot Hoomi that these mahatmas had used their power in 1857 to control the Indian masses and saved the British Empire and that they would do the same in future. Hume believed all this. He was keen to acquire these occult powers by which the Chelas could know all about the present and the future. He started a ‘correspondence’ with the mahatmas in Tibet. By 1883 Hume had quarreled with Blavatsky, but his faith in the Gurus or mahatmas continued unabated. He also began to use his connection with the mahatmas to promote political objectives dear to his heart — attempting to reform Indian administration and make it more responsive to Indian opinion. In December 1883, he wrote to Ripon: ‘I am associated with men, who though never seen by the masses . . . are yet reverenced by them as Gods . . . and who feel every pulse of public feeling.’ He claimed a Superior knowledge ‘of the native mind’ because ‘a body of men, mostly of Asiatic origin . . . who possess facilities which no other man or body of men living do, for gauging the feelings of the natives. . . have seen fit. . . to give me their confidence to a certain limited extent.’ In January 1884, he informed Ripon that even earlier, in 1848, he had been in contact with the brotherhood or association of his mystical advisers and that it was their intervention which had defeated the revolutions of 1848 in Europe and the ‘mutiny’ of 1857. From distant Tibet they were now acting through him and others like him to help Ripon introduce reforms and avoid ‘the possibility of such a cataclysm recurring.’ This association of mahatmas was also helping him, he told Ripon, to persuade the Queen to give a second term as Viceroy to Ripon and to ‘tranquilize the native press.Hume tried to play a similar role with Dufferin, but more hesitatingly, not sharing with him the information that his advisers were astral, occult figures so that even many historians have assumed that these advisers were his fellow Congress leaders! Only once did he lift the veil before Dufferin when the latter during 1887 angrily pressed him to reveal the source through which he claimed to have gained access to the Viceroy’s secret letter to the Secretary of State. Pressed to the wall, Hume told him copies of the letter had been obtained by his friends through occult methods or ‘through the medium of supernatural photography.’ And when Dufferin showed him the original letter, proving that the copy was false, Hume had no answer.’Once earlier, too, Hume had indirectly tried to tell Dufferin that his advisers were not ordinary political leaders but ‘advanced initiates’ and mahatmas; but he had done so in a guarded fashion. In a letter to Dufferin in November 1886, he said that he had been trying to persuade those who had shown him the volumes in Simla to also show them to Dufferin so that the Viceroy could get their veracity checked by his own sources. But, at present they say that this is impossible.’ Nor would they agree to communicate with the Viceroy directly. ‘Most of them, I believe, could not. You have not done, and would not do, what is required to enable them to communicate with you directly after their fashion.’ But there was hope. ‘My own special friend’ who spent more than a month with Hume in Simla (in 1878), and who was often in India might agree to see the Viceroy. Hume suggested: ‘if ever a native gentleman comes to the Private Secretary and says that Mr. Hume said the Viceroy would like to see him, see him at once. You will not talk to him ten minutes without finding out that he is no ordinary man. You may never get the chance — goodness knows — they move in a mysterious way their wonders to But Hume was worried that he could offer no visible or direct proof of his knowledge or connections. He told the Viceroy that he was ‘getting gradually very angry and disgusted’ because he was not able to get ‘this vouching for directly.’ None of the ‘advanced initiates’ under whose advice and guidance’ he was working would ‘publicly stand by me,’ so that most Europeans in India ‘look upon me either as a lunatic or a liar.’ And hence, he informed the Viceroy, while he had decided to continue the political work, he had decided to ‘drop all references to my friends.” Thus, it turns out that the seven volumes which Hume saw were prepared by mahatmas and Gurus, and his friends and advisers were these occult figures and not Congressmen! *Further proof offered for the safety-valve theory was based on W.C. Bannerjee’s statement in 1898 in Indian Politics that the Congress, ‘as it was originally started and as it has since been carried on, is in reality the work of the Marquis of Dufferin and Ava.’ He stated that Flume had, in 1884, thought of bringing together leading political Indians once a year “to discuss social matters” and did not “desire that politics should form part of their discussion.” But Dufferin asked flume to do the opposite and start a body to discuss politics so that the Government could keep itself informed of Indian opinion. Such a body could also perform ‘the functions which Her Majesty’s Opposition did in England.”Clearly, either W.C. Bannerjee’s memory was failing or he was trying to protect the National Congress from the wrath of the late 19th century imperialist reaction, for contemporary evidence clearly indicated the opposite. All the discussions Hume had with Indian leaders regarding the holding of an annual conference referred to a political gathering. Almost the entire work of earlier associations like the Bombay Presidency Association, Poona Sarvajanik Sabha, Madras Mahajan Sabha and Indian Association was political. Since his retirement from the Indian Civil Service in 1882, Hume had been publicly urging Indians to take to politics. He had also been asking his Indian friends not to get divided on social questions. When, in January 1885, his friend B.M. Malabari wrote some editorials in the Indian Spectator urging educated Indians to inaugurate a movement for social reform, Hume wrote a letter to the Indian Spectator criticizing Malabari’s proposals, warning against the dangerous potential of such a move, and arguing thatpolitical reforms should take precedence over social reform.’ Dufferin, on his part, in his St. Andrews’ Day dinner speech in 1888, publicly criticized the Congress for pursuing politics to serve narrow interests rather than take to social reform which would benefit millions.’5 Earlier he had expressed the same sentiment in a private letter to the Secretary of State. A perusal of Dufferin’s private papers, thrown open to scholars in the late 1950s, should have put an end to the myth of Dufferin’s sponsor of or support to the Congress. It was only after Hume had sent him a Copy of the letter to the Indian Spectator with a covering note deprecating Malabari’s views on social reform that Dufferin expressed agreement with Hume and asked him to meet him. Definite confirmation of the fact that Hume never proposed a social gathering but rather a political one comes in Dufferin’s letter to Lord Reay, Governor of Bombay, after his f meeting with Hume in May 1885: “At his last interview he told me that he and his friends were going to assemble a political convention of delegates, as far as I understood, on the lines adopted by O’Connell previous to Catholic emancipation.”Neither Dufferin and his fellow-liberal Governors of Bombay and Madras nor his conservative officials like Alfred and J.B. Lyall, D.M Wallace, A. Colvin and S.C. Bayley were sympathetic to the Congress. It was not only in 1888 that Dufferin attacked the Congress in a vicious manner by writing that he would consider ‘in what way the happy despatch may be best applied to the Congress,’ for ‘we cannot allow the Congress to continue to exist.” In May 1885 itself, he had written to Reay asking him to be careful about Hume’s Congress, telling him that it would be unwise to identify with either the reformers or the reactionaries. Reay in turn, in a letter in June 1885, referred with apprehension to the new political activists as ‘the National Party of India’ and warned against Indian delegates, like Irish delegates, making their appearance on the British political scene. Earlier, in May, Reay had cautioned Dufferin that Hume was ‘the head-centre of an organization . . . (which) has for its object to bring native opinion into a focus.’ In fact, from the end of May 1885, Dufferin had grown cool to Hume and began to keep him at an arm’s length. From 1886 onwards he also began to attack the ‘Bengali Baboos and Mahratta Brahmins’ for being ‘inspired by questionable motives’ and for wanting to start Irish-type revolutionary agitations in India.20 And, during May-June 1886. he was describing Hume as ‘cleverish, a little cracked, excessively vain, and absolutely indifferent to truth,’ his main fault being that he was ‘one of the chief stimulants of the Indian Home Rule movement. Toconclude, it is high time that the safety-valve theory of the genesis of the Congress was confined to the care of the mahatmas from whom perhaps it originated!

CHAPTER 5. FOUNDATION OF THE INDIAN NATIONAL CONGRESS:THE REALITY

In the last chapter we began the story of the foundation of the Indian National Congress. We could not, however, make much headway because the cobwebs had to be cleared, the myth of the safety-valve had to be laid to rest, the mystery of the ‘missing volumes’ had to be solved, and Hume’s mahatmas had to be sent back to their resting place in Tibet. In this chapter we resume the more serious part of the story of the emergence of the Indian National Congress as the apex nationalist organization that was to guide the destiny of the Indian national movement till the attainment of independence. The foundation of the Indian National Congress in 1885 was not a sudden event, or a historical accident. It was the culmination of a process of political awakening that had its beginnings in the 1860s and 1870s and took a major leap forward in the late 1870s and early 1880s. The year 1885 marked a turning point in this process, for that was the year the political Indians, the modem intellectuals interested in politics, who no longer saw themselves as spokesmen of narrow group interests, but as representatives of national interest vis-a-vis foreign rule, as a ‘national party,’ saw their efforts bear fruit. The all-India nationalist body that they brought into being was to be the platform, the organizer, the headquarters, the symbol of the new national spirit and politics.British officialdom, too, was not slow in reading the new messages that were being conveyed through the nationalist political activity leading to the founding of the Congress, and watched them with suspicion, and a sense of foreboding. As this political activity gathered force, the prospect of disloyalty, sedition and Irish-type agitations began to haunt the Government.

