PERHAPS no other organisation in Indian history has managed to whitewash its true historical role as successfully as has the Indian National Congress.
Take the period between its founding in 1885 and the First World War, 1914-18: the facts, the documents, and practically every speech of the Congress leadership display fervent loyalty to the British sovereign, concern for the survival and expansion of the British Empire, and horror of the nationalists. There is not even any attempt, during this initial period, to disguise this loyalism: it is worn as a badge of respectability, it is considered a matter of pride.
Indeed, the existence of the Congress has its roots in imperial strategy. Among the British administrators a debate had been going on about the advisability of involving Indians in political and administrative life. The 1861 Indian Councils Act had provided for the barest minimum of such involvement. It had provided for an addition of six nominated non-official members to the Viceroy's Legislative Council, out of whom there could be a certain number of loyalist Indians. In 1858, after the suppression of the "Mutiny", a loyal Indian officer of the British Government had argued for this measure in the following manner:
"The evils which resulted to India from the non-admission of natives into the Legislative Council of India were various. Government could never know the inadvisability of the laws and regulations which it passed.... the greatest mischief lay in this that the people misunderstood the views and intentions of the Government.... I do not want to enter here into the question as to how the ignorant and uneducated natives of Hindustan could be allowed a share in the deliberations of the Legislative Council.... All I wish to prove here is that such a step is not only advisable, but absolutely necessary, and that the disturbances are due to the neglect of such a measure.... All causes of rebellion, however various, can be traced to this one." (emphasis added)
Here, we already see one major common feature of the pleas for reform that were to follow under the British Raj: it was that they came not as demands for reform raised during a struggle but as internal advice - ie, counters to, and diversions from, any struggle for a radical break with the Raj.
The continuing unrest in the 1870s and 1880s produced a continuing debate among the British administrators as to how to deal with the Indians. One school proposed a hard line: Lytton, who was Viceroy from 1876 to 1880, was contemptuous of the "Baboos, whom we have educated to write semi-seditious articles in the native press, and who really represent nothing but the social anomaly of their own position." Yet he too sought Indian collaborators, though he sought them in a narrow social section, on the conviction that "To secure completely and efficiently utilise the Indian aristocracy is... the most important problem now before us."
The more far-sighted imperialists realised that the Empire could afford seemingly more generous (though equally meaningless) concessions. Major Baring, Finance Member of the Viceroy's Council, was actually even more contemptuous of the emerging Indian politicians; but it was precisely in this spirit that he proposed to give them greater "self-representation":
"We shall not subvert the British Empire by allowing the Bengali Baboo to discuss his own schools and drains. Rather shall we afford him a safety-valve if we can turn his attention to such innocuous subjects...."
The Local Self-Government Acts of 1883-84 brought this into practice. Ripon, under whose viceroyalty (1880-84) they were instituted, became the darling of those Indian politicians who were later to form the Congress - Surendranath Banerjea, Dadabhai Naoroji, M.G. Ranade, and so on. Ripon himself was obviously not motivated by a desire to give Indians independence, but rather to widen slightly the circle of collaborators. He sensed more acutely than did Lytton the potential for mass unrest, and hence what he called "the hourly increasing... necessity of making the educated natives the friends, instead of the enemies, of our rule."
Between these two schools of imperial opinion a fierce debate broke out, taking as its occasion the Ilbert Bill, introduced under Ripon. The Bill itself was not of major consequence: it merely amended the law to give Indian district magistrates and sessions judges the same powers as their European counterparts. Mackenzie, the Home Secretary, anticipated only "a slight and temporary outcry among the more bigoted Europeans." Nearly all the members of the Viceroy's Council agreed with the Bill, as did the provincial governments.
The losing school of opinion put up a vicious fight, and an uproar was created by the European community. Sir Fitzjames Stephens led the polemic against the Bill, and Sir James Ferguson (Tory governor of Bombay), Rivers Thomson (lieutenant-governor of Bengal), Sir Ashley Eden (of the Indian Council) joined in it. However, others, such as Baring, Courtney, Ilbert (the Law Member of the Council), and Sir Charles Aitchison stood by Ripon's decision. Though the storm of European protests caused the Bill to be temporarily withdrawn, it could not alter the new trend.
Ripon thus represented simply a more sophisticated school of imperialist strategy; but far from exposing him as such, the future leaders of the Indian National Congress swore eternal loyalty to him. Allan Octavian Hume, the English civil servant who was to become the founder of the Congress, described his own activities (in a letter to Ripon in 1883) as including organising a whole variety of actions in support of Ripon's policies, "whether petitioning the Queen for your reappointment, tranquillising the native press, reconciling them to any modification you found necessary in your policy, or preparing counter-demonstrations of goodwill to rebut those in a contrary sense of the Europeans."
