Birth of the Congress

The Indian National Congress was founded in December 1885. Though in 1851 the British Indian Association had been formed in Calcutta and about the same time in the Western Presidency the Bombay Association was set up and though these were in a sense the fore-runners of the more broad-based all-India political organisation, namely, the Indian National Congress, yet a whole generation had to pass before the Congress could be established in 1885. This gap represents the period of the first War of Independence of 1857-’58, its suppression and the aftermath.

Since the middle of the nineteenth century various associations were being formed to ventilate the grievances and aspirations of politically-conscious Indians. As early as 1843, the British India Society was founded in Bengal. Later, in 1851 Rajendralal Mitra and Ramgopal Ghose formed the British, Indian Association. At about the same time the Bombay Association was started by Juggan Nath Sarkar, Dadabhai Naoroji and others. Poona also organized its public life through the Poona Sarvajanin Sapha.

In 1876 Surendranath Banerjea founded the Indian Association in Bengal. One of the main objects of Surendranath and the Indian Association was the unification of the people of India on the basis of common political interests and aspirations. The Indian Association at that time used to represent and reflect public opinion from Peshawar to Chittagong.

The time had meanwhile become ripe for the formation of an all-India political organization. At the first National Confer­ence at Calcutta held in 1883 Surendranath Banerjea suggested that an all-India political organization be formed. In fact, while the second National Conference was being held at Calcutta, the Indian National Congress, the first effective all-India political organization, was established at Bombay. The National Conference later merged itself into the Indian National Congress.

In view of the growing impoverishment of the people under foreign rule, the formation of political associations became neces­sary for ventilating the grievances of the people. Though the language of the resolutions of some of the early Congresses was moderate, it is significant that the poverty of the people under imperial rule engaged the attention of Congressmen from the very beginning and resolutions regarding the same were, in fact, passed as early as 1886 and 1887. Thus, the formation of a political organ­isation, here as elsewhere, was in no small measure the result of economic compulsion.

Congressmen were acutely conscious of the fact that the people were increasingly being impoverished under British rule. Romesh Dutt, who became the President of the Congress in 1899 and who was a distinguished economic historian of modern India, attributed the poverty of India to the exploitation of the country by British rulers. He wrote that the poverty of the Indian people was unparalleled, and that the famines which desolated India during the last quarter of the nineteenth century were unexampled in their extent and intensity in the history of ancient or modern times. “By a moderate calculation the famines of 1877 and 1878, of 1889 and 1892, of 1897 and 1900, have,” he recorded, “carried off fifteen millions of people. The population of a fair-sized European country has been swept away from India within twenty-five years. A population equal to half of that of England has perished in India within a period which men and women, still in middle age, can remember.”

India’s agriculture and industry rapidly declined under British rule. In the eighteenth century India was a great manufacturing as well as an agricultural country, and the products of Indian looms used to be sold in the markets of Asia and Europe. “It is”, wrote Romesh Dutt, “unfortunately true that the East India Company and the British Parliament, following the selfish commercial policy of a hundred years ago, dis­couraged Indian manufacturers in the early years of British rule in order to encourage the rising manufacturers of England. Their fixed policy, pursued during the last decades of the nineteenth century, was to make India subservient to the industries of Great Britain, and to make the Indian people grow raw produce only, in order to supply material for the looms and manufacturers of Great Britain. This policy was pursued with unwavering resolution and with fatal success; orders were sent out to force Indian artisans to work in the Company’s factories; …..prohibitive tariffs excluded Indian silk and cotton goods from England; English goods were admitted into India free of duty or on payment of nominal duty.”

Referring to this phenomenon even H. H. Wilson, the British historian, remarked that the British manufacturer employed the arm of political injustice in order “to keep down and ultimately strangle a competitor with whom he could not have contended on equal terms.” As a result millions of Indian artisans lost their earnings. It was a painful episode in the history of British rule in India but it was a story, wrote Romesh Dutt, which had to be told to explain the economic condition and miseries of the Indian people.

