The Indian National Congress and the Moderates

In December 1885 the many strands of Indian political life came together in a single all-India body: the Indian National Congress. For its first twenty years the Congress was led by the Moderates. These were men who believed in British fair play and worked patiently, within the law, to win a greater share for Indians in their own governance. They never demanded freedom, and they failed to reach the masses. But they built the foundations on which the whole later movement stood. This is a high-yield topic.

The ground had been prepared through the 1870s and early 1880s by political associations and all-India campaigns. The final shape was given by a retired English civil servant, A.O. Hume. He mobilised leading intellectuals and organised the first session of the Indian National Congress at Gokuldas Tejpal Sanskrit College, Bombay, in December 1885. It was attended by 72 delegates and presided over by Womesh Chandra Bonnerjee. Thereafter the Congress met every December in a different part of the country.

Early presidents and leaders included Dadabhai Naoroji (thrice president), Badruddin Tyabji, Pherozeshah Mehta, Surendranath Banerjea, Romesh Chandra Dutt, Ananda Mohan Bose and Gopal Krishna Gokhale. In 1890 Kadambini Ganguly, the first woman graduate of Calcutta University, addressed a Congress session.

Examiners love "firsts" about the Congress presidency. Fix these facts:

• Dadabhai Naoroji: presided over the second session at Calcutta in 1886. He went on to be president thrice in all.
• Badruddin Tyabji: the first Muslim president, at the 1887 Madras session.
• George Yule: the first British (non-Indian) president, at the 1888 Allahabad session. Note carefully: A.O. Hume, the founder, was never Congress president. He served as general secretary.
• Alfred Webb: an Irish member of the British Parliament, president of the 1894 Madras session.
• Annie Besant: the first woman president of the Congress, at the 1917 Calcutta session.
• Sarojini Naidu: the first Indian woman president, at the 1925 Kanpur session. Do not confuse her with Besant, who came first.
• C.R. Das: elected president for the 1921 Ahmedabad session and functioned as president while in prison; Hakim Ajmal Khan acted in his place.

One landmark session deserves special mention. At Lucknow in 1916 the Congress and the All-India Muslim League held their sessions jointly and concluded the Lucknow Pact, an agreement on constitutional demands in which the Congress accepted separate electorates for Muslims. It marked a rare moment of Congress-League unity.

Was it a 'safety valve'? There is a long debate about Hume's motive:

• The 'safety valve' theory holds that Hume founded the Congress to give the growing discontent a harmless outlet, so it would not explode into revolt. Even the Extremist leader Lala Lajpat Rai believed this.
• The Marxist 'conspiracy theory' (R.P. Dutt) went further, calling the Congress a device to abort a popular uprising, with the bourgeois leaders party to it.
• Modern historians dispute this. They argue the Congress expressed the genuine urge of politically conscious Indians for a national body, and that the early leaders used Hume as a 'lightning conductor', a respectable cover under which nationalist forces could safely come together when an Indian-led body might have been crushed.

The aims of the early Congress were to found a democratic nationalist movement, politicise and educate people, establish headquarters for a movement, promote friendship among nationalist workers, develop an anti-colonial ideology, and build a feeling of national unity across religion, caste and province.

The leaders who dominated the Congress in its first phase (1885-1905) were Naoroji, Mehta, Wacha, Bonnerjee and Surendranath Banerjea. They were staunch believers in liberalism and moderate politics. This is why they are called the Moderates, to distinguish them from the Extremists of the next generation.

Their approach was constitutional agitation within the four walls of the law, aiming at slow but orderly progress. They believed the British were basically just but simply unaware of Indian conditions. So:

• they worked to create strong public opinion in India and educate people on political questions; and
• they tried to persuade the British government and public to introduce reforms, using the method of 'prayer and petition' and, if that failed, constitutional agitation.

A British Committee of the Congress was set up in London in 1889 with a journal, India. The lobbying effort in Britain went further. In 1893 Sir William Wedderburn and W.S. Caine set up the Indian Parliamentary Committee to agitate for Indian political reforms inside the House of Commons. Keep the two bodies distinct: the British Committee (1889) worked on the British public, while the Indian Parliamentary Committee (1893) worked on Parliament itself. Dadabhai Naoroji spent much of his life campaigning for India's case in Britain. The Moderates believed the political connection with Britain was, at that stage, in India's interest. They felt the time was not ripe for a direct challenge. The goal was to transform colonial rule to be as close to national rule as possible.

Though they could not draw the masses, the early nationalists did a great deal to awaken the nation.

Economic critique of imperialism. Led by Dadabhai Naoroji, R.C. Dutt and Dinshaw Wacha, they analysed colonial political economy and put forward the "drain theory". This was the idea that Britain was bleeding India by turning a self-sufficient economy into a supplier of raw materials, a market for finished goods and a field for British capital. Naoroji branded this exploitation "un-British": it betrayed the very justice Britain claimed to stand for. He set out the argument in his book Poverty and Un-British Rule in India, and the phrase is firmly linked to his name in exams. They demanded reduction of land revenue and military spending, abolition of the salt tax, better conditions for plantation labour, and protection for Indian industry. This created an all-India opinion that British rule was the main cause of India's poverty.