The official suspicion was not merely the over-anxious response of an administration that had not yet recovered from the mutiny complex, but was in fact, well-founded. On the surface, the nationalist Indian demands of those years — no reduction of import duties on textile import no expansion in Afghanistan or Burma, the right to bear arms, freedom of the Press, reduction of military expenditure, higher expenditure on famine relief, Indianization of the civil services, the right of Indians to join the semi-military volunteer corps, the right of Indian judges to try Europeans in criminal cases, the appeal to British voters to vote for a party which would listen to Indians —look rather mild, especially when considered separately. But these were demands which a colonial regime could not easily concede, for that would undermine its hegemony over the colonial people. It is true that any criticism or demand no matter how innocuous its appearance but which cannot be accommodated by a system is in the long-run subversive of the system. The new political thrust in the years between 1875 and 1885 was the creation of the younger, more radical nationalist intellectuals most of whom entered politics during this period. They established new associations, having found that the older associations were too narrowly conceived in terms of their programmes and political activity as well as social bases. For example, the British Indian Association of Bengal had increasingly identified itself with the interests of the zamindars and, thus, gradually lost its anti-British edge. The Bombay Association and Madras Native Association had become reactionary and moribund. And so the younger nationalists of Bengal, led by Surendranath Banerjea and Anand Mohan Bose, founded the Indian Association in 1876. Younger men of Madras — M. Viraraghavachariar, G. Subramaniya Iyer, P. Ananda Charlu and others — formed the Madras Mahajan Sabha in 1884. In Bombay, the more militant intellectuals like K.T. Telang and Pherozeshah Mehta broke away from older leaders like Dadabhai Framji and Dinshaw Petit on political grounds and formed the Bombay Presidency Association in 1885. Among the older associations only the Poona Sarvajanik Sabha carried on as before. But, then, it was already in the hands of nationalist intellectuals. A sign of new political life in the country was the coming into existence during these years of nearly all the major nationalist newspapers which were to dominate the Indian scene till 1918 — The Hindu, Tribune, Bengalee, Mahraua and Kesari. The one exception was the Amrita Bazar Patrika which was already edited by new and younger men. It became an Englishlanguage newspaper only in 1878. By 1885, the formation of an all-India political organization had become an objective necessity, and the necessity was being recognized by nationalists all over the country. Many recent scholars have furnished detailed information on the many moves that were made in that direction from 1877. These moves acquired a greater sense of urgency especially from 1883 and there was intense political activity. The Indian Mirror of Calcutta was carrying on a continuous campaign on the question. The Indian Association had already in December 1883 organized an All-India National Conference and given a call for another one in December 1885. Surendranath Banerjea, who was involved in the All-India National Conference, could not for that reason attend the founding session of the National Congress in 1885). Meanwhile, the Indians had gained experience, as well as confidence, from the large number of agitations they had organized in the preceding ten years. Since 1875, there had been a continuous campaign around cotton import duties which Indians wanted to stay in the interests of the Indian textile industry. A massive campaign had been organized during 1877-88 around the demand for the lndianization of Government services. The Indians had opposed the Afghan adventure of Lord Lytton and then compelled the British Government to contribute towards the cost of the Second Afghan War. The Indian Press had waged a major campaign against the efforts of the Government to control it through the Vernacular Press Act. The Indians had also opposed the effort to disarm them through the Arms Act. In 1881-82 they had organized a protest against the Plantation Labour and the Inland Emigration Act which condemned plantation labourers to serfdom. A major agitation was organized during 1883 in favour of the Ilbert Bill which would enable Indian magistrates to try Europeans. This Bill was successfully thwarted by the Europeans. The Indians had been quick to draw the political lesson. Their efforts had failed because they had not been coordinated on an all-India basis. On the other hand, the Europeans had acted in a concerted manner. Again in July 1883 a massive all-India effort was made to raise a National Fund which would be used to promote political agitation in India as well as England. In 1885, Indians fought for the right to join the volunteer corps restricted to Europeans, and then organized an appeal to British voters to vote for those candidates who were friendly towards India. Several Indians were sent to Britain to put the Indian case before British voters through public speeches, and other means. *It thus, becomes clear that the foundation of the Congress was the natural culmination of the political work of the previous years: By 1885, a stage had been reached in the political development of India when certain basic tasks or objectives had to be laid down and struggled for. Moreover these objectives were correlated and could