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Unit 9: Establishment of the Indian National Congress: Home Rule Movement, Moderates and Extremists

disappointments frequent and trying. That is the place which it has pleased Providence to assign Notes
to us in this struggle, and our responsibility is ended when we have done the work which belongs
to that place. It will, no doubt, be given to our countrymen of future generations to serve India by
their successes; we, of the present generation, must be content to serve her mainly by our failures.
For, hard though it be, out of those failures the strength will come which in the end will accomplish
great tasks.
Role of Hume
As for the question of the role of A.O. Hume, if the founders of the Congress were such capable
and patriotic men of high character, why did they need Hume to act as the chief organizer of the
Congress? It is undoubtedly true that Hume impressed — and quite rightly — all his liberal and
democratic contemporaries, including Lajpat Rai, as a man of high ideals with whom it was no
dishonour to cooperate. But the real answer lies in the conditions of the time. Considering the size
of the Indian subcontinent, there were very few political persons in the early 1880s and the
tradition of open opposition to the rulers was not yet firmly entrenched.
Courageous and committed persons like Dadabhai Naoroji, Justice Ranade, Pherozeshah Mehta,
G. Subramaniya Iyer and Surendranath Banerjee (one year later) cooperated with Hume because
they did not want to arouse official hostility at such an early stage of their work. They assumed
that the rulers would be less suspicious and less likely to attack a potentially subversive organization
if its chief organizer was a retired British civil servant. Gokhale, with his characteristic modesty
and political wisdom, stated this explicitly in 1913: ‘No Indian could have started the Indian
National Congress . . . if an Indian had . . . come forward to start such a movement embracing all
India, the officials in India would not have allowed the movement to come into existence. If the
founder of the Congress had not been a great Englishman and a distinguished ex-official, such
was the distrust of political agitation in those days that the authorities would have at once found
some way or the other to suppress the movement.
In other words, if Hume and other English liberals hoped to use the Congress as a safety-valve,
the Congress leaders hoped to use Hume as a lightning conductor. And as later developments
show, it was the Congress leaders whose hopes were fulfilled.
Self Assessment

1. Choose the correct option:
(i) Who gave the theory of safety-valve to the Congress?
(a) B.G. Tilak (b) Lala Lajpat Rai
(c) Surendrenath Banarjee (d) Gopal Krishna Ghokhley
(ii) Who established Indian National Congress in 1885?
(a) A.O. Hume (b) Dafferin (c) Vedararn (d) Lord Ray
(iii) Indian association was founded by Surendra Nath Benerjee and Anand Mohan Bose on.
(a) 1872 (b) 1874 (c) 1876 (d) 1878
(iv) Indian Mirror was published from
(a) Bombay (b) Calcutta (c) Allhabad (d) Delhi
(v) When did Indian Association organised An Indian National Conference?
(a) 1883 (b) 1884 (c) 1885 (d) 1888

9.2 Home Rule Movement and Its Fallout
Role of Lokmanya Tilak and Annie Besant

The romantic adventure of the Ghadar revolutionaries was the dramatic response of Indians living
abroad to the First World War. We now turn to the less charged, but more effective, Indian
response — the Home Rule League Movement, led by Lokamanya Tilak and Annie Besant.

LOVELY PROFESSIONAL UNIVERSITY 117