By- Banibrata Datta
(Editor Vande Mataram Newspaper)
As the Congress attempts to rejuvenate its historic standing in Indian politics with the Bharat Jodo Yatra, we take a look at how the INC came into being, and how it arrived at its present avatar amid splits and disagreements.
On 28 December 1885, the Indian National Congress was founded at Gokuldas Tejpal Sanskrit College in Bombay, with 72 delegates in attendance.
The first INC meeting in Mumbai in 1885. A. O. Hume, the founder of the Indian National Congress, is shown in the middle (third row from the front). To his right is Dadabhoy Nairoji; to his left, in sequence, are: W. C. Bonnerjee, Pherozeshah Mehta, and Gopal Krishna Gokhale.
The Indian National Congress (INC), India’s largest opposition party, marked its 138th foundation day on December 28. Recently elected party president Mallikarjun Kharge addressed party workers at the All India Congress Committee headquarters in New Delhi. “Today India has progressed as Congress has taken the courage to break the shackles of Dalits, poor… To keep democracy strong, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru appointed five non-Congress ministers to his cabinet. It shows the principle of taking everyone along,” said Kharge.
Several party members shared messages from the party’s social media accounts, featuring videos and photos of its history, invoking the party’s role in the Indian freedom struggle and role in independent India.
We take a look at how on December 28, 1885, the INC came into being, and how it arrived at its present avatar amid splits and disagreements.
How the Congress was founded
The English bureaucrat Allan Octavian Hume or AO Hume is credited as the founder of the organisation. On December 28, 1885, 72 social reformers, journalists and lawyers congregated for the first session of the INC at Gokuldas Tejpal Sanskrit College, Bombay.
At that point, the aim of this group was not to demand independence from the ongoing colonial rule but to influence the policies of the British government in favour of Indians. Its objective is often described as providing a “safety valve” as the time, through which Indians could air out their grievances and frustration.
Another bureaucrat who later became a Congress member, William Wedderburn, wrote in “Octavian Hume. C.B. Father of the Indian National Congress”
“It was in 1882 that Mr. Hume retired from the public service; and we now approach the great work of his life —the national movement, of which the Indian National Congress was the political side. As he explained, the: Congress organization was ‘only one outcome of the labours of a body of cultured men, mostly Indians, who hound themselves together to labour silently for the good of India.’
The fundamental objects of this national movement were…First, the fusion into one national whole of all the different elements that constitute the population of India; second, the gradual regeneration along all lines, spiritual, moral, social, and political, of the nation thus evolved; and third, the consolidation, oft, the union between England and India…”
Wedderburn then quotes the leader Gopalkrishna Gokhale as saying, “No Indian could have started the Indian National Congress…If the founder of the Congress had not been a great Englishman and a distinguished ex-official, such was the official distrust of political agitation in those days that the authorities would have at once found some way or other to suppress the movement.’’
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Transformation towards the demand for independence
Over the next few years, the party’s work continued, to shift the colonial administrators’ attitudes and policies on the rights and powers allowed to Indians. However, Hume and the party were also criticised, by the British for attempting to change the existing systems that favoured them and by some Indians for not achieving significant results, initially. Hume left India around the end of the 19th Century.
The party largely consisted of educated, upper-class people who were likely to have studied abroad. But with time, this grouping became more diverse, as the organisation began setting up provincial organisations.
At its Eleventh Session in 1895, there was an increase in the number of delegates from 1,163 the previous year to 1,584. President Surendranath Banerjea congratulated the Congress for bringing together “the scattered element of a vast and diversified population.”
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The members frequently protested issues of British colonialism, such as the Bengal famine and the drain of wealth from India. However, these protests were at this point usually limited to prayers and petitions, including writing letters to the authorities. As the British rule continued, there grew differences in what the party’s functioning should be like.
Splits and Reconvening
One of the biggest strengths of the party, which helped it appeal to a broad section of Indian society, was having members who held different ideological positions. In Surat in 1906, the divisions between the ‘moderates’ led by Gopal Krishna Gokhale and Surendranath Banerjea, and the ‘extremists’ led by Bal Gangadhar Tilak came to the fore and there was a split. While Tilak and Lala Lajpat Rai wanted the Congress to boycott the visit of the Prince of Wales in protest against the Bengal Partition a year prior, the moderates opposed any such move.
But by 1915, the Bombay session saw these two groups coming together again as one. The pattern of splits and eventual cohesion continued well after Indian independence, even after the party came to completely dominate successive general elections under Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru.
In the late 1960s, under PM Indira Gandhi, there was a power struggle. There was disagreement over the economic policies that were to be followed by the government, with Gandhi leaning strongly towards socialism, unlike senior leader Morarji Desai.
The Presidential elections to be held around this time became a kind of proxy war, with both factions pushing for their candidates, culminating with Gandhi’s candidate VV Giri winning. Congress President S Nijalingappa expelled the Prime Minister from the Congress, and the party officially split into Congress (R) led by Indira and Congress (O), which later merged with the Janta Party.
Gandhi said of this time, “After the split in the Congress, I was running a minority government. Had the opposition joined forces, we would have been very badly defeated. But the opposition was very helpful. The only people who were rude to us were those who had left us.” She later returned to power after the 1971 elections.
That was not the last of the internal battles, and to date, factionalism and ideological differences of the party often become public over a range of matters. As the party again embarks on a new chapter meant to rejuvenate its historic standing in Indian politics with the Bharat Jodo Yatra, how it brings itself together is to be seen.
Congress President Mallikarjun Kharge today hoisted the national flag at the Indian National Congress office in Delhi on the occasion of ‘Congress Foundation Day’ in the presence of Congress office bearers and leaders including Mrs. Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi.
