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

Muslims against the Hindus. The uttar disregard Curzon showed for public opinion gave Notes
ample evidence, if any evidence was still needed, that the Moderates’ policy of ‘petitions,
prayers and protests’ was barren of results.

The worst and most-hated aspect of Curzon’s administration was the partition of
Bengal into two provinces of Bengal and Eastern Bengal and Assam in 1905.

Self-Assessment
2. Fill in the blanks:
(i) ............... Bal Gangadhar Tilak was released after serving a prison sentence of six years.
(ii) In early 1915, Annie Besant launched a campaign through her two papers New India and
............... .
(iii) The Home Rule League at the Bombay provincial conference held at ............... in April
1916.
(iv) The new secretary of state, Montagu, made a historic declaration in the House Commons,
on 20 August, ............... .
(v) The third and the final Phase of the struggle began with the coming of Lord Hastings as
Governor-General in ............... .
9.4 Summary

• Indian National Congress was founded in December 1885 by seventy-two political workers.
It was the first organized expression of Indian nationalism on an all-India scale. A.O. Hume,
a retired English ICS officer, played an important role in its formation.
• In his Young India published in 1916, the Extremist leader Lala Lajpat Rai used the safety-
valve theory to attack the Moderates in the Congress. Having discussed the theory at length
and suggested that the Congress ‘was a product of Lord Dufferin’s brain.’
• Emphasizing the myth, Dutt wrote that the Congress was brought into existence through
direct Governmental initiative and guidance and through ‘a plan secretly pre-arranged with
the Viceroy’ so that it (the Government) could use it ‘as an intended weapon for safeguarding
British rule against the rising forces of popular unrest and anti-British feeling.’ It was ‘an
attempt to defeat, or rather forestall, an impending revolution.’
• Its ‘two-fold character’ as an institution which was created by the Government and yet
became the organizer of the anti-imperialist movement ‘ran right through its history.’ It both
fought and collaborated with imperialism. It led the mass movements and when the masses
moved towards the revolutionary path, it betrayed the movement to imperialism.
• What had led Hindus to enter the path of ‘denationalization,’ said Golwalkar, were the aims
and policy laid down by Hume, Cotton, and Wedderburn in 1885; ‘the Congress they
founded as a “safety valve” to “seething nationalism,” as a toy which would full the awakening
giant into slumber, an instrument to destroy National consciousness, has been, as far as they
are concerned, a success.
• On 16 June 1914, Bal Gangadhar Tilak was released after serving a prison sentence of six
years, most of which he had spent in Mandalay in Burma. He returned to India very different
to the one he had been banished from.
• Tilak initially concentrated all his attention on seeking readmission, for himself and other
Extremists, into the Indian National Congress. He was obviously convinced that the sanction
of this body, that had come to symbolize the Indian national movement, was a necessary pre-
condition for the success of any political action.

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