Constitutional reforms in the councils. Indian legislative councils had no real power, but the nationalists used them well. From 1885 they demanded expansion of the councils (more elected Indians) and greater control over finances, raising the slogan "No taxation without representation." Their pressure won the Indian Councils Act of 1892. This raised the number of non-officials and allowed budget discussion and questions. Officials still kept their majority and the budget could not be voted on, so the reform was bitterly criticised as inadequate. Naoroji (1904), Gokhale (1905) and even Tilak (1906) went on to demand self-government on the lines of Canada and Australia.

Administrative reform and civil rights. The Moderates campaigned for the Indianisation of the services (on economic, political and moral grounds), separation of the judiciary from the executive, lower military spending, and more spending on welfare and education. They also defended civil rights: free speech, a free press and freedom of association. This defence became an integral part of the freedom struggle. The public outrage at the arrest of Tilak and the Natu brothers in 1897 showed how strongly people felt.

An evaluation. The early nationalists represented the most progressive force of their time. They created a wide national awakening, trained people in politics, exposed the exploitative character of colonial rule and established the basic truth that India should be ruled in Indians' interest. But their social base was narrow and the masses played a passive role. They lacked faith in the common people and failed to widen the democratic base or the scope of their demands. As Bipan Chandra put it, "The period from 1858 to 1905 was the seed time of Indian nationalism; and the early nationalists sowed the seeds well and deep." The government, meanwhile, turned hostile. Dufferin sneered at the Congress as a "factory of sedition" and Curzon hoped to assist it "to a peaceful demise."

The early Congress took a deliberate decision to keep social reform off its agenda. Its leaders feared that disputes over caste, marriage and religious custom would split the delegates and destroy the fragile political unity they were building. Social questions therefore needed a separate platform.

That platform was the National Social Conference, inaugurated in 1887 by Mahadev Govind Ranade, a judge, economist and the foremost social reformer of western India, along with Behramji Malabari, a Parsi journalist who campaigned against child marriage. For many years the Conference met annually alongside the Congress session, often in the same pandal, so that delegates could debate social problems on a national scale without committing the Congress itself. Ranade's method was distinctive. He relied on legislation to remove social ills and worked unceasingly against child marriage and the purdah system, and for widow remarriage and women's education. Remember the division of labour: the Congress for politics, the National Social Conference for social reform.

Gopal Krishna Gokhale (1866-1915) was the finest product of this reformist Moderate tradition and a disciple of Ranade. His rise was remarkably rapid:

• Graduate at 18, then professor at Fergusson College, Poona.
• Associate editor of the Sudharak at 20, the reformist journal founded by G.G. Agarkar.
• Secretary of the Poona Sarvajanik Sabha, an early political association, and of the Provincial Conference at 25.
• Secretary of the Indian National Congress at 29 and, at 31, a leading witness before the Welby Commission, a royal commission on Indian expenditure.
• Member of the Bombay Legislative Council at 34 and the Imperial Legislative Council at 36, where his budget speeches became famous.
• President of the Indian National Congress at 39, at the Banaras session of 1905.

Mahatma Gandhi regarded Gokhale as his political guru, his master in public life. Gokhale also showed striking personal independence. He rejected the offer of a knighthood and refused a position in the Council of the Secretary of State for India, choosing to remain an unattached nationalist voice rather than an ornament of the government.

In 1905 he founded the Servants of India Society at Poona. Its members took vows of poverty and lifelong service, training as full-time, selfless workers for national education, social reform and the uplift of the depressed classes. Eminent public men were associated with it, including the jurists M.C. Setalvad, B.N. Rau and Alladi Krishnaswamy Iyer.

The Congress tried from the start to be a body of all communities. Badruddin Tyabji presided over the 1887 Madras session as its first Muslim president. But the most influential Muslim leader of the age, Sir Syed Ahmad Khan, founder of the Aligarh movement for Muslim education, became its leading Muslim critic. Note the timing carefully, because statement questions turn on it. Sir Syed was not opposed to the Congress at the moment of its formation in 1885; his open opposition developed in the years that followed, as the Congress pressed for elected councils. He then advised Muslims to stay away from political agitation and remain loyal to the government, arguing that an elected system would leave the smaller community permanently outvoted.

Three later developments are often tested alongside this:

• All-India Muslim League (1906): founded at Dacca, it supported the partition of Bengal and demanded separate electorates. It did not oppose them. Separate electorates were conceded in the Morley-Minto reforms of 1909.
• Ahrar movement (around 1910): a group of younger, nationalist-minded Muslims, including Maulana Mohammad Ali, Hakim Ajmal Khan, Hasan Imam and Mazhar-ul-Haq, who rejected the loyalist politics of Aligarh.
• Provisional Government of India at Kabul (1915): set up during the First World War by Raja Mahendra Pratap as president, with Maulana Barkatullah as prime minister and Maulana Obaidullah Sindhi as home minister, to seek foreign help against British rule.

British India sat alongside hundreds of princely (native) states, ruled by Indian princes under British paramountcy. The national movement reached these states unevenly, but in some it arrived early because rulers themselves were unpopular.

Tripura is the standard example. The state was drawn into the freedom movement early in the 20th century because groups were already fighting against the kingship and its protector, the British. Local opposition to the maharaja, whose throne rested on British backing, fused with the wider anti-colonial struggle. The lesson is general: in the princely states, agitation against an autocratic ruler and agitation against the British paramount power tended to merge, since the Crown stood behind the throne.