only be fulfilled by the coming together of political workers in a single organization formed on an all- India basis. The men who met in Bombay on 28 December 1885 were inspired by these objectives and hoped to initiate the process of achieving them. The success or failure and the future character of the Congress would be determined not by who founded it but by the extent to which these objectives were achieved in the initial years. *India had just entered the process of becoming a nation or a people. The first major objective of the founders of the Indian national movement was to promote this process, to weld Indians into a nation, to create an Indian people. It was common for colonial administrators and ideologues to assert that Indians could not be united or freed because they were not a nation or a people but a geographical expression, a mere congeries of hundreds of diverse races and creeds. The Indians did not deny this but asserted that they were now becoming a nation. India was as Tilak, Surendranath Banerjea and many others were fond of saying — a nation-in-the-making. The Congress leaders recognized that objective historical forces were bringing the Indian people together. But they also realized that the people had to become subjectively aware of the objective process and that for this it was necessarily to promote the feeling of national unity and nationalism among them. Above all, India being a nation-in-the-making its nationhood could not be taken for granted. It had to be constantly developed and consolidated. The promotion of national unity was a major objective of the Congress and later its major achievement For example, P. Ananda Charlu in his presidential address to the Congress in 1891 described it ‘as a mighty nationalizer’ and said that this was its most ‘glorious’ role.’ Among the three basic aims and objectives of the Congress laid down by its first President, W.C. Bannerji, was that of ‘the fuller development and Foundation of the Indian National Congress: The Reality consolidation of those sentiments of national unity.’ The Russian traveller, I.P. Minayeff wrote in his diary that, when travelling with Bonnerji, he asked, ‘what practical results did the Congress leaders expect from the Congress,’ Bonnerji replied: ‘Growth of national feeling and unity of Indians.’ Similai.ly commenting on the first Congress session, the Indu Prakash of Bombay wrote: ‘It was the beginning of a new life . . . it will greatly help in creating a national feeling and binding together distant people by common sympathy and common ends.’The making of India into a nation was to be a prolonged historical process. Moreover, the Congress leaders realized that the diversity of India was such that special efforts unknown to other parts of the world would have to be made and national unity carefully nurtured. In an effort to reach all regions, it was decided to rotate the Congress session among different parts of the country. The President was to belong to a region other than where the Congress session was being held. To reach out to the followers of all religions and to remove the fears of the minorities a rule was made at the 1888 session that no resolution was to be passed to which an overwhelming majority of Hindu or Muslim delegates objected. In 1889, a minority clause was adopted in the resolution demanding reformof legislative councils. According to the clause, wherever Parsis, Christians, Muslims or Hindus were a minority their number elected to the Councils would not be less than their proportion in the Population. The reason given by the mover of the resolution was that India was not yet a homogenous country and political methods here had, therefore, to differ from those in Europe. The early national leaders were also determined to build a secular nation, the Congress itself being intensely secular. *The second major objective of the early Congress was to create a common political platform or programme around which political workers in different parts of the country could gather and Conduct their political activities, educating and mobilizing people on an all-India basis. This was to be accomplished by taking up those grievances and fighting for those rights which Indians had in common in relation to the rulers. For the same reason the Congress was not to take up questions of social reform. At its second session, the President of the Congress, Dadabhai Naoroji, laid down this rule and said that ‘A National Congress must confine itself to questions in which the entire nation has a direct participation.’ Congress was, therefore,not the right place to discuss social reforms. ‘We are met together,’ he said, ‘as a political body to represent to our rulers our political aspirations.’Modern politics — the politics of popular participation, agitation mobilization — was new to India. The notion that politics was not the preserve of the few but the domain of everyone was not yet familiar to the people. No modern political movement was possible till people realized this. And, then, on the basis of this realization, an informed and determined political opinion had to be created. The arousal, training, organization and consolidation of public opinion was seen as a major task by the Congress leaders. All initial activity of the early nationalism was geared towards this end. The first step was seen to be the politicization and unification of the opinion of the educated, and then of other sections. The primary objective was to go beyond the redressal of immediate grievances and organize sustained political activity along the lines of the Anti-Corn Law League (formed