Indian National Congress

The moderate years

During its first several decades, the party passed fairly moderate reform resolutions, though many of its members were becoming radicalized by the increased poverty that accompanied British imperialism. The party’s initial goal was to achieve constitutional changes within the colonial framework, and it relied on meetings, petitions, and press campaigns to make its demands. Gradually, these political methods were seen as inadequate and led to a rising disenchantment with the moderates, as the early group of Congress Party leaders came to be known.

Despite the perceived passivity of their political activities, the moderates were extraordinarily successful in constructing a damaging economic critique of colonialism based on the socioeconomic conditions of 19th-century India. Exploitative British policies combined with famines and epidemics impoverished India, which had been reduced to a supplier of raw materials to England and a consumer of the imported finished goods. The “drain of wealth” through ruinous taxation, depletion of domestic resources, and the transfer of income to England were detailed in the writings of Naoroji, Romesh Chunder Dutt, and Dinshaw Wacha.

The extremist faction emerges

In the early 20th century the party began to transform into a nationwide movement in response to the partition of Bengal (1905–11). An “extremist” faction emerged within the Congress Party, consisting of the “Lal Bal Pal” trio (Lala Lajpat Rai, Bal Gangadhar Tilak, and Bipin Chandra Pal) and Annie Besant. This faction began to endorse a policy of swadeshi (“of our own country”), which called on Indians to boycott imported British goods and promoted Indian-made goods. The Swadeshi Movement, launched in 1905, was based on this principle of economic self-sufficiency and became the first organized mass collective action in the struggle for independence.

The Surat split

Disagreements between the extremists and the moderates, led by Gopal Krishna Gokhale, intensified over the next several years and culminated in an acrimonious session at Surat (now in Gujarat state) in 1907. In addition to the Lal Bal Pal trio’s insistence on resolutions favoring the principles of swadeshi and boycott, the extremists wanted Tilak to speak before the moderate president-elect, Rash Behari Ghose, did. Chaos ensued when the demand was rejected, with shoes and chairs being thrown. The session was suspended before there could be a formal schism. The two factions reconciled at the 1915 session in Bombay. By 1917 the extremists had begun to exert significant influence by appealing to India’s diverse social classes, and Besant (who had started the Home Rule League in 1916) became the party’s first woman president.

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Gandhi’s civil disobedience

In the 1920s and ’30s the Congress Party, led by Mahatma Gandhi, began advocating nonviolent noncooperation. The change in tactics was precipitated by the protest over the perceived feebleness of the constitutional reforms enacted in early 1919 (Rowlatt Act) and Britain’s manner of carrying them out, as well as by the widespread outrage among Indians in response to the massacre of civilians who had gathered at Jallianwala Bagh in Amritsar, Punjab, that April. Many of the acts of civil disobedience that followed were implemented through the All India Congress Committee, formed in 1929, which advocated avoiding paying taxes as a protest against British rule. Notable among those acts was the Salt March in 1930 led by Gandhi.

The demand for Purna Swaraj

Another wing of the Congress Party, which believed in working within the existing system, contested general elections in 1923 and 1937 as the Swaraj (Home Rule) Party. Led by Motilal Nehru and Chittaranjan Das, the Swaraj Party had particular success in the elections of 1937, winning 7 out of 11 provinces. As the independence movement progressed, the Congress Party revised its initial goal of constitutional reform to dominion status. The Nehru Report (named for Motilal Nehru, who presided over the commission that produced the report), released in 1928, first articulated the demand for dominion status. This was revised again to press for Purna Swaraj (“Complete Self-Rule”) at the Congress session at Lahore in 1929; the party made this resolution public on January 26, 1930.

Independence for India

When World War II began in 1939, Britain made India a belligerent without consulting Indian elected councils. That action angered Indian officials and prompted the Congress Party to declare that India would not support the war effort until it had been granted complete independence. In 1942 the organization sponsored mass civil disobedience, called the Quit India Movement, to support the demand that the British leave India. British authorities responded by imprisoning the entire Congress Party leadership, including Gandhi, and many remained in jail until 1945. After the war the new British government of the Clement Attlee-led Labour Party resolved to withdraw from India. The British Parliament passed an independence bill in July 1947, and independence was achieved the following month. The Indian subcontinent would be partitioned into two states, a Hindu-majority India and a Muslim-majority Pakistan. In January 1950 India’s status as an independent state took effect as the Constitution of India came into force.