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Indian Freedom Struggle (1707–1947 A.D.)

Notes

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. 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.

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 modern 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 imports, 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

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