Programme and Objectives of the Early Indian National Congress (1885–1905)
The years between the founding of the Indian National Congress in 1885 and 1905 are generally known as the phase of the Moderates — a period in which the Congress operated less as a political party and more as a broad, constitutionally minded movement, working to forge national unity while carefully avoiding any suggestion of disloyalty to the Crown.
Nature and Character of the Early INC
Organisational Character
- The early Congress was not a “full-fledged political party” — it had no paying members, no central office, no permanent fund, and no permanent officials, apart from a single general secretary.
- Congress leaders spared no effort to assure the Raj that the organisation “wasn’t a nursery for sedition and rebellion,” and, as Jawaharlal Nehru later admitted, remained largely preoccupied with the concerns of landlords, capitalists, and the educated unemployed.
- Even so, the proceedings of its early sessions reveal a genuine underlying will to present an all-India front to the colonial regime.
Growth in Delegate Numbers and Popular Enthusiasm
- Delegate numbers, drawn from all corners of the country, rose steadily across the early sessions: 72 in 1885 (Bombay), 436 in 1886 (Calcutta), 607 in 1887 (Madras), 1,248 in 1888 (Allahabad), and 1,889 in 1889 (Bombay).
- Alongside Allan Octavian Hume and William Wedderburn, who were directly associated with convening the 1885 session, other “distinguished Europeans” joined this and subsequent sessions as well.
- Popular enthusiasm for the Congress became evident from its second session at Calcutta onward — the Town Hall, the session’s venue, was reportedly “stifled in a crowd of … 2,000 to 3,000 lookers-on” on its very first day, with the size of such accompanying crowds rising to 6,000 by the 1889 session.
Composition of the Early Delegates
- The first INC session in 1885 was attended by 72 non-official Indian representatives, drawn — according to the official Congress report — from “most classes” and various walks of life.
- These included lawyers, merchants, bankers, landowners, medical men, journalists, educationists, and religious teachers and reformers.
Efforts Toward National Unity
- From the outset, the INC sought to eliminate regional differences; the first Congress declared that one of its major objectives would be the “development and consolidation of those sentiments of national unity.”
- The decision to hold the Congress session each year in a different part of the country, and to choose a president from a region other than the one hosting that year’s session, was likewise intended to break down regional barriers and misunderstandings.
Moderate, Constitutional Methods
- The INC was never a radical organisation in its early career, since a culture of open opposition to the government had not yet taken root in India.
- Its leaders were cautious reformers, seeking to alleviate the more unpleasant aspects of what Surendranath Banerjee described as the “un-British rule” in India, through prayers, petitions, and memoranda.
- W.C. Bonnerjee, president of the first Congress, made clear from the outset that the organisation was not “a nest of conspirators and disloyalties,” and that its members were thoroughly loyal, consistent well-wishers of the British government.
Why Hume? — Gokhale’s Explanation
- This studied loyalism helps explain why the founders of the Indian National Congress chose to involve A.O. Hume in their project in the first place.
- Gokhale, writing in 1913, observed that any attempt by Indians to form an all-India organisation on their own would have immediately attracted unfriendly official attention:
“If the founder of the Congress had not been a great Englishman, the authorities would have at once found some way or the other to suppress the movement.”
- As has been memorably put: “if Hume and other English liberals hoped to use Congress as a safety-valve, the Congress leaders hoped to use Hume as a lightning conductor.”
Assessment: A Modern but Limited Beginning
- In this sense, the Congress movement began in India as a form of limited, elitist politics pursuing limited reforms — yet it nonetheless represented a genuinely new and modern trend within Indian political tradition.
- Despite its limitations, it sought to forge an overarching national unity and raised a critical political demand: that the basis of government be widened, and that the people be given their proper and legitimate share in it.
- It was from here that the mainstream of Indian nationalist politics began to flow.
Moderate Control and Constitutional Faith, 1885–1905
- The Indian National Congress remained entirely under the control of moderate leaders through this period.
- In its initial years, Congress leaders had no wish for the organisation to function as a political party; they sought merely autonomy in internal affairs under British suzerainty, expressed deep faith in the sincerity of the British government, and insisted that the Congress operate strictly within constitutional limits.