in Britain by Cobden and Bright in 1838 to secure reform of Corn Laws). The leaders as well as the people also had to gain confidence in their own capacity to organize political opposition to the most powerful state of the day. All this was no easy task. A prolonged period of politicization would be needed. Many later writers and critics have concentrated on the methods of political struggle of the early nationalist leaders, on their petitions, prayers and memorials. It is, of course, true that they did not organize mass movements and mass struggles. But the critics have missed out the most important part of their activity — that all of it led to politics, to the politicization of the people. Justice Ranade, who was known as a political sage, had, in his usual perceptive manner, seen this as early as 1891 When the young and impatient twenty-six-year-old Gokhale expressed disappointment when the Government sent a two line reply to a carefully and laboriously prepared memorial by the Poona Sarvajanik Sabha, Ranade reassured him: ‘You don’t realize our place in the history of our country. These memorials are nominally addressed to Government, in reality they are addressed to the people, so that they may learn how to think in these matters. This work must be done for many years, without expecting any other result, because politics of this kind is altogether new in this land.” *As part of the basic objective of giving birth to a national movement, it was necessary to create a common all-India national-political leadership, that is, to construct what Antonio Gramsci, the famous Italian Marxist, calls the headquarters of a movement. Nations and people become capable of meaningful and effective political action only when they are organized. They become a people or ‘historical subjects’ only when they are organized as such. The first step in a national movement is taken when the ‘carriers’ of national feeling or national identity begin to organize the people. But to be able to do so successfully, these ‘carriers’ or leaders must themselves be unified; they must share a collective identification, that is, they must come to know each other and share and evolve a common outlook, perspective, sense of purpose, as also common feelings. According to the circular which, in March 1885, informed political workers of the coming Congress session, the Congress was intended ‘to enable all the most earnest labourers in the cause of national progress to become personally known to each other.’9 W.C. Bonnerji, as the first Congress President, reiterated that one of the Congress objectives was the ‘eradication, by direct friendly personal intercourse, of all possible race, creed, or provincial prejudices amongst all lovers of our country,’ and ‘the promotion of personal intimacy and friendship amongst all the more earnest workers in our country’s cause in (all) parts of the Empire.”In other words, the founders of the Congress understood that the first requirement of a national movement was a national leadership. The social- ideological complexion that this leadership would acquire was a question that was different from the main objective of the creation of a national movement. This complexion would depend on a host of factors: the role of different social classes, ideological influences, outcomes of ideological struggles, and so on. The early nationalist leaders saw the internalization and indigenization of political democracy as one of their main objectives. They based their politics on the doctrine of the sovereignty of the people, or, as Dadabhai Naoroji put it, on ‘the new lesson that Kings are made for the people, not peoples for their Kings.’ From the beginning, the Congress was organized in the form of a Parliament. In fact, the word Congress was borrowed fromNorth American history to connote an assembly of the’ people. The proceedings of the Congress sessions were conducted democratically, issues being decided through debate and discussion and occasionally through voting. It was, in fact, the Congress, and not the bureaucratic and authoritarian colonial state, as some writers wrongly argue, which indigenized, popularized and rooted parliamentary democracy in India. Similarly, the early national leaders made maintenance of civil liberties and their extension an integral part of the national movement. They fought against every infringement of the freedom of the Press and speech and opposed every attempt to curtail them. They struggled for separation of the judicial and executive powers and fought against racial discrimination. It was necessary to evolve an understanding of colonialism and then a nationalist ideology based on this understanding. In this respect, the early nationalist leaders were simultaneously learners and teachers. No ready- made anti-colonial understanding or ideology was available to them in the 1870s and 1880s. They had to develop their own anti-colonial ideology on the basis of a concrete study of the reality and of their own practice. There could have been no national struggle without anideological struggle clarifying the concept of we as a nation against colonialism as an enemy They had to find answers to many questions. For example, is Britain ruling India for India’s benefit? Are the interests of the rulers and the ruled in harmony, or does a basic contradiction exist between the two? Is the contradiction of the Indian people with British bureaucrats in India, or with the British Government, or with the system of colonialism as such? Are the Indian people capable of fighting the mighty British empire? And how is the fight to be waged? In finding answers