Indeed, one of the events which propelled into existence an all-India Congress (as distinct from various local associations of large landholders or rich lawyers) was the departure of Ripon in December 1884. Surendranath Banerjea spent much of 1884 touring India to organise "spontaneous" farewell demonstrations for Ripon in November and December. An Englishman claimed that the demonstrations showed "a spirit of organisation which India has never known before" (conveniently forgetting the organisation of the rebellion 27 years earlier). The Indian Spectator remarked that "From Madras, from Mysore, from the Punjab and Gujarat they came as an organised voice... to express their appreciation of the new principles of government." B.M. Malabari, who along with Dadabhai Naoroji edited the Voice in Bombay, broke into verse in his address to Ripon: "Thou foundest us a weak, incoherent mass, but leav'st us now one compact nation strong." (Gordon Johnson, Provincial Politics and Indian Nationalism: Bombay and the Indian National Congress, 1880-1915, Cambridge, 1973)
If Ripon represented a school of imperial thought, these politicians were that school's Indian counterparts. They nurtured not a private but an open horror of the Indian masses and their struggles. (For example, Dinshaw Wacha, in his memoirs describes with approval the manner in which the rebels of 1857 were executed - strapped to the mouths of cannon and blown apart.) It was the departure of Ripon (described at the time of his death, by the Congress of 1909, as one "who by his beneficent, progressive and statesmanlike policy, as Viceroy of India, earned the lasting esteem, affection and gratitude of all classes of His Majesty's subjects") that spurred his Indian collaborators into more organised activity. On December 28, 1885, the first Indian National Congress met in Bombay, with the retired British Indian Civil Service officer A.O. Hume as its General Secretary and Womesh Chandra Bonnerjee as its President. Simultaneously in Calcutta, a National Conference met with Surendranath Banerjea as its President. The two organisations merged the following year.
As to how and why the Congress came into existence, its first President, W.C. Bonnerjee, provides an unintentionally devastating account:
"It will probably be news to many that the Indian National Congress, as it was originally started and has since been carried on, is in reality the work of the Marquis of Dufferin and Ava when that nobleman was Governor-General of India. Mr. A.O. Hume, C.B., had in 1884 conceived the idea that it would be of great advantage to the country if leading Indian politicians could be brought together once a year to discuss social matters and be upon friendly footing with one another. He did not desire that politics should form part of their discussion, for there were recognised political bodies in Calcutta, Bombay, Madras and other parts of India, and he thought that these bodies might suffer in importance if when Indian politicians from different parts of the country came together they discussed politics. His idea further was that the Governor of the Province where the politicians met should be asked to preside over them and that thereby great cordiality should be established between the official classes and the non-official Indian politicians. Full of these ideas he saw the noble Marquis when he went to Simla early in 1885 after having in the December previous assumed the Viceroyalty of India. Lord Dufferin took great interest in the matter and after considering over it for some time he sent for Mr. Hume and told him that, in his opinion, Mr. Hume's project would not be of much use. He said that there was no body of persons in this country who performed the functions which Her Majesty's Opposition did in England. The newspapers, even if they really represented the views of the people, were not reliable and as the English were necessarily ignorant of what was thought of them and their policy in native circles, it would be very desirable in the interests as well of the rulers as of the ruled that Indian politicians should meet yearly and point out to the Government in what respects the administration was defective and how it could be improved; and he added that an assembly such as the proposed should not be presided over by the local Governor for in his presence the people might not like to speak out their minds. Mr. Hume was convinced by Lord Dufferin's arguments and when he placed the two schemes, his own and Lord Dufferin's, before leading politicians in Calcutta, Bombay, Madras, and other parts of the country, the latter unanimously accepted Lord Dufferin's scheme and proceeded to give effect to it. Lord Dufferin had made it a condition with Mr. Hume that his name in connection with the scheme of the Congress should not be divulged so long as he remained in the country, and his condition was faithfully maintained and none but the men consulted by Mr. Hume knew anything about the matter." (R.P. Dutt, India Today, Bombay, 1947)
Later historians, while admitting that Hume and Dufferin had such a discussion, doubt whether Dufferin actually took Hume seriously or genuinely promoted the idea of a Congress as a "safety-valve" for the signs of revolt. That is a matter for speculation: but the recorded fact is that the Congress was intended as such by its founders. Sir William Wedderburn (President of the 1889 Congress and biographer of Hume) wrote:
"Towards the close of Lord Lytton's Viceroyalty, that is, about 1878 and 1879, Mr. Hume became convinced that some definite action was called for to counter the growing unrest. From well-wishers in different parts of the country he received warnings of the danger, to the Government and to the future welfare of India, from the economic suffering of the masses and the alienation of the intellectuals."
