On 28 December 1885, a political association was formed in Bombay with ambitions modest by any modern standard. The Indian National Congress began as a forum for educated Indians to petition an imperial state for redress, reform and dignity within the British system. That it was founded by Allan Octavian Hume, a retired British civil servant, is neither incidental nor merely ironic.

And it wasn’t the founder alone who was not Indian. Subsequent presidents of the party included foreigners George Yule (1888), Sir William Wedderburn (1889, 1910), Alfred Webb (1894), Sir Henry Cotton (1904), Annie Besant (1917) and Edith Ellen Gray, aka Nellie Sengupta, (1933). This situates the Congress firmly within the political grammar of late 19th-century liberal imperialism. The distance between that beginning and the party’s present predicament is so large that treating Congress as a single, continuous institution risks flattening history.

The Congress has been, at different phases in the past, an elite debating society, a mass movement, a hegemonic ruling party, a patronage machine, a vehicle for dynastic leadership and, most recently, an opposition force struggling to define a coherent alternative to the dominant Bharatiya Janata Party.

Origins under empire, petition, loyalty, limits

The early Congress was loyalist in approach. Its leaders, drawn largely from the English-educated professionals, believed that moral persuasion, resolutions and memoranda could civilise the imperial rule. Annual sessions debated civil service examinations, budgetary discrimination and racial exclusion. The outfit, a glorified pressure group, had no stomach for confrontation. Early Congress leaders like Dadabhai Naoroji and WC Bonnerjee wrote letters to power, hoping against hope that the ‘lords’ would answer the prayers.

The partition of Bengal and the rise of assertive nationalism sent the Congress a message as the third decade of the 20th century arrived: Perform or perish!

Mass movement, moral authority, strategic ambiguity

The entry of a South Africa-via-England-returned Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi altered Congress beyond recognition. He mobilised the masses and called for non-cooperation with and civil disobedience of the colonial order. The Congress’s strength now lay in its ability to speak across classes, regions and religions, albeit imperfectly. The Congress spoke for peasants and workers while being led by landlords and lawyers. Nevertheless, this broad church was an Indian asset.

The contradiction between the Congress’s rhetorical commitment to democracy and its intolerance of internal dissent surfaced when Subhas Chandra Bose, elected Congress president against Gandhi’s preferred candidate Pattabhi Sitaramaiah, found himself isolated by Bapu’s coterie.

This is the stage that challenges any present-day Congress politician’s claim that the party bears the legacy of India’s freedom struggle, as the head of the Indian National Army, who most audaciously fought for India’s independence, parted ways. Most of the other armed revolutionaries had died by the time the British left, leaving no competition for the Congress in 1947.

From movement to state, dominance without competition

With the transfer of power from the British, the brown sahibs inherited the very system they had opposed. While the party went on to win the ‘tournament’ of the........

© News18