The feature of India’s foreign trade which had far-reaching consequences on the economy of India was the uncompensated or unrequested surplus of exports from India. The East India Company pursued a policy of purchasing Indian goods out of the revenue collected from Bengal and of exporting them to England. These purchases were euphemistically called “investments” and these “investments” constituted a disastrous drain of the wealth of the country.

William Digby, after taking into account the transfer of treasures on private individual accounts and also after taking into account the export surplus that appeared in official trade statistics, estimated that “probably between Plassey and Waterloo a sum of £ 1,000 millions was transferred from Indian hoards to English banks.” On this basis the average drain was £ 17.2 millions per annum. Professor Furber, an American investigator, whose estimate was far more conservative, however wrote: “The drain towards the West should not be reckoned as exceeding £ 1.9 millions annually during the period 1783-93.”

The kind of charges and expenses that were debited to India appeared “preposterous” even to outside observers, such as, Leyland Jenks, an American writer. “The cost of the Mutiny, the price of the transfer of the Company’s rights to the Crown, the expense of simultaneous wars against China and Abyssinia every governmental item in London that remotely related to India down to the fees of the charwoman in India House and expenses of the ships that sailed but did not participate in hostilities, and the cost of Indian regiments for six months training at home before they sailed – all were”, wrote Jenks, “charged to the account of the unrepresented ryots.”

Speaking in London in 1871 Dadabhai Naoroji, one of the early Congress leaders, sought to quantify the loss that India had suffered by reason of the drain of her wealth to Britain. He said that the drain, up to that time, from India to England, was more than £500,000,000 at the lowest computation in principal alone and that the further continuation of this drain was then at the rate “of above £12,000,000 with a tendency to increase.” It was because of this drain and the consequent continuous impoverish­ment and exhaustion of the country that the material condition of India was such that the great mass of the poor people hardly had, said Dadabbai, “2d. a day and a few rags or a scanty subsistence.”

The cause of India’s economic degradation was this incessant drain of her wealth. Dadabhai wrote that “not till this disastrous drain was duly checked and not till the people of India were restored to their natural rights in their own country was there any hope for the material amelioration of India.” Further, the drain of the wealth of India not merely impeded capital formation in the country, the British by bringing to India the capital which they had drained from the country secured almost a monopoly of all trade and important industries and thereby further exploited and drained India.

Towards the end of the nineteenth century the economic situation in the country was extremely unsatisfactory and there was great discontent among the people. Allan Octavius Hume, who had been a member of the covenanted Civil Service and who had access to confidential documents, was greatly disturbed about the deteriorating economic situation. From a study of these documents he was convinced that “at the time (about fifteen months, I think, before Lord Lytton left) that we were in immi­nent danger of terrible outbreak...I was shown seven large volumes...containing a vast number of entries all going to show that these poor men of the lowest classes were persuaded 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 should do something. They were going to do something….and that some­thing meant violence.” In 1872 Hume warned Lord Northbrook: “Your Lordship can probably hardly realise the instability or our rule...I am strongly impressed with the conviction that the fate of the empire is trembling in the balance and that at any moment, some tiny scarcely-noticed cloud may grow and spread over the land a storm raining down anarchy and devastation.”

Though many regard Hume as the father of the Indian National Congress, in fact various circumstances and movements of the past prepared the ground for and culminated in the formation of an all-India political organisation – the Congress. The Congress had its roots in the separate political associations that already existed in various parts of India and was watered by controversies over the Vernacular Press Act, the Arms Act, the reduction of the age limit for entrance into the Indian Civil Service and the Ilbert Bill.

But neither Hume nor the seventy-two delegates, who were “pressed and entreated to come” to the first Congress that met at Bombay in December 1885, could fully anticipate that the Congress would later become a militant nationalist organisation that would launch civil disobedience movements to terminate British rule and establish Swaraj. Early Congressmen were moderate in their politi­cal demands. They did not want to terminate British rule immediately; they wanted to liberalize that rule.

Yet with the passage of time even the moderates became more and more critical of British rule. In 1898 Dadabhai Naoroji, the moderate leader, said: “...we cannot help feeling that...(the Queen’s) Proclamation for the welfare of her people have been interpreted by her ministers in exactly the opposite light to that in which we view them.”

–From Indian Nationai Congress – Its History and Heritage (1975)