Wedderburn quotes a memorandum of Hume's:
"The evidence convinced me at the time about 15 months, I think, before Lord Lytton left that we were in imminent danger of a terrible outbreak.... poor men were pervaded with a sense of the hopelessness of the existing state of affairs... they were convinced they would starve and die, and that they wanted to do something. They were going to do something, and stand by each other, and that something meant violence.... In the existing state of affairs of the lowest half-starving classes, it was considered that the first few crimes could be the signal for hundreds of similar ones, and for a general development of lawlessness, paralysing the authorities and the respectable classes. It was considered also that everywhere the small bands would coalesce into large ones, like drops of water on a leaf; that all the bad characters in the country would join; and that very soon after the bands obtained formidable proportions, a certain small number of the educated classes, at the time desperately, perhaps unreasonably, bitter against the Government, would join the movement, assume here and there the lead, give the outbreak cohesion, and direct it as a national revolt."
So the Congress was a reaction, not to British injustice and exploitation, but to the threat of national revolt. Whether or not Dufferin actually promoted the Congress is irrelevant: the fact is that the Congress was busy proving itself more loyal than the King, more alert to save his rule than his own officers.
Seventy-two "delegates" (the term is misleading because they were self-appointed) attended the first Congress's deliberation in Bombay at Tejpal Hall. Of the 72 delegates, 39 were lawyers and 14 journalists, two were teachers, and one a doctor. The delegates, that is to say, were largely from the "educated classes". Gokhale was later to explain that the educated were "the natural leaders of the people" and that political rights were being demanded "not for the whole population, but for such portion of it as has been qualified by education to discharge properly the responsibilities of such association."
Even from among the educated, these were a tiny elite. For example, three of the four major Congress leaders from Bombay city (Pherozeshah Mehta, K.T. Telang and Badruddin Tyabji) were rich lawyers closely linked to the Bombay millowners; and the fourth, Dinshaw Wacha (the most active among them, and general secretary of the Congress from 1896 to 1913) was a member of the Bombay Mill Owners' Association for 38 years, as well as a managing agent of several textile mills. J.N. Tata's biographer F.R. Harris also claims that Tata was present at the First Congress, and that he gave generously to its funds.
Other delegates had been senior advisors in the employ of princes - such as Dadabhai Naoroji. Naoroji, soon after the First Congress, settled down in England as a businessman. Further, many of the actual leaders of the Congress could not be formally recorded as delegates as they were servants of the Raj itself: among these were Dewan Bahadur Raghunath Rao, Deputy Collector of Madras; Mahadev G. Ranade, then Member of the Legislative Council and Small Causes Court Judge of Poona, later to be a Judge of the Bombay High Court; Pherozeshah Mehta, Bombay Municipal Commissioner, 1884-85; and Romesh Chandra Dutt, a Divisional Commissioner till 1894. The British did not obstruct such civil servants in their Congress activities. C. Narayanaswami Naidu, Chairman of the Seventh Congress Reception Committee and simultaneously Chairman of Nagpur Municipality, testified that the Chief Commissioner of the Central Provinces had cordially given permission to attend to any official who wished it.
This was to remain, till the rise of the Swadeshi movement, 1904-5, the character of the Congress membership. The Congress did not include many princes as actual members. Nevertheless, some were known as large contributors (especially the Maharaja of Darbhanga), or for having provided the venue free of charge. Most stayed away from the actual sessions. However, the 1886 Report of the Indian National Congress noted the "entire absence of the old aristocracy". It also admitted that "the ryots and cultivating classes were insufficiently represented", and even "petty moneylenders and shopkeepers were conspicuous by their absence". However, it took pride in the fact that "the higher commercial classes, bankers, merchants" were fairly well represented, and about 130 of the delegates (ie, around 30 per cent of the total) were "landed proprietors of one kind or another". Besides these zamindars and bankers, the remainder was mainly "English-educated elite" - especially lawyers and journalists. The richer "lawyers", such as Pherozeshah Mehta, were closely linked to industrialists and often held positions in their firms. Any many "journalists" were actually owners of papers who were men of property in their own right, but preferred to describe themselves as "journalists".
It is necessary here to state very briefly in what social context the Congress made its appearance and developed: ie, what were the various classes in society, their relations to the means of production, their relations with one another, and their relations with the imperialists.
By the early or middle nineteenth century, the initial phase of British rule in India - one of reckless loot and plunder, antagonistic to even the Indian feudal rulers - gave way to a new stage, corresponding to the changes in Britain with the Industrial Revolution. In this stage, two native classes were cultivated by the British as collaborators to their own rule. The first was a landlord-moneylender class in the countryside that ensured the British a fat revenue collected easily. The second was a merchant class that purchased raw materials for British industry and sold its finished goods here, in the process contributing to the annihilation of the nascent Indian industries such as textiles. These two classes also offered to the British certain native political collaborators who would intervene on their behalf in case of unrest - a need even more sharply felt after the near-successful 1857 Rebellion.