to these and other questions many mistakes were made. For example, the early nationalists failed to understand, at least till the beginning of the 20th century, the character of the colonial state. But, then, some mistakes are an inevitable part of any serious effort to grapple with reality. In a way, despite mistakes and setbacks, it was perhaps no misfortune that no ready-made, cut and dried, symmetrical formulae were available to them. Such formulae are often lifeless and, therefore, poor guides to action. True, the early national leaders did not organize mass movements against the British. But they did carry out an ideological struggle against them. It should not be forgotten that nationalist or anti-imperialist struggle is a struggle about colonialism before it becomes a struggle against colonialism. And the founding fathers of the Congress carried out this ‘struggle about colonialism’ in a brilliant fashion. *From the beginning, the Congress was conceived not as a party but as a movement. Except for agreement on the very broad objectives discussed earlier, it did not require any particular political or ideological commitment from its activists. It also did not try to limit its following to any social class or group. As a movement, it incorporated different political trends, ideologies and social classes and groups so long as the commitment to democratic and secular nationalism was there. From the outset, the Congress included in the ranks of its leadership persons with diverse political thinking, widely disparate levels of political militancy and varying economic approaches. To sum up: The basic objectives of the early nationalist leaders were to lay the foundations of a secular and democratic national movement, to politicize and politically educate the people, to form the headquarters of the movement, that is, to form an all-India leadership group, and to develop and propagate an anti-colonial nationalist ideology. History will judge the extent of the success or failure of the early national movement not by an abstract, ahistorical standard but by the extent to which it was able to attain the basic objectives it had laid down for itself. By this standard, its achievements were quite substantial and that is why it grew from humble beginnings in the 1880s into the most spectacular of popular mass movements in the 20th century. Historians are not likely to disagree with the assessment of its work in the early phase by two of its major leaders. Referring to the preparatory nature of the Congress work from 1885 to 1905, Dadabhai Naoroji wrote to D.E. Wacha in January 1905: ‘The very discontent and impatience it (the Congress) has evoked against itself as slow and non-progressive among the rising generation are among its best results or fruit. It is its own evolution and progress….(the task is) to evolve the required revolution — whether it would be peaceful or violent. The character of the revolution will depend upon the wisdom or unwisdom of the British Government and action of the British people.’And this is how G.K. Gokhale evaluated this period in 1907: ‘Let us not forget that we are at a stage of the country’s progress when our achievements are bound to be small, and our disappointments frequent and trying. That is the place which it has pleased Providence to assign to us in this struggle, and our responsibility is ended when we have done the work which belongs to that place. It will, no doubt, be given to our countrymen of future generations to serve India by their successes; we, of the present generation, must be content to serve her mainly by our failures. For, hard though it be, out of those failures the strength will come which in the end will accomplish great tasks.”*As for the question of the role of A.O. Hume, if the founders of the Congress were such capable and patriotic men of high character, why did they need Hume to act as the chief organizerof the Congress? It is undoubtedly true that Hume impressed —and, quite rightly — all his liberal and democratic contemporaries, including Lajpat Rai, as a man of high ideals with whom it was no dishonor to cooperate. But the real answer lies in the conditions of the time. Considering the size of the Indian subcontinent, there were very few political persons in the early 1 880s and the tradition of open opposition to the rulers was not yet firmly entrenched. Courageous and committed persons like Dadabhai Naoroji, Justice Ranade, Pherozeshah Mehta, G. Subramaniya Iyer and Surendranath Banerjea (one year later) cooperated with Hume because they did not want to arouse official hostility at such an early stage of their work. They assumed that the rulers would be less suspicious and less likely to attack a potentially subversive organization if its chief organizer was a retired British civil servant. Gokhale, with his characteristic modesty and political wisdom, gazed this explicitly in 1913: ‘No Indian could have started the Indian National Congress. .. if an Indian had. . . come forward to start such a movement embracing all India, the officials in India would not have allowed the movement to come into existence. If the founder of the congress had not been a great Englishman and a distinguished ex-official, such was the distrust of political agitation in those days that the authorities would have at once found some way or the other to suppress the movement. In other words, if Hume and other English liberals hoped to use the Congress as a safety-valve, the Congress leaders hoped to use Hume as a lightning conductor. And as later developments show, it was the Congress leaders whose hopes were fulfilled.