- Congress proceedings were organised in an orderly and efficient manner, with strict parliamentary procedure observed in moving, discussing, and passing resolutions.
- Moderate leaders pleaded for policies that would transform India economically, socially, and politically, appealing for gradual self-rule while keeping their demands, and the constitutional means chosen to pursue them, deliberately moderate.
- In this initial phase, the Congress was dominated by the educated middle class, whose members held an almost absolute faith in the effectiveness of peaceful, constitutional agitation — the holding of the Congress’s annual session itself being a significant method of propaganda.
- Congress leaders trusted in the essential sense of justice and fairness of the British nation, laboring under the belief that British rule in India would ultimately prove beneficial; their aim, accordingly, was to educate the Indian public and make it conscious of its own rights.
- The Congress took genuine pride in the British connection, regarding the British government not as an antagonist, but as an ally.
Congress as a Movement, Not a Party
- The Moderate leadership was well aware that India was, in a real sense, “a nation in the making,” and worked consistently for the development and consolidation of a shared national unity, irrespective of region, religion, or caste — beginning modestly, by promoting close contacts and friendly relations between people from different parts of the country.
- Its economic and political demands were structured, above all, to unify the Indian people around a common political programme.
- From the very beginning, the Congress was conceived not as a party, but as a movement — requiring agreement only on very broad objectives, with no particular political or ideological commitment demanded of its activists.
- It made no attempt to limit its following to any single social class or group, instead incorporating a range of political trends, ideologies, and social groups, so long as each shared a broad commitment to democratic and secular nationalism.
Objectives of the Early Indian National Congress (1885)
- Promoting national unity: to weld India into a nation and help create “an Indian people,” developing and consolidating a sense of national unity irrespective of race, caste, religion, or province — directly countering the imperialist charge that Indians were not a people or nation at all, but a mere grouping of hundreds of diverse races, languages, castes, and religions.
- Creating a national platform: to build a national political platform and programme on which all Indians could agree, serving as the basis for genuinely all-India political activity.
- Politicising public opinion: to politicise the people, generate public interest in political questions, and train and organise public opinion across the country.
- Building an all-India leadership: to create a genuinely all-India political leadership — no such leadership existed at the country-wide level in the 1880s — alongside training a common cadre of political workers to carry forward this work.
- Recording opinion and charting a course: to record the views of the educated classes on pressing problems of the day, and to lay down lines for future political action in the public interest.
- Two early procedural decisions reflected the Congress’s sensitivity to communal balance: in 1888, it was decided that no resolution would be passed if opposed by an overwhelming majority of either the Hindu or Muslim delegates present, and a similar majority clause was written into a resolution on legislative council reform adopted in 1889.
- Notably, social reform was deliberately excluded from the Congress agenda — the organisation was conceived as a political body representing the political aspirations of the Indian people as a whole, not a platform for social reform debate, largely out of a concern to preserve political unity above all else. In its broad orientation, the early Congress largely followed a bourgeois path of socio-economic and political development.
Specific Demands Beyond Civil Service Reform
- The delegates’ demands went well beyond the Indianisation of the civil services or greater Indian representation on government councils. They also:
- Opposed the Raj’s increasing military expenditure.
- Spoke of the country “sinking deeper and deeper into this abyss of destitution.”
- Criticised the annexation of Upper Burma.
- Proposed the separation of the executive from the judiciary, and the re-imposition of import duty on finer classes of cotton goods.
- Urged the encouragement of indigenous manufactures.
- Demanded the promotion of general and technical education, alongside a reduction in government control over education — all issues of genuinely national concern.
British Attitude Towards the Early Congress
Initial Neutrality (1885–87)
- The official British attitude toward the Congress was, at first, one of neutrality and indifference, if not outright cordiality.
- Lord Dufferin hosted a garden party for delegates attending the second Congress session at Calcutta in 1886, and the Governor of Madras extended facilities to organisers of the third session, held in Madras in 1887.
- The 1888 Allahabad session was presided over by George Yule, the first Englishman to hold the office of Congress president.
- The third session, at Madras in 1887, was presided over by Badruddin Tyabji, and it was here that the word “self-governance” was first invoked from the Congress platform.
Growing Hostility
- By 1887, however, it had become apparent that the INC would not remain confined to a limited, deferential role, and British attitudes hardened — the authorities could not tolerate the spread of political awareness among the common people.
- In 1887, Lord Dufferin publicly attacked the Congress, ridiculing it as representing only a “microscopic minority” of the population and dismissing its demands as “a big jump into the unknown.”
- Earlier, in 1886, he had written of the nationalist press: “There can be no doubt there is generated in the mind of those who read those papers a sincere conviction that we are all of us enemies of mankind in general and India in particular.”
- In 1890, government employees were formally barred from participating in or attending Congress meetings.
- George Hamilton, Secretary of State for India, accused the Congress of possessing a “seditious and double-sided character.”
- In 1900, he complained directly to Dadabhai Naoroji: “You announce yourself as a sincere supporter of the British rule, but you denounce the conditions and consequences which are inseparable from the maintenance of that rule.”
- Earlier, in 1897, he had written to Viceroy Elgin that the growing “solidarity … of native opinion and races and religions in antagonism to our rule frightens me as regards of the future.”
- Despite its moderate methods and its consistent emphasis on loyalty to the British crown, the INC failed to secure any substantial concessions from the government.
The Policy of Divide and Rule
- Recognising that growing Indian unity posed a genuine threat to their rule, the British authorities pushed further into a deliberate policy of divide and rule.
- They encouraged figures such as Sir Syed Ahmad Khan (of the Aligarh Movement) and Raja Shiva Prasad of Benares, along with other pro-British individuals, to launch anti-Congress activity.
- British hostility deepened further under Lord Curzon, who remarked that the Congress was “tottering to its fall,” and that one of his “greatest ambitions” while in India was “to assist it to a peaceful demise.”
- Curzon’s government sought to weaken nationalist elements generally, and the Congress in particular, by driving a wedge between its leaders along religious lines — and to communalise Indian politics more broadly through the Partition of Bengal in 1905, carried out explicitly on communal grounds.
- This communal strategy had deeper roots: while the British had repressed the Muslim upper classes and favoured the Hindu middle and upper classes in the immediate aftermath of the 1857 Revolt, after 1870 they began instead attempting to turn the upper and middle-class Muslim community against the national movement.
- They exploited the Hindi–Urdu controversy to stoke communal feeling, and also made use of the orthodox Hindu cow protection movement toward the same end.
- Kimberley, Secretary of State for India, wrote to Viceroy Lansdowne in 1893 that such tensions “makes all combinations of Hindu and Muslims impossible and so cuts at the root of the Congress agitation for formation of united Indian people.”
- Similar efforts were made to turn the traditional feudal classes against the new intelligentsia, one province against another, and caste against caste.
- To further split the nationalist ranks, the British periodically adopted a friendlier approach toward either the conservative or the moderate sections of Indian opinion.
- Moderates were appeased through concessions such as the Indian Councils Act of 1892 and an increase in the maximum recruitment age for the Civil Services.
- Through the Indian Universities Act of 1904, stricter government control was imposed on university education, reflecting British anxiety that the spread of education was itself fuelling nationalism.
- Leaders of older, more conservative associations — such as the British Indian Association — were courted in an effort to turn them against the more radical Congress leadership.
The “Repression–Conciliation–Suppression” Policy After the Swadeshi Movement
- Following the Swadeshi Movement in Bengal, the British adopted a new and more calculated strategy — one of “Repression–Conciliation–Suppression.”
- Militant leadership was repressed first; the British then attempted to win over the moderates; the militant leadership was then suppressed completely; and, finally, even the moderates were sidelined and ignored.
- Both moderates and extremists ultimately fell into this trap.
- The British had earlier believed that a moderate-led Congress, being weak and lacking a genuine popular base, would fade away on its own — but the experience of the Bengal movement forced a fundamental change in this assessment, and in British policy toward the Congress as a whole.