But as giant monopolies and banks developed in the industrialised countries during the latter part of the nineteenth century, and as finance capital came into its own out of industrial capital, the export of finished consumer goods to the colonies was no longer the key to imperialist exploitation. Now the export of finance capital to the colonies became dominant. Investment in the colonies grew rapidly. This took many forms. In some cases the British directly invested and set up firms in India. In some cases an Indian merchant would set up an industry but be entirely dependent on British machinery, technology, and various forms of financial assistance. These investments, however, extended only to a narrow range of industries - light industry, consumer goods industry, and an infrastructure sufficient for this type of investment; but nothing more.
The Government of British India assiduously protected these industries by heavily taxing imports of British consumer goods, and often even subsidising or guaranteeing purchases of domestic consumer goods. Such a policy profited the dominant interests in British industry whose machinery and technology was imported by such dependent Indian industries. It is in precisely this process of protection and limited promotion that various Indian industrialists such as J.N. Tata, G.D. Birla, Lala Shri Ram, Walchand Hirachand, Lala Padampat Singhania, Thakurdas, the Chettiars, and others were fostered, prospered, and expanded. Naturally, since these industrialists - the comprador big bourgeoisie - profited as partners in the British exploitation of India, and depended on imperialism for their sustenance and growth, they could not afford a break with imperialism. It is this class in particular that, along with the landlord class, backed the Congress leadership.
Aside from the landlord-moneylender class, the comprador big bourgeoisie and various other collaborators with the British (the feudal aristocracy, the bureaucracy), all other classes in India suffered by British rule.
These classes included (i) the national bourgeoisie (ie, the section of the small and middle capitalists that were not tied to British technology and finance, and who suffered in competition with the big bourgeoisie), (ii) the peasantry, including landless labourers, poor and middle peasants, and even those rich peasants who were constricted by landlord rule; (iii) the petty-bourgeoisie - small shopkeepers, intelligentsia, students, and so on; and (iv) the working-class, newly-born. (There is not the space here to elaborate and substantiate these points, which deserve a separate study. Those who are interested may also read further on this subject in S.K. Ghosh's Indian Big Bourgeoisie: Its Genesis, Growth, and Character, Subarnarekha, Calcutta, 1985.)
It is claimed by some apologists for the Congress that, while these men constituted a small elite, they expressed aspirations of the Indian people. The theory of the "drain" (ie, that India's resources were being drained to England) is cited as an example of how men like Dadabhai Naoroji and R.C. Dutt contributed to nationalist economic theory. The historian, Bipan Chandra, in his Rise and Growth of Economic Nationalism in India, Economic Policies of Indian National Leadership, 1880-1905, (New Delhi, 1966) goes so far as to claim that they were the first to formulate the theory that India's resources were being drained abroad, and that they thus made an irreversible contribution to the nationalist struggle.
But the "drain" was hardly discovered by Naoroji and his breed. From the time of institution of British rule, innumerable men - both Indians and British government officers - had written of Britain's plunder of India. It was on the basis of this perception that many had risen in revolt.
Clive himself had long before stated the facts to the directors of the East India with a frankness that required no economist to further explain:
"Your revenues, by means of this acquisition (Bengal), will, as near as I can judge, not fall far short for the ensuing year of 250 lacs of Sicca Rupees.... Hereafter they will amount to at least 20 or 30 lacs more. Our civil and military expenses in time of peace can never exceed 60 lacs of Rupees; the Nabob's allowances are already reduced to 42 lacs, and the tribute to the King (the Great Moghul) at 26; so that there will be remaining a clear gain to the Company of 122 lacs of Sicca Rupees, or 1,650,900 sterling..."
It is certainly true that Naoroji, Dutt, and others documented the drain with comparative exactness; yet the trials of Hastings and Clive, and the Parliamentary debates of the time, similarly documented the rapacity of the East India Company thoroughly and condemned it. But those trials, and the Parliamentary attacks on the East India Company, were not a step towards freedom for India. Rather, they were the ushering-in of a new set of industrial interests to loot it.
Similarly, Naoroji and Dutt criticised direct British plunder, but did not attack the emerging forms of dependent industrialisation which were to form the new basis of plunder. The "drain" theoreticians, moreover, while criticising the exploitation of India's cheap raw materials and its being flooded with English goods, defended the basic political structure which enabled this exploitation. For instance, while zamindars and comprador capitalists were clear beneficiaries of, and crucial props to, British rule, their existence and role was entirely ignored by these critics. This obfuscation prepared the ground for a State in which power could be nominally transferred to these collaborator classes, even as imperialist exploitation continued.
In fact, the "drain" economists persistently stressed that the Raj had brought innumerable benefits to India, and that these benefits needed merely to be extended. Dadabhai Naoroji proclaimed at the first Congress:
"All the benefits we have derived from British rule, all the noble projects of our British rulers, will go for nothing if, after all, the country is to continue sinking deeper and deeper into the abyss of destitution."
The "drain" economists can hardly be considered economic nationalists when they swore so fervently by the political structure that maintained foreign exploitation that, by their own recognition, fostered destitution. Naoroji insisted that the solution for poverty lay within the British Empire. The First Congress ended then with the following flight of poetry:
"Mr Hume, after acknowledging the honour done him, said that, as the giving of cheers had been entrusted to him, he must be allowed to propose - on the principle of better late than never - giving of cheers, and that not only three, but three times three, and if possible thrice that, for one the latchet of whose shoes he was unworthy to loose, one to whom they were all dear, to whom they were all as children - need he say, Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen-Empress."The rest of the speaker's remarks was lost in the storm of applause that instantly burst out, and the asked-for cheers were given over and over."
Dadabhai Naoroji's presidential speech to the Second Congress summed up the Congress's political position:
"Well, then, what is it for which we are now met on this occasion? We have assembled to consider questions on which depends our future, whether glorious or inglorious. It is our good fortune that we are under a rule which makes it possible for us to meet in this manner. (cheers) It is under the civilising role of the Queen and people of England that we meet here together, hindered by none, and are freely allowed to speak our minds without the least fear and the least hesitation. Such a thing is possible under British rule and British rule only. (loud cheers) Then I put the question plainly: Is this Congress a nursery for sedition and rebellion against the British Government? (cries of no, no); or is it another stone in the foundation of the stability of that Government? (cries of yes, yes) There could be but one answer, and that you have already given, because we are thoroughly sensible of the numberless blessings conferred upon us, of which the very existence of this Congress is a proof in a nutshell."
This loyalty to British rule did not diminish over the next 29 years. Between 1885 and 1914, we find innumerable such professions of loyalty and expressions of gratitude in the speeches of the various Congressmen; what is more, we find more than 24 resolutions either swearing loyalty, paying homage, expressing gratitude or paying some other form of respect to the British rulers. Each and every one of these resolutions exposes how utterly opposed the Congress was to India's national interests. (Early Congress resolutions can be found in Annie Besant's How India Wrought for Freedom, Adyar, 1915.)
To take only one example, Resolution I of the Twelfth Congress (1896) called Victoria's reign the "most beneficent in the annals of the Empire, a reign associated with the most important advances in human happiness and civilisation." Let us remember: It was a reign associated with the completion of India's conquest by Britain; the destruction of most of India's nascent industry; the routine torture of literally thousands of peasants for non-payment of taxes; an unprecedented frequency of famines (twenty major famines during this period); the most horrific suppression of the 1857 rebellion (in the course of which the British exhibited their advances in civilisation by blasting captured rebels from the mouths of cannons); the massacre of adivasis; the alienation of land of millions of peasants; and the penetration of foreign exploitation into every corner of the country. Such was the Congress's definition of human happiness and civilisation.
The Poona Sarvajanik Sabha, the celebrated Maharashtra constituent of the Indian National Congress, argued for an agrarian system along the lines prevailing in Bengal. The 1793 Permanent Settlement in Bengal fixed permanently the land revenue to be paid by the landlords to the administration, leaving them free to extract as much as they wished from their tenants. In its Journal of July 1885 the Sabha argued that a Permanent Settlement would:
"...provide that the thrifty and hard-working classes will succeed to ownership of the land... the varied classes, having at present no interest in the land, cannot occupy the position, nor enjoy the status, nor discharge the function of landlords. The absence of such a class retards progress in all directions. The presidency of Bengal enjoys this advantage over the rest of India and this alone accounts for its prosperous and progressive conditions". (emphasis added)
Justice Ranade, one of the the leaders of the Sabha, clarified in the Journal that allowing land to remain in the hands of ryots was a mistake:
"In all old and backward countries like India, there is always only a minority of people who monopolise all the elements of strength. They are socially and religiously in the front ranks, and possess intelligence, wealth, thrifty habits, knowledge, and power of combination. The majority are unlettered, improvident, ignorant, disunited, thriftless, and poor in means. No political manipulation can hold the balance between these two classes, power must gravitate whether there is intelligence and wealth, and it is a hopeless struggle to keep up a poverty-stricken peasantry in the possession of the soil, and divorce the natural union of capital and land.... Democracy cannot be transplanted into the Indian soil at a start, it will take many generations... to raise the Indian peasant to equality with the Brahmin and the Bania."
As one historian points out, "Such an approach was unlikely to bring the Kunbis and Marathas flocking behind the Sabha's banner." (Anil Seal, Emergence of Indian Nationalism: Competition and Collaboration in the Later Nineteenth Century, Cambridge, 1968.)
Even Bipan Chandra, staunch defender of the Congress leadership, admits that they
"...not only had no clear-cut policy on the question [of exploitation of the peasantry by landlords] but did not even pay sufficient attention to it. It did not regard the relation between the tenant and the landlord as a major economic problem, nor did it espouse the cause of the tenants through a general political agitation. The extent to which the problems of the tenantry were ignored by the national leadership may be gauged from the fact that the Indian National Congress had virtually nothing to say about them during the period under study [1885- 1905]."
Of course, there was scope for contradictions and tensions between the zamindars/moneylenders and the Raj: but the contradiction could only be limited and non-antagonistic, since it was ultimately because of the Raj, and with the constant assistance of the Raj, that the zamindari interests maintained their position and prospered. The zamindars could not do otherwise than ally with the British rulers against the continual eruptions of sharp - even armed - fights against their feudal/semi-feudal exploitation. (Significant anti-feudal movements in the period shortly before the formation of the Congress included a number of tribal movements/revolts of Santals in what is now Bihar, and Koyas and Konda Doras in A.P.; armed revolts by the Moplahs of Malabar; the anti-moneylender Deccan `riots' of 1875; and agitation by peasants of Pabna, Bengal, against rent-enhancement.)
At the same time, the feudal sections amply assisted the Congress. It is not surprising that recent studies have revealed close connections between, for instance, Pandit Madan Mohan Malaviya and Allahabad's Khattri and Agarwal moneylending/banking/trading families who were often directly landlords; 12 of the 24 major Allahabad commercial families listed by this study owned zamindaris. In 1889, internal intelligence of the British recorded the Maharaja of Darbhanga (who gave Rs 10,000 annually), the Raja of Vizianagaram, the Gaekwar of Baroda, the Raja of Ramnad and eight zamindari families of Bengal as being major donors to the Congress. Despite the majority of Bengal zamindars' dissatisfaction with the Congress, most zamindars seem to have remained within its fold: In 1899, when according to British intelligence reports practically all Congress activity in Bengal had died out, the Congress paper India was subscribed by "nearly all the leading zamindars of Bengal". Feudal sections could also contribute in other ways: For instance, the list of chairmen of Reception Committees for various Congresses included Rajah Sir T. Madhava Rao (1887), Sardar Dayal Singh (1893), Maharajah Bahadur Jagadindranath Rai Bahadur (1901), Nawab Syed Mohammed Saheb Bahadur (1903), and Dewan Bahadur K. Krishnaswami Row (1908). Of course, many landlords were too loyal for even Congress activity; but for those who took an interest in politics and wanted to express some grievance, the Congress became an organ.
An example of the types of grievances raised by the Congress was the Congress reaction to the British experiment of introducing some forms of ryotwari in a few select areas of Bengal. The Congress flew into a panic: the Ninth Congress, Resolution X,
"desires now to reiterate emphatically this recommendation and to call attention to the profound alarm which has been created by the action of the king in interfering with the existing Permanent Settlement in Bengal and Bihar... and hereby pledges itself to oppose, in all possible legitimate ways, any and all such reactionary attacks on permanent settlements and their holders."
Land alienation showed up the contradiction between the Congress and the peasantry. Debt-ridden peasants were compelled in droves to surrender their lands to those from whom they had borrowed. When, in the fear of unrest, the colonial Government attempted some namesake appeasement of the peasantry by restricting the scope for alienation of land, the Congress did not expose its fakeness but rather complained at its very existence. Resolution X of the Eleventh Congress claims that
"any proposal to restrict the right of private alienation of lands by legislation as a remedy for the relief of agricultural indebtedness will be a most retrograde measure, and will, in its distant consequences, not only check improvement but reduce the agricultural population to a condition of still greater helplessness. The indebtedness of the agriculturist classes arises partly from their ignorance..."
The Congress leaders in Bombay Presidency reacted with sharp protests at the Bombay Land Revenue Amendment Act, 1901, which placed some restrictions on the alienation of peasants' land.
Given such sentiments, it is not surprising that, in the 1896 food riots at Nagpur, the person and house of a Congress leader, who was a moneylender and landlord, became the principal targets. Nor is it surprising that the largely Muslim peasantry of an East Bengal run largely by Hindu landlords could not sympathise with a Congress which so vigorously defended the Permanent Settlement; or that the Muslim peasants in the Punjab treated the Congress as the organ of Hindu moneylenders and traders.
Resolution II of the Fifteenth Congress states: "this Congress regrets the introduction into the Supreme Legislative Council of a Bill to amend the law relating to agricultural land in the Punjab, with a view to restrict alienation of land as proposed by the Bill by sale or mortgage..." (Resolution XII of the Twenty-Fourth Congress repeats the same sentiment, though in a meeker form.)
All other demands of the early Congress were, at best, for the mildest reforms. Reform of the Legislative Councils was the central demand, and when it was granted in 1892, not only did demands for further reform of it die out until 1904, but Congress activity itself went into steep decline. Its most active members were too busy advising the British on how to rule India (for that was all the scope afforded by the 1892 Councils Act). Popular grievances were sometimes expressed by the Congress in an extremely mild and limited fashion: For example, the Congress advocated curbing rising military expenditures, reform of the police administration and the legal system, and the amelioration of poverty. But the manner in which these "demands" were phrased was in the style of one asking his superior for a favour. Typical is Resolution III of the Tenth Congress:
"Resolved - That this Congress, concurring in the views set forth in previous Congresses, affirms:"- That fully fifty millions of the population, a number yearly increasing, are dragging out a miserable existence on the verge of starvation, and that, in every decade, several millions actually perish by starvation.
"- And humbly urges, once more, that immediate steps be taken to remedy this calamitous state of affairs."
"Humbly urges" - that is all!
And when any demand, or even the shadow of it, was conceded, there would be eternal gratitude to the imperialists. For example, after the horrific famine of 1896-7, the Congress of 1897 resolved (Resolution X, Thirteenth Congress) to raise 1,000 pounds sterling to be sent to London in order that a memorial might be erected by the London Mayor on behalf of the Congress. The memorial was not to be to the millions of Indians who starved, but rather to the British for the "generous aid afforded by them to the starving millions of this country"!
Some central demands were not for even a reform in the existing system, but rather simply for allowing more upper-class Indians to collaborate in it. Thus the demand for opening up the civil services to Indians and holding the Indian Civil Services examination simultaneously in India as well assumed overriding importance. Surendranath Banerjea unabashedly placed it at the head of all the demands of the Congress: "The question is likely to come again and again until this concession is made. We attach greater importance to it than to any other question connected with the administration of the country." (Surendranath himself had long before been dismissed from the I.C.S. on what he claimed were false charges.)
It should be remembered that an I.C.S. officer had no scope to change the policies of the British Raj; all he could do was implement them. The Congress's obsession with this demand reflected its collaborator character. So did its demand for allowing Indians into the Army: Resolution XII of the Second Congress abjectly pleaded:
"...in view of the unsettled state of public affairs in Europe, and the immense assistance that the people of this country, if duly prepared therefor, are capable of rendering to Great Britain in the event of any serious complications arising, this Congress once again earnestly appeals to the Government to authorise (under such rules and restrictions, as to it may seem fitting) a system of volunteering for the Indian inhabitants of the country, such as may qualify them to support the Government, effectively, in any crisis."
Most of all, the Congress wanted upper-class Indians to have the opportunity of joining the officer corps of the British Army (Resolution IV, Third Congress) - that wing of the British administration that most blatantly repressed the Indian people!
How cheaply the Congress leaders were willing to sell themselves remains astonishing to the present day.
Dadabhai Naoroji stated their aims in the following words:
"Simultaneously examinations for all the services should be held both in India and in England.... In India also they must adopt the system for the Uncovenanted Services.... achieve this, and next representation in the Legislative Councils and Indian will have nothing or little to complain (of)."
In 1888, he even ruled out Home Rule:
"...I am a warm Home Ruler for Ireland, but neither myself nor any other Indian is asking for any such Home Rule for India. You must have seen from the Report of the Congress that our demands are far more moderate, in fact are only a further development of the existing institution."
The Report of the Fourth Congress made it clear that even if demands were not conceded but if Congress were recognised as the sole representative of the Indian people, that would be enough:
"If England only invites and welcomes the confidence of India, and receives, with kindly consideration, the loyal suggestions (not necessarily adopting all, but treating them with the respect to which they are entitled) of the Congress which, year by year, more and more thoroughly represent the views of the whole thinking portion of the nation, all will be well for both countries. As a great Indian Prince recently said, after hearing the resolutions passed at the several Congresses: `if only these things be conceded, the rule of the British in India will last forever'." (emphasis added)
So far we have examined the roots of the Congress, its attitude towards British rule, the make-up of its membership, and the character of its demands. What of its activities?
A.O. Hume told an audience in 1888:
"What have been its methods? First, quiet teachings and preachings throughout the greater part of the country of simple elementary political truths. The people are taught to recognise the many benefits that they owe to British rule, as also the fact that on the peaceful continuance of that rule depend all hopes for the peace and prosperity of the country. They are taught that the many hardships and disabilities of which they complain are after all, though real enough, small in comparison with the blessings they enjoy, but that all these grievances may be and will be redressed if they all join to press their views and wishes unanimously, but temperately, on the Government here and on the Government and people of England. The sin of illegal or anarchical proceedings are brought home to them, and the conviction is engendered that by united, patient constitutional agitation they are certain ultimately to obtain all they can reasonably or justly ask for, while by any recourse to hasty or violent action they must inevitably ruin their cause and entail endless misery on themselves; and these teachings have gone on so quietly and unostentatiously that they have never once attracted even serious attention, much less unfavourable comment."
However, Hume's description, while accurately depicting Congress's politics, exaggerates the consistency and scale of its activities. Actually, the Congress was only - as the oft-quoted phrase describes it - "a three-day tamasha" once a year, with no permanent organisation, at first no officers other than a general secretary, no central offices, and only a paper brought out from England to hold it together. But all such formalities would have been necessary only for a mass organisation; the pre-1918 Congress leadership was not prepared for it to become a mass organisation. They never addressed the people of India in their speeches or resolutions; all of these were directed humbly at the rulers.
This is brought out sharply in the determination of the leadership to set itself up in England. From 1886 on, Dadabhai Naoroji was hunting for a Parliamentary seat in England. In 1885, Lalmohan Ghose had already spent Rs 11,000 of the Bengal Congress's money on an unsuccessful bid to get elected there. To the complaint of some Congressmen, that he was needed in India, he replied that not only the Bombay Congress but "any other Congresses" were bound to be fruitless "unless there is somebody there (ie, in England) to work for and support them". Dadabhai demanded of the Bombay Congress that he be appropriately funded to live in the National Liberal Club of London. "My intention", he wrote, "is to devote my whole time and energy for India's work in England", whether in Parliament or out of it. "My wants, therefore, are not only the expense for one or two elections, but also the means to enable me to live in England in suitable style."
Dadabhai overcame the resistance of the Bombay Congressmen (who found it difficult to raise such large sums of money) by having English M.P.s invited to the 1888 Congress to show the English that the Congress was not full of "sedition-mongers". By 1889, the British Committee of the Indian National Congress was formed. And then, by 1890, the Congress (presided over by William Wedderburn, English M.P.) voted a sum of Rs 45,000 for the purpose, and Rs 63,000 was subscribed on the spot. This was more than the combined annual income of all the leading associations in India, and twice what it had cost to hold the Third Congress at Madras. Going by Naoroji's own estimates of Indian per capita income, the sum the British Committee could spend a year could be calculated at the annual income of 3,000 Indians.
In England, then, the Congress was spending more than it was in India; in England it launched and ran the only Congress journal. In India the Congress became, with the concessions made by the 1892 Councils Act, semi-defunct; but in England it continued to function.
All this merely underlines how the Congress leadership was merely a spokesman for Liberal imperialists. Liberal imperialists did not apply racial prejudice in regard to their anglicised collaborators, and believed in giving the collaborators a greater role in governing India; but they were strictly opposed to changing the basic economic premises of the Empire. Of course, as a wing of the Liberal imperialists and the Indian collaborator classes, Congress earned the hostility of the English residents in India and other Tory die-hards.
There was a school of imperialist opinion that believed solely in repression: even the pretence of a concession seemed to them the wrong policy. The racist and arrogant attitudes of these sections - especially evident among the English bureaucracy in India - offended even the most loyal compradors and zamindars (F.R. Harris's biography of J.N. Tata quotes a typical example). But such taking of offence cannot be construed as nationalistic sentiment, since it in no way envisioned any form of independence for India, but envisioned instead only administration carried out by Indians on behalf of the British. As Secretary of State Hamilton wrote to Curzon in 1899:
"I look upon the Congress movement as an uprising of Indian Native opinion against, not British rule, but Anglo-Indian bureaucracy."
The story of Hume's leaflet illustrates how unwilling the Congress was to become a mass organisation. Hume, who was very much a frustrated and careerist maverick, once drew up a brief and simple set of questions and answers explaining what the Congress was. He got it translated into several languages and, in 1887, had thousands of copies distributed around the country.
Harmless though this single mass action of the Congress was, it evoked fury among the British. It was then that Viceroy Dufferin made his brutal (though true) remark that the Congress represented a "microscopic minority". It is interesting that Congress leaders, including Dadabhai Naoroji, were quick to disclaim Hume's action and in fact passed a resolution at Allahabad (1888) that Congress was responsible "for the formal resolutions passed at its sittings and for nothing else". Thus the Congress specifically disavowed any intentions to be more than a three-day tamasha!
There were, of course, already elements in the Congress who felt, like Tilak, that "we will not achieve any success in our labours if we croak once a year like a frog"; but even they had no clear idea of how to go about making the Congress a mass organisation.
It was the spontaneous unrest that emerged outside the Congress that inspired a section of the Congress and dragged along the Congress leadership for two years - until it was deserted by the leadership in 1907 and brutally repressed by the British in 1908-10.
Although the Swadeshi movement contained various, often contradictory, trends, it posed the first major challenge to the Congress. The Congress's answer to it, in turn, provides us an even clearer understanding of its character. It is useful, for this reason, to look into the genesis and conduct of the Swadeshi